Sat 17 May 2008 | 
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Without Californian taco trucks, there would be a good chance that I'd be dead.
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While I was living in California as a student in the heady days when the US had a more responsible fiscal manager in the White House, the Australian dollar languished around 50 cents to the US dollar. On my meager savings, this meant that there was a thin line between me eating protein recognizable as meat when a weird cut went on special at Ralph's supermarket due to a salmonella scare ("This week: Miscellaneous Necks!") and adopting the recent immigrant diet of beans, rice and tortillas.
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Phil Lees feels his way through the SBS back catalogue - and contemplates lamb mechoui the size of Maeve O'Meara's hands - in an attempt to lower the bar for the home-cook and spread a wave of culinary underwhelmingness.
I've always harboured the sneaking suspicion that food television only exists to raise people's expectations about food so high that they are too afraid to cook at home just in case the televised recipe goes pear-shaped, and thus instead go out and buy whatever prepared foods are advertised between the program segments. Which got me thinking: perhaps if I can replicate the results as seen on TV, then maybe I can singularly lower the bar for the home-cook and spread a wave of culinary underwhelmingness.
About this Blog
A blog about what the world eats, when and where it eats it, and why it matters to us all. Only much less ambitious than that sounds and with more excruciating puns.
Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter his own meat. Most of the time.
He left this bucolic idyll to attend university in Melbourne, study English and Commerce, and support himself by doing the sort of food jobs that weren't sexy until Anthony Bourdain wrote about them. In short, Phil has served hamburgers from the window of a van.
Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth. He's never eaten at a Michelin-starred restaurant. There is more important food in the world to be eaten.
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