Chris Berg, and perhaps some home grown in-vitro meat will fix what ails ya ...

(Above: don't forget the salt and the ketchup).

The indefatigable Chris Berg is at it again, and truly as an energiser bunny working in aid of industry, he performs herculean feats.

Take Dig in, don't wait. Our slow food nostalgia is misplaced:

For the most part, when it comes to food and agriculture, industrial is good. Corporate farming is good. Even processed is good. Natural food is an illusion. We wouldn't want it if we had it. Our ancestors had natural food. It was awful.

Our ancestors had natural food and it was awful?

Does this mean Berg sat down around the campfire a couple of centuries, or millenia ago, hoed in and found the grub not to his liking? Has he ever eaten a woolly mammoth? Sure the meat might have been chewy, but what about the flavour?

Now the pond generally has little time for foodies and winies and such like affected ponces - too much tine spent in Adelaide will do that to you - but really if someone wants to indulge in localised food, or slow cooking or slow eating, where's the harm?

Is the world seriously threatened because I choose to wander out into the back yard, covered as it is in brick pavers, pluck some pot-grown sage saturated in the soot detritus of avgas from the third runway, and use it to advantage in a nice meal of mashed potatoes and pork chops, acquired by the usual industrial means?

Some people, bless 'em, carry such activities to the extreme, and grow their own potatoes, kill the fattened pig for the chops, and grow a mean tomato for use in their sauce, and good luck to them.

Some people love the business of food and cooking and the preparation and sharing of food, and good luck to them.

I'm here to swear that Berg is wrong in relation to a well chosen lamb, home slaughtered; fish caught from the local river; nicely cured ham done in the back shed; and honey from a decent home hive, as provided by members of the extended family at one time or another, not to mention sundry north western delicacies that are hard to find these days, including purple beans.

Berg's attitude is a tad more prosaic:

The only groups who practice ''slow food'' (regional cuisines cooked from scratch with local ingredients) are the extremely well-off with the luxury of time and the desperately poor who have no alternative. The rest of us can buy our way out of dreary kitchen work.

Dreary kitchen work?

Hey gang let's head down to Maccas for some of that good old oil, grease, saturated fats, hepped up sugar and salt and white bread because it'll get us out of dreary kitchen work ...

I guess if you're a hammer in the kitchen, all you'll see is a lot of dreary nails deserving a good pounding.

Naturally if you yearn for anything substantial, you're a romantic, if not outright offensively delusional:

The nostalgia for a lost world of pure food is nostalgia for a world of nutritional poverty. Laudan describes it as ''culinary Luddism''. And increasingly it has policy implications.

It turns out, of course, if you head off to Rachel Laudan's page on the web, A Historian's Take on Food and Food Politics, that she is deep down - and on the surface - a culinary luddite herself, what with her latest entries concerned with the canelon of Catalan, and figuring out the Catalan cuisine (no peanut butter, and oh the shame of it, no mayo), and exploring heusos salados, salt bones to the ordinary punter, which involve simmering the bones for a couple of hours to produce salt bone broth.

Oh the astonishing shame of it.

A couple of hours to make a broth ... doesn't she realise you can make a decent salty broth from a couple of compressed cubes of crap in a minute? Just add boiling water and there you go, done in a trice ...

Never mind, what are these alarming policy implications that so disturb Chris Berg?

The recent debate over cheap milk was at its heart a debate over how we think about food. Should governments protect family farms? Or accept that in most cases the cheapest and most reliable way to feed the nation is industrial agriculture?

Yep, not content with crushing the dreams of urban foodies, Berg is exceptionally keen to crush the lifestyles of family farmers, turning them into mere cogs working in the wheels for benefit of Coles and Woolies and their shareholders.

Lordy, you almost expect Berg to break into raptures about the joys of test-tube burgers, as recently outlined in The New Yorker by Michael Specter (a most relevant name for his piece Test-tube Burgers, which sorry to say is inside the paywall for the non-paying punters).

Can something be called chicken or pork if it was born in a flask and produced in a vat?

Indeed. Is it possible to make a burgundy outside of Burgundy?

Well the good news is that even Peter Singer is in favour of in-vitro meat, and no doubt at some point in the future we'll all be lining up for a tasty meal of (spoiler alert) soylent green, which is to say useless human corpses packed into tasty Soylent Green wafers.

Meanwhile, poor old Berg is getting his knickers in a knot about the spectre of evil luddite foodies ruining the planet:

Throughout history, and for all but the rich, the production of slow, natural food has been an arduous necessity. Making food from scratch was the marker of a life of subsistence. Eating local was a requirement. The family farm was no Arcadian idyll. It's long been a site of hard labour.

Oh the suffering, the humanity.

A couple of questions: what do people do with all the time they saved in the growing and eating food? Is it to play video games and write useless blogs? If so, is the time saved any more joyously used than slowly preparing and enjoying good food?

And why the sanctimonious claptrap about people who enjoy different lifestyles, perhaps even enjoy hard labour, and the pleasures of arduous necessities, as opposed to the fripperies and frivolities of inner city urban elites only too ready to shun an honest day's hard work, and plonk down on the couch for a microwaved meal?

Oops, I see I've become involved in Bergian stereotypes, and associated condescensions.

Surely we can end on an up beat note?

So let's embrace the higher standards of living offered by commercial, industrial food.

Yes indeed, and feel free to rush off right now to have a bite of Red Rooster, KFC, Maccas, Hungry Jacks, and any of the other fast food compilers of time saving crap, or if you like head off to the conglomerate known as Woolies and enjoy the variations between the promotional notion of fresh food people, and the harsher realities of not quite so fresh food with signs of wear and tear, along with the abundance of pre-fabricated tinned, packaged and processed foods that litter the shelves ...

Or you could spend a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon making a delicious soup from a pumpkin grown in your garden.

Whatever.

Just be aware that one choice will invoke Bergian rapture of an ecstatic kind, and the other a despairing ire at your pig-headed refusal to accept the Bergian way.

But there is one upside worth noting.

With either choice, you'll be better off than wasting your time reading Chris Berg's special pleading for industrialists and the duopolistic supermarket chains as they seek to keep the chooks happy and standing in the line, impatiently wondering why the scan rates are so slow in these impatient, restless modern times ...

(Below: mmm, tasty soylent green).