This weeks compost

1.      Average Australian eats fast food nearly every week

'While fast food maintains its grip on our girths and wallets, cafes proved the most popular destinations for dining out with 29.8 million visits to cafes each month. Australians pay a further 44 million visits to cafes each month to buy coffee or other drinks. Of the 51.5 million visits to fast food restaurants, just 21 million are for dining in, while the majority of visits are for take-away meals.'

Well, these figures are obviously not right. I make at least, oh, 35 million of those visits for coffee.

http://bit.ly/1foT1oH

2.      Pizza flingers pale in comparison

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=631622163577679

This is one mutha of a roti. The skill in thinning it out alone is astonishing, but then the casualness with which he drapes it over what looks like half a concrete pipe, and then flips it without getting a single crease in it!!!!

3.      Gastrodiplomacy: Cooking Up A Tasty Lesson On War And Peace

‘It's often said that the closest interaction many Americans have with other countries' cultures is through food. That kind of culinary diplomacy is particularly common in Washington, D.C., where immigrants from all over the world have cooked up a diverse food scene. Now one scholar-in-residence at American University is using the city's food culture to teach her students about global affairs via a course on "gastrodiplomacy" — using food as a tool to foster cultural understanding among countries.’
So that’s what Lucrezia Borgia and Titus Andronicus were up to – gastrodiplomacy!
http://n.pr/1dj7pV1

What comes under the term, though, seems to be...let’s say a tad elastic. Have a look at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyROTdBUs4

and:

http://www.publicdiplomacycouncil.org/commentaries/04-03-13/gastrodiplomacy-part-public-diplomacy

and:

http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newswire/cpdblog_detail/setting_the_table_for_diplomacy/

and:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-rockower/the-gastrodiplomacy-cookb_b_716555.html

SO: anyone out there got examples of Aussie gastrodiplomacy they’d like to shar?

4.      Wackaging: do we want our food to talk back?

‘Some know the phenomenon as "wackaging", the Guardian's own Rebecca Nicholson launched a Tumblr dedicated to it a few years back, with a slogan proclaiming "I blame Innocent smoothies". And the company, born from a start-up by a group of Cambridge students in 1999, surely marked a watershed in groceries that give good chat.’

I honestly hadn’t noticed, probably because I don’t buy the kind of products that wackage. And anyway, why isn’t it called ‘yackaging’?

http://bit.ly/1j1bFZh

5. Parsnip, leek, aubergine or beetroot: will Debenhams' body shapes for men go pear-shaped?

'The department store that brought us size 16 mannequins, banned airbrushing on swimwear and featured paralympians in its advertising has decided that one way of redressing the gender imbalance when it comes to body image is to make men identify with vegetables.'

I definitely identify with a bitter melon, particularly as I grow older.

http://bit.ly/1dwLbPv