The shifting mind and mood of Australians

Twice a year, Ipsos Mackay research (of which I am the director) conducts its Mind & Mood study, which is a snapshot of what Australians are thinking and feeling and provides n insight into changing trends and potential shifts in future attitudes.

Hugh Mackay, the found of Mackay research, started Mind & Mood in 1996 and they have been conducted annually ever since. This year we decided to do them twice a year – once just isn’t enough.

And indeed the mood in March of this year, when we did our first Mind & Mood, was significantly different than the mood in September. In March all the talk across the wide variety of affinity groups we conducted was about the GFC and job insecurity. In the September fieldwork, the GFC was barely mentioned.

For more information about the content of this recent report, see George Megalogenis’ story on the front page of The Australian yesterday.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26283950-601,00.html

His op ed provides some interesting analysis.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26283230-5013592,00.html

How can we go from doom and gloom to ‘what recession’ in under a year? Well, the endless optimism of Australians might be part of it. Our continuing sense we are lucky, blessed to be living here. But also low unemployment rates and until recently low interest rates have had something to do with it. If things continue as they have since mid year I predict Australians will look back at 2009 as the year we dodged the bullet.

How not to cook porcini




In October 2006 we were visiting Siena for a week of Italian classes and staying in a very cute apartment with a basic kitchen and a spectacular view over the rooftops of the town.

I was dying to cook with porcini and so we went to the weekly market to pick some prime specimens for a simple dinner of pasta with porcini, mixed herbs and pecorino.

I made the fatal error of washing the porcini rather than cleaning them carefully with a soft dry brush and so they were soggy, albeit tasty all the same.

Referring to the orange bible, Stephanie Alexander says that “the best rule with mushrooms is to prepare them as little as possible”, with no need to wash or peel either wild or cultivated mushrooms. She suggests simply wiping away dirt with a damp cloth.

Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers in their second River Café Cookbook suggest the soft dry brush method and have a wonderful recipe for wood-roasting whole porcini with thyme and pancetta and garlic.

In their Tuscan Cookbook, Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander argue that porcini need to be inspected closely as the stems can be wormy; good mushrooms should have “firm and dense stems” with “a smooth rather than chalky texture”.

I can’t tell you how long I have been washing and peeling mushrooms, not so much the exotics or the browns but the normal caps and buttons. I will cease and desist and the next time I am in Tuscany will know how not to cook porcini.

Bologna's food markets







Our increasing interest in farmer markets in both urban and regional Australian is a development to be applauded (albeit I agree with Gay Bilson when she writes in her book Digressions (p. 289) that “this popularity has been partly hijacked and turned into the weekend hobby of ‘culinary tourism’.”). There are markets and there are collections of stalls flogging overpriced cupcakes and jars and packets of stuff easily bought at your local IGA.

The markets in the gastronomic mecca of Bologna were something I had been dying to see. I had memories of Bologna from visits there as a child but didn’t appreciate its significance as a centre for food until I was an adult. For a terrific description of Bologna’s food history see John Dickie’s Delizia: The Epic History of Italians and Their Food and his chapter on Bologna in the 1600s). For a review of Dickie’s book see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/aug/19/houseandgarden.features

My dream was realised in October 2006 when my husband and I spent two days in La Grassa, just wandering around and eating and looking at the food shops and stalls. The photos of just some of the bounty in their central markets are posted with these words.

I am sad to say I am not a huge mortadella fan so we stuck to sweets and tortellini and visited the same enoteca in the evenings for a glass of local wine and a sample of their free afternoon snacks, which would often suffice for our evening meal after a day of grazing and lunches.

Bologna isn’t a tourist trap. When we were there we felt like the only visitors walking the streets, which was a welcome relief after stepping over counterfeit handbag hawkers in Florence.

Would you like a side order of resentment?


A few months ago I was chatting to journalist Julian Lee about something and used the term Schadenfreude. This quickly led into a discussion about how much we love the term but he made the funny and apt comment that it sounded more like a German cake than an emotional state. I then became fixated on the idea of creating a cake and calling it Schadenfreude Torte.

I googled the term and sure enough some smart person has already invented Schadenfreude pie.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2006/09/26/how-to-make-a-schadenfreude-pie/

A sliver is satisfying but too much can be hazardous to your health.

Riot over oatmeal

Tuesday saw me flying to and from Melbourne and avoiding work by reading The London Review of Books on the plane.

The 8 October issue has a review by James C. Scott of a book about Henry Ford’s ambitious but failed attempt to establish a rubber plantation in Amazonia.

See here for more information about the book, Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia.
http://us.macmillan.com/fordlandia

Grandin’s thesis, according to the review, is that two factors brought about the demise of Fordlandia early in the project’s history – the recalcitrance of the workers (the candangos) and the harshness of the tropical environment.

In terms of management’s conflict with the workers, apparently there was a riot on 22 December 1930 sparked by what the reviewer describes as a “trivial” incident. Let me quote from Scott’s review:

At first, common labourers had sat at one end of the dining-hall, foremen and craftsmen at the other, and each group has been served by waiters. Then, at the suggestion of a supervisor … a cafeteria system was instituted, meaning that the men had to queue for their food. As the workers waited in the stifling heat, someone shouted: ‘We are not dogs that are going to be ordered by the company to eat this way’.

Everything in the dining hall was then smashed by angry (and we can only assume hungry) workers, who then moved on to destroy the powerhouse, the office building, the garage, the sawmill, radio station and so on. Most of the Americans at the site escaped on an emergency launch and provincial troops were called in to quell the riot. Says the reviewer, “Fordlandia staggered on, but it never really recovered.”

