The Good Oil: Living in Australia as an Expat

I’m not vegetarian, but my wife Cat is. She finds it hard going in this country.

She’s not vegetarian for any moral “think of the furry-wurry animals” reason - she just hates the taste (and texture) of meat. The thought of eating meat or its various products makes her sick. So it’s not like she can have chicken “just this once”. It’s no meat, or no food at all.

Trouble is, the Aussie definition of “vegetarian” seems to be “pretends not to like meat, but likes it really”. Cat’s had this conversation in more than one restaurant:

“Here’s our menu, madam.”

“I’m vegetarian. What dishes can you offer for me?”

“You’re vegetarian? Do you eat chicken and fish?”

“Er, no. I’m vegetarian.”

You wouldn’t have thought it a hard concept to grasp.

Quite often we’ll go out for a meal on holiday, to find that only one restaurant in town has anything veggie on the menu. And that will be “stir-fried vegetables” (which Cat is understandably sick of by now). Often restaurants will have a veggie entrée, then the mains will all be meat. (As if vegetarians somehow have smaller stomachs or something.)

It’s pretty short-sighted really. If a group of five people go out for a meal, and one of them’s vegetarian, then these restaurants are going to lose not one customer, but five.

Occasionally we’ll encounter the odd enlightened food establishment that not only has - shock horror - a choice of veggie mains, but even deigns to label them as such with a V symbol. Such places understandably get repeat visits from us. And of course, vegetarian restaurants like Emilia’s - which I’ve banged on about before - are gold dust to Cat. Shame they’re as rare as rocking horse shit in this country.

Takeaway trauma

Takeaway food presents its own challenges. Chips, while hardly exciting, are at least nearly always available, but the chances are they’ve been fried in lard. And the Aussies have another surprise up their sleeve for vegetarians. We noticed that often the chips we bought had a funny yellow tinge to them, and tasted kind of sweet. We asked one chip shop why this was:

“Oh, that’s chicken salt.”

“Excuse me?”

“Chicken salt. It’s salt, with bits of chicken in.”

“You’ve got to be kidding us!”

“No really, it’s pretty common here. Aussies love it!”

Say no more.

Supermarket sheep

Food shopping is hard work too. Whereas in the UK practically everything that doesn’t contain dead animal bits - and that’s most things - has a big green V symbol on the packet, here such a thing is a rarity. A lot of stuff is dead-animal-product free, but the manufacturers don’t see the need to label it as such. (”Not worth the effort for the three vegetarians in Australia,” you can almost hear them saying.)

So shopping trips frequently involve tedious scanning of lengthy ingredient lists, trying to work out if they’ve used gelatin or vegetable gum, or what type of rennet has been used in a cheese component. It’s like stepping back in time to the UK in the seventies.

To make matters worse, food manufacturers shoehorn dead things into practically any foodstuff they can get away with. Pumpkin soup? Contains chicken stock. Cheese? Often uses calf rennet. Biscuits? The cheaper ones contain lard. Yogurt? Ice-cream? Double cream, even? Laced with gelatin. Once we bought some bread and noticed a fishy smell when we toasted it. Sure enough - it contained fish oil. Fish. In bread. Sometimes it’s enough to turn even my carnivorous stomach.

And while I’m ranting about food shopping: The veggie burgers, sausages and so on that they sell in supermarkets here are a joke. Nine times out of ten they’re manufactured as “meat alternatives” - because of course all vegetarians secretly want to eat meat. So they resemble meat in texture, which means Cat hates them. Not to mention the fact that they taste foul. Where are Linda McCartney’s veggie sausages when you need them? Birds Eye veggie quarter pounders and potato waffles? Tesco’s nut cutlets and Mexican bean burgers? Note to Aussie food manufacturers: there’s more to being vegetarian than eating fake-meat burgers and sausages made from soya beans.

To be fair, things have improved a lot even in the five years we’ve lived here. More and more restaurants have a choice of veggie options, and food labelling seems to be improving. Must be due to all these invading veggie Poms. Speaking of which - if you veggie lot back in Blighty think you have it easy, it looks like things are about to take a turn for the worse over there. Enjoy your Mars, Twix and Snickers while you can, you smug buggers.

UPDATE 21 MAY: Thanks to the thousands of vegetarians complaining to Mars (my wife included), they’ve done a U-turn and made Mars, Twix and Snickers vegetarian again. Such is the strength of the vegetarian movement in the UK. If Mars started adding animal rennet to snacks over here, I’d be surprised if anyone batted an eyelid.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 8:18 am and is filed under Leisure and Outdoor, Retail and Banking, Uniquely Australian, Whinging Pom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.