Not Quite Digested

Hello valued readers! The silence since the last blog post and return back to Australia from USA has been deafening. I can only blame it on a grant I am writing. Like most national level grants this one is complex, has many facets to consider and in short, difficult to write. Of course it is on food history and it has taken a life of its own...

Rest assured I have a couple of posts in the pipeline for you.  First I'll be dissecting my experiences on eating out in America versus eating out in Australia. Themes include tipping - pros and cons - or is it just con con con, the restaurateur conning the customer to pay his wait-staff for him; ways of cooking and ways of serving; the globalisation of food pretensions; and the costs of eating out, comparatively speaking.

Another post will be on coffee snobbery. I'll write on the fact that less than two decades ago cafe coffee in Australia was a mild version of dishwater. But now there are more baristas than the entire population of Finland. All hissing and frothing away at coffee machines the size of oil tankers. And the snobbery of Australian coffee drinkers, travelling thousands of miles overseas to criticise the coffee of foreigners, to laugh at their late discovery of the flat white, and so on. So, please wait up for me!