Food for Thought
I’m so depressed. My question with MasterChef has always been ‘Who watches this crap?’ and now I have my answer: it’s nearly a fifth of the Australian population. I can’t believe that last Sunday almost four million people watched two blokes cooking. It makes me worry that when I’m old my grandkids will ask awkward questions like ‘What did most Australians watch when you were younger, Grandad?’ And I’ll have to say, ‘A show called MasterChef.’
‘Starring that bloke from Halo?’ they’ll ask.
‘He was Master Chief. This was MasterChef, a cooking show.’
‘Bullshit,’ will come the reply.
‘No,’ I’ll explain, ‘Australia was in a crisis. There was a financial collapse, fossil fuels were running out and countries weren’t addressing the climate change crisis, so, just like Woody Guthrie producing his Dust Bowl Ballads in the Great Depression, my era gave us cooking shows.’
‘How could that help?’ they’ll inquire.
‘Well,’ I’ll warm to the subject as I open my pill box with fourteen compartments and pop my evening handful of capsules, ‘I think people needed a distraction, so, instead of us thinking about the imminent end of civilisation as we know it, they made us think about our stomachs. And we were so poor we couldn’t afford to go out to restaurants, so we stayed at home and watched other people cook and eat.’
‘Isn’t it rude to watch other people eat?’
‘Not if they can’t see you watch them. Can we walk while we talk? The doctor told me I have to exercise to keep my antelope heart from stopping.’
As we walk in the too-harsh sunlight, with our factor 90 sunblock, the kids will ask, ‘So, people liked to watch the top chefs cook food?’
‘Not top chefs. One of them was a lawyer and the other an engineer.’
‘So, instead of saving people from injustice or constructing earthquake-proof houses, they cooked food?’
‘Correct. That made people happy for the moment, and that was all my generation cared about. Which is why everyone rides pushbikes now.’
‘What did it taste like?’ they’ll ask.
‘Oh, we didn’t taste it like on your fancy 3D Tastorama televisions, we watched the cooks cook and then the four fat men said, ‘Plate the food,’ because they were so fat and lazy they couldn’t even cut up their own meals. And we sat in our lounge rooms with our egg on toast and watched the four gastronomic gargantuans give them a mark out of ten.’
‘These chefs then cooked for presidents and kings?’
‘No,’ I’ll say, as we stroll past the crumbling coastline, ‘they got to work in restaurant kitchens, having hot oil scar their forearms, and their knees give way on them by the time they were forty because they stood on hard concrete floors all day and night.’
‘Fuck off, you lying old bastard,’ will likely be the reply.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which ‘four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts’. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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