WATER:
The human body is mostly water. Some folk drink it only in an emergency; they reckon it rusts your plumbing. More than seventy percent of the earth's surface is awash with it and as Australians know only too well, it often rages across the land sweeping away towns and drowning all in its path. Nevertheless, it's something we can't live without and fad provides the lucrative, commercial hook.
The fashionable quest for pure, crystalline, unadulterated, potable water knows no bounds for trendoids and aspiring jocksters. The price they'll pay for it defies sane logic.
The bottled water craze has created big business.
Companies will deliver hefty containers of spring water to your home. Businesses have installed chilled, bottled water dispensers.
Bludgers congregate like flies around a milking shed and do nothing at the boss' expense but sip demurely from those silly, little paper cups which, hold barely enough to rinse your eye.
If you must drink water, you need a big glass of the stuff, a manly draught. Those paper thimbles have you bobbing up and down at the cooler like brolgas in a mating ritual.
When it comes to bottled water I'm a committed skeptic. I guess it's cool to cruise about the likes of trendy Sydney with a bottle of mineral water dangling between two fingers.
The real posers have squirt-top bottles to hose the back of their tonsils every few minutes -- usually while they're talking to you. One might think the poor buggers had just run a marathon through the Sahara.
It was during a warm day last summer when the Berry Country Market in NSW had lured the four-wheel-drive gentry from afar. People were giving me the squinted eye. And, why not, I had no Akubra, no blue sunshades, no phone slung like a gun on the hip and no distinctive water bottle.
My friend couldn't bare the shame and bought for me a big bottle of designer water -- from France, you know. It looked, smelled and tasted like water -- odourless, colourless and tasteless -- just as we were taught in chemistry class. I really expected to feel a bit different after a few swigs, but didn't. I couldn't get the hang of dangling the bottle between my fingers either, so I cradled it like a newborn babe and looked like a nerd.
Since then, I have studied the designer water fad by reading labels. With so many brands on sale and so much technical stuff on those labels, I'm left with the notion that selling bottled water by alluding to the efficacious effects upon one's health, might be tantamount to some sort of fraud.
The temptation for hucksters to fill bottles with common old tap water and flog them off at crazy prices is more than attractive.
To keep things a trifle honest, our government requires the water's chemical composition to be indicated on the label. This is all very well if you're a rocket scientist or a chemistry major who can decipher the list of convoluted symbols and their atomic abbreviations.
Take a bottle of imported water, for example: A 300ml bottle of water with a dozen ingredients is measured in parts per million. Do you know how many p.p.m. of Mg, Ca, Pb, K, So4, Na and more is good or safe for your body? Of course not! This water caper might be the biggest joke of the twentieth century. Here's France, a country slap in the middle of heavily polluted Europe, shipping bottled water to Australia. And, we rush like sheep in a grass fire to buy it. The power of advertising.
A 500 ml of bottled, French water costs about 85 cents or much more depending on where you buy it.
Sorry Chaucer - I can't find anywhere that sells it for 85 cents..... but I like your optimism! Monty
That's $1.70 per litre. Petrol costs about $2 per litre. With that kind of profit on water, the same stuff that falls from the sky with great regularity, I'm going to search for a magic spring somewhere in the beautiful Kangaroo Valley and get rich. Here's how I'll advertise it.
"From Kangaroo Valley we bring you the elixir of life. Skippy's Crevice Water. It's guaranteed fat-free, nutritious and 100% wet.
Our aqua-bonza is drawn from the very bowels of mother earth where it absorbed its miracle producing natural properties for countless millennia.
Simply enjoy one glass before meals to ensure eternal life. Skippy Crevice Water restores hair, cures impotency and if taken at bedtime in large enough quantities eliminates premature “jockulation" and advanced trendoid syndrome".
Who wants to invest?
Now that I have gotten that off my chest, unless you live in somewhere like Flint, Michigan, maybe I have said enough.
As this is supposed to be a food column just like the Asparagus and artichoke foodie rambles which I know you all went crazy about we shall move from liquids to solids.
The following recipe comes from Chef Lorscheidt of the Inn on The Park Hotel restaurant, Toronto, Canada. No doubt he has long retired, as has the hotel.
To give shrimp cakes an Asian twist, add a little chopped fresh coriander. Perfect for part of a Sunday brunch.
Lorscheidt’s Shrimp Cakes
500 gr green prawns, peeled and chopped
6 slices white bread, crusts removed
1/2 cup thick cream
2 eggs, beaten
3 shallots, chopped finely
1 tbs. chopped chives
1 clove garlic, smashed and chopped
juice of 1 lemon
Salt & pepper to taste
Soak the bread in the cream 10 mins. Squeeze out excess and mix remaining ingredients together. Form into small patties. Saute in a little butter until lightly browned. Sprinkle with a touch of lime juice and serve. A drop of light soya also goes well.
Until next week
Chaucer
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