Want to make big bucks in the cookbook game? Don’t bother winning MasterChef or leveraging a long and successful career in restaurants. Snaffle a government tender instead!

Thanks to a tip from the eagle-eyed folk at the CIS, the Prick notes that the very Orwellian-sounding Australian National Preventive Health Agency has just awarded a tender – worth $189,200! – to Bauer Media (formerly ACP) for … wait for it … “the development of a health meals cookbook”.

Details are scant but this seems a very odd piece of corporate welfare indeed. Bookstore shelves are already positively groaning under the weight of various diet and “health meals”, so presumably there’s a market for this sort of thing that doesn’t need to be goosed along by a six-figure gift from the Australian taxpayer. But then again, it also appears that the Preventive Health Agency also has $83 million to get through by the end of this fiscal year (and the tender times out at the end of June) so perhaps nearly two hundred grand is a bargain.