Food For Show?
The Age
Monday September 20, 1993
There are lean pickings for food lovers at the Royal Melbourne Show.
RITA ERLICH finds that the yellow brick road is the trail to follow.
The Royal Agricultural Society held a Show Ee-igh ee-igh oh! And at that Show there was food to eat, Ee-igh ee-igh oh! With a can of Coke here and a greasy chip there, Here a chip, there a can, Everywhere chips and cans, The Royal Agricultural Society held a Show, Ee-igh ee-igh oh! WHEN the chips are down, what else is there to eat? There's the fried chicken or the hamburgers or the pies that go with the chips, and all the chocolate bars that fill the showbags, and maybe some icecream.
Chocolate confectionery seems bigger than ever at the Royal Melbourne Show this year. From the showbags, you'd think that chocolate bars were one of the biggest manufacturing industries in the whole state of Victoria. Along with soft drinks and chips and dairying.
The show's never been a place for a nervous gourmet. Funny about that.
Agriculture is one of Victoria's strengths; our food and wine are thought to be so good that they are tourist attractions; and yet the food at the show represents some of the worst we can offer. Bad for our teeth, bad for our weight, bad for our well-being.
Should we be fair? There are moments of brightness among the gloom.
The tree-ripened packham pears in Centenary Hall were pleasing to eat.
``Have some more," said the man who was handing them out with a generosity that's not common in the showgrounds. Look in the Harvest Hall at the amazing range of honeys, colors from palest topaz to mahogany brown. Try the Minneola tangelo juice, while you're picking up the two oranges that are part of the Yellow Brick Road showbag.
That showbag has been an interesting development, a worthy attempt to bring agriculture back into showbags, and to improve the quality of the food eaten at the show. It works like this: for $6 you buy a cotton bag that contains a copy of `The Weekly Times' and you follow the yellow markings on the road to collect food items from around the showgrounds.
The trail takes you into the Dairy Pavilion, Centenary Hall, the Harvest Hall, the Meat Hall, the Government Pavilion. (For some reason, the Girl Guides stall in the pavilion is responsible for dispensing Weet-Bix.) At the end of the road, you will have a very mixed bag of goodies: cream cheese spread, icecream and frozen yoghurt, sun-dried tomato spread, a kind of milk shake called `Killer shake', a wild strawberry-flavored dairy dessert, two miniature packets of sultanas, a small chub of stras, a bottle of water (known as Adam's Ale), a little bottle of dental wash, the Weet-Bix, two oranges, an apple, and a pear.
Centenary Hall is worth a look. It's full of agricultural produce, although some of it looks sad. There's a display of fresh fruit and vegetables, a display of grains (just a display, no information, unfortunately), avocados for sale along with an avocado-ripening bag ... a what? It might be a good Christmas present for the cook who has everything, but a brown paper bag will do just as well, particularly if you put an apple in with the unripe avocado. There's a display of macadamia nuts, including chocolate-coated macadamia nuts, but no samples.
Ignore the halls of manufactures and commerce, which are devoted to showbags filled with chocolate bars or flotsam and jetsam from children's movies. Have a wander in the Meat Hall, where you can watch cooking demonstrations and look at assorted cuts of meat and buy various sausages.
Take a wander through the Rural Pavilion, which includes thoughts for the future of farming. Like emu and kangaroo meat, packaged most unappetisingly in cryovac.
There are no emus or kangaroos to be judged like horses, cats, dogs, cattle, or sheep. Some of the animals are noble relics of past farming days: Clydesdales, for instance, are no longer in common farming use.
Except in the harvesting of asparagus, where Clydesdales are still better than tractors.
The Dairy Pavilion, near the railway entrance, is enormous. It's the most confident of all the buildings, filled with stalls and samples and merchandise, and a showcase full of the trophy winners. It would be good to buy a showbag full of dairy champions, but that's not possible. Still, many of the dairy champions are available at the show. You can buy wedges of Lactos's Folepi (a big round cheese with an ear of wheat embossed on its brown wax covering) and Jindi Brie and Regal's frozen yoghurt. That won the innovation award.
The chocolate awards were won by Chocolatier and Haigh's, neither of which is available at the Show.
There are champions, and medal-winners, and then there's the food that most people buy. The diet of Victorians at play is a worry. A public service advertisement in the Crafts and Cookery catalogue shows the healthy diet pyramid. At the ``eat least" pinnacle of the pyramid are salt, sugar, butter, margarine, oil, and cream. At the Show, that's the ``eat most" category. That's the kind of food that's available.
Perhaps there should be junk food categories in the judging. The one escape is the Country Women's Association building, where you can still find sandwiches made to order, scones, cold meat and salad, and tea poured from a pot covered with a knitted cosy.
The Royal Melbourne Show is no place for those who care about what they eat and how they eat it. It never has been. And the Harvest Picnic in February has taken over as the showcase for specialist produce.
There are signs that some organisations are keen to get us to care and to remind us of Victoria's agricultural base. The Department of Agriculture has posters showing all the varieties of potatoes.
Unfortunately, you can't buy them at the Show; you must go to the department bookshop in Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, if you want one. Oh dear! The difficulty is that the show is such a jumble of tatty and worthy, spruikers and urgers mixed up with knowledgeable growers and farmers, government departments explaining their work alongside the screams from the amusement rides ... it's hard to make any sense of it. You wouldn't go there for the food: you'd be better going shopping at any of the specialist food stores.
What tastes good The five best tastes of the Show.
1. Tree-ripened pears and Fuerte avocados at Centenary Hall.
2. Unibic's coconut macaroons at Centenary Hall.
3. Riviera icecream at the Dairy Foods Pavilion.
4. Honey at the Harvest Hall.
5. Redlich sausages (three pieces for $1) at the Meat Promotions Centre.
© 1993 The Age