Those busybody nutritionists are warning us our love affair with sausages is putting our health at serious risk because they contain more than a quarter of recommended maximum daily salt intake.
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They say we consume 1.1 billion a year with the average Aussie eating 44 a year that contain a total of 16 teaspoons of salt. Some brands are three times saltier than others.
But although our barbecue favourites have never pretended to be healthy, even chefs like Jamie Oliver promote fancy recipes to try to raise the status of the humble snag like sausage fusilli, sausage carbonara, sausage gnocchi with bean salad and sausage cassoulet.
So pretty soon, if we don’t watch out, they’ll be slicing sausages into highfalutin dainty morsels and serving them from napkin-lined baskets or eating them with cream cheese dip, an assault on taste buds that would be as awful as eating steak with chocolate topping.
Unhealthy or otherwise, it’s terribly wrong to mess with the sausage because it should never be up-marketed and would never be at home on the end of a cocktail stick or passed around on silver plates at posh receptions.
Its place will always be in the legendary sausage sandwich that should be to us what hamburgers are to the Americans, pizzas to the Neapolitans and fish and chips to the British.
Coupled with the meat pie, sausage sandwiches are a national dish and let’s hope we’ll always be able to buy one at sporting club stalls in the Woollies and Bunnings car parks or be able to dish them up them at a barbecue at home regardless of what the nutritionists say.
HERE’S WHY WE’RE THE REAL ‘BIRDSVILLE’
HO hum. Just another lazy morning in downtown Orange ...
A seagull wandering along the footpath in front of TJs newsagency, six ducks in Summer Street near the Wontama pedestrian crossing playing chicken (oh, dear) with cars, a flock of pigeons on the road in Sampson Street, three magpies looking for breakfast and two crows checking out a discarded Maccas bag in Kite Street and five galahs chattering away on the power lines in Woodward Street.
IN POLITICAL TERMS, OUR ENEMY IS GEOGRAPHY
SO where is the bush? That legendary heartland across the Great Divide. To Henry Lawson it was the parched land west of the Darling River, 'beyond the farthest government tank and past the farthest bore, beyond the break of day, and sunset and the dawn...'
To us it’s Orange. A great place to live and a stable workforce but to many politicians the bush is Western Sydney where the government is planning new cities.
This is because elections are won and lost not in the relatively few rural seats but in suburban areas so the country has become a victim of economic rationalism, missing out on many things city people take for granted.
The State Government this year is relocating around 1800 Department of Education staff from Sydney city to Parramatta and it has already relocated another 1920 department jobs out of the Sydney CBD, including 973 to Western Sydney.
In the meantime we poor yokels in the bush are missing out with billions of infrastructure money being spent in Sydney.
Let’s hope we can get some of the Snowy Hydro Scheme loot and a decent early morning train service. We deserve it.