Later in the review we learn that what was on offer for Fordlandia workers to eat was not their usual fare but the kind of food Henry Ford considered to be nutritious (healthy workers make more efficient workers …). Whole wheat bread, unpolished rice, canned peaches and oatmeal.

I understand why the workers rioted. After a long morning of work, standing in line in the heat for oatmeal seems like anything but trivial.

It’s clear that Ford didn’t truly understand the ways in which food – what we eat and how it is served to us - is so essential to our happiness and wellbeing. Had he served the workers what they wanted to eat in the manner in which they wanted to eat it, showed some understanding of their culture and their needs as human beings, maybe Fordlandia would not have been sacked.

I heart MasterChef

In July of this year Ipsos ran a poll that showed that the first series of MasterChef had a significant impact on the (reported) behaviour of Australians in the kitchen.

An overwhelming 61 per cent of people Ipsos polled agreed that watching MasterChef encouraged them to be more creative when cooking meals at home.

For more information on these results see
http://www.ipsos.com.au/knowledgecentre/news/090723.aspx

I was slow to become a fan of MasterChef but by mid-series, I was a full-blown devotee; ironically, perhaps, we planned our evening meals around the show.

As part of the recent Brisbane Writers Festival, I was on a live Radio National panel with chef and author Gay Bilson and novelist Marion Halligan. For photos and podcast see:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/australiatalks/stories/2009/2674092.htm

The issue of MasterChef came up in that panel discussion; neither Gay nor Marion were fans. I was a bit of a coward and remained silent as they savaged the show.

Gay was particularly concerned about how cruel the MasterChef kitchen was and how disparaging they were about ‘domestic cooking’.

I could definitely see her point. However, compared to shows like Dance Your Ass Off, MasterChef was positively warm and cuddly. I guess it all depends on how au fait you are with the conventions of reality TV.

I haven’t been able to see more than one episode of Celebrity MasterChef but I think it is somewhat less compelling. I am waiting for series two next year to see if they can pull it off again.

Until then, I am cooking a few dishes from the MasterChef repertoire include Chris’ tiramisu with double chocolate stout.

Also have become a fan of Matt Preston on facebook and just bought his essay collection yesterday; loving it so far.

This recipe calls for blood ...


My friend and colleague Zoe Sadokierski and I are currently working on our second project together.

See here for Zoe’s blog and examples of her amazing work.
http://zoefolio.blogspot.com/

Zoe and I collaborated on a contribution for a collection called Hair, part of the Trunk series edited by Suzanne Boccalatte and Meredith Jones.
http://www.boccalatte.com/?p=345

I wrote about my wild and unkempt hair, that I don’t have serious, newsreader hair and hence certain assumptions are made about me. I have posted Zoe’s fabulous illustrations for that piece.

Our second collaboration will be submitted for inclusion in Trunk’s second volume entitled Blood and will look at the question of blood – human and animal – in cooking.

I have been researching the history of blood in food, everything from ancient Sumerian recipes with human blood to Italian sweet blood and chocolate sausages and Polish duck blood’s soup. Zoe is thinking up magical ways to present the text, using some editions from my obscure cook book collection as inspiration.

Here are some quirky facts on blood taken from Stewart Lee Allen’s, In The Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food.

Malaysians have been known to suck the blood from a freshly decapitated rattlesnake … apparently it is a natural aphrodisiac.

Haiti’s 1804 slave revolution began with a voodoo ceremony that climaxed in the drinking of a pig’s blood.

Members of Kenya’s Masai tribe are known to drink the milk and blood of cows mixed together.

I need to fact-check the first two but I have seen a documentary on the Masai that showed the process of taking blood from a live cow for drinking purposes.

Susie Orbach on our bodies

In the November issue of marie claire you will find an interview I did with the famous feminist and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. Jackie Frank approached me to interview her as part the magazine’s reporting on their recent survey of Australian women. I jumped at the chance to talk to Orbach, having read both Hunger Strike and Fat is a Feminist Issue at university.

In her latest book Bodies Orbach returns to familiar territory exploring the pressure on both men and women to be perfect and design our bodies as perfect through everything from extreme dieting to surgery.

For my full article buy a copy of the magazine and see http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/marie-claire/ for more information about the issue.

Here is a snapshot of my interview with Orbach.

RH: The marie claire survey of Australian women found that nine percent reported that they were happy with their body and actually reading your book that sounds a bit high. Nine percent sounds like quiet a positive number considering the intensity of body shame and distress in our society. So when you hear a statistic like that what do you immediately think?


SO: I think it’s so crazy because you can say to me ‘that sounds quite high’, and I can think, yeah, it does sound quite high. But really, I mean we should be getting the result the opposite way but we’re not. The reality of only nine percent of women feeling ok in their body means that three kids in a primary school class or a secondary school class are feeling ok and all the rest are obsessing and upsetting. It depends how you look at that statistic. We’re so used to how awful the situation is.

RH: You say in your book, that we’ve normalised this level of body discomfort.

SO: You have to ask another series of questions to that nine percent, which you know might yield very unpleasant results. But we don’t want to go there because we really want them to feel ok about their bodies.

RH: Another thing reading your book and also looking at the survey marie claire did, there seems to be quite a broad spectrum of body distress, everything from the ‘if I had the money and the opportunity I’d re-haul my whole body with cosmetic surgery’, to what I call the ‘couple of kilo syndrome’, which is the ‘I’m fine but if I just loose five or six kilos’.

SO: I think that is a very common one actually. I mean that’s the ordinary madness, right? If I could just lose a couple of kilos somehow everything would be alright and then when people look at themselves [in] pictures five years ago they think. ‘I look gorgeous not ugly’. But they didn’t feel it at the time because they were still in the ‘if only I could have lost five kilos’ [state of mind].