Fairfax Media trades on the Australian Stock Exchange under the symbol FXJ, but it could be more properly be known by the initials FFS. The company’s share price is in a death spiral and its lack of capital means that the only way is south as its remaining staffers spend their days frantically scrolling through the pages of Gawker and Feministing looking for the sort of click-bait that might generate three-figure comment threads dripping with middle-class angst and outrage.
“FFS” is also pretty much the only reaction the Prick has each week to the increasingly advertorial-driven “Good Food” Tuesday supplement (hang on, didn’t it used to be “Good Living”?). Take this week’s Jill Dupleix cover story, “10 essential tools for every modern cook’s kitchen”, a near pitch-perfect parody of bobo gastronomy. From the Himalayan pink salt blocks to the iPad (huh?) it’s all there. What kitchen would be complete without an “oat miller” which, according to “eco-preneur and zero-waste evangelist Joost Bakker” (!) apparently “makes the best porridge, with sun-dried raisins, banana, honey and biodynamic milk”?
Also indispensable – who knew? – for any hip 21st century chef is a Mexican tortilla press. Irony is in short supply these days, but the Prick cannot be the only one in the Herald’s shrinking readership appalled by the image of rich white luvvies making peasant food in their Gaggenau-stuffed Balmain kitchens.
This site will concede that the PolyScience sous-vide machine, coming in at #8 and selling for $600, does sound pretty cool and probably does a better job of keeping temperatures stable than the home-built jobby in the kitchen at Stately Prick Manor – a hint in case the Three Little Pricks are reading and looking for something to pool their pocket money on for Christmas. What would be really great, of course, is if someone could build a proper chamber-sealer that’s affordable for the home. Hang on, it seems somebody has.
Prick With A Fork 
Yes, since I am reading Steven Poole’s wonderful book about food wankerism “You Aren’t What You Eat” it struck me when I read this morning’s ‘Epicure,’ that Jill D and her ilk mustn’t have clapped eyes on it.
You can get a kit for everything these days, no matter how simple that thing was. Bread makers were popularised years ago. A home brew beer/cheese/salami sort of store in our neighbourhood sell not only can beer-wort and cheese kits but ‘pizzelle makers’ – sweet mini-pizzas, apparently. Actually they’re just waffles with fancy designs on them. In Target we came across a ‘beer machine’ – just an all-in one keg coming with its own can-kit that keeps the wort at the right temperature while it ferments, and then produces beer. (It’s the overdue cousin of the bread maker). And, the other day, in a mail sales catalogue, we came upon an advertisement for, would you believe it, a devilled-egg maker, with the following enticing suggestion:
HAVE A DEVIL OF A TIME MAKING DEVILLED EGGS!
Does anyone make them anymore?
Seriously, people. If you want to make something at home, 95 times out of 100, you can just do it with pots, pans, spoons, and the ingredients. You don’t need a bread maker/waffle maker/pizzelle maker/beer maker/oat miller/tortilla press/devilled-egg maker.
Ironic that it’s in the Fairfax papers that you will find columnists regularly inveighing against the excesses of consumerism, but you will also find columns like that by Dupleix so obviously suiting the requirements of the paper’s advertisers (pique the readers interest in the next range of products coming off the assembly line).
Comment in moderation, btw *Crosses fingers*
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