Fat cats, mermaids, sealing our fates or fatalling our ceilings.  Copenhagen naturally got me thinking about food.  But rollmops and herrings for breakfast weren’t on my radar.

Cut to an image of the usual obese contemporary crowd scenes with spherical kids in school uniforms and chopped off or blurred heads.

Flashback to the school tuck shop.  1960.  With just one professional manager, everything else was created by the loving labour of volunteer mums.

Picture this, dear reader.  A seven inch round flaky pastry beef pie.    Like the Feast of Stephen, lying there in its brown paper bag, deep and crisp and even, but flakier, resplendent in its golden skin and membranous interior crust.  The only thing standing between this god-given delicacy and immediate gorging was the fact that the internal temperature was fairly close to the melting point of tungsten.  Do you remember when we had grazing animals –before tofu and lentils ?  When coleslaw was a distant and unanticipated future threat ?  Actual meat !

Problem –lunch was a time-bound event; a tricky balance between searing hunger and the opportunity to play games of skill and lethal intent, heroism and public ridicule.  Cocky Lora, sponsored by the Australian Dental Association), Fly  – for the boys and hopscotch for the girls (sponsored by the College of Orthopaedic surgeons), Butt – tennis ball against the wall – excluding those who couldn’t cope with just one bounce (sponsored by ophthalmic surgeons); cricket of course, elastics for the girls.  Where was I ? Oh yes, lunch.

Solution :  – peel off the pastry lid, and alternate between eating that and blowing on the pie contents – boeuf a la gristle, Offaly kind of the pie makers.  But marvellous to the taste.  And the pain of third degree burns to the tongue was easily dealt with by drinking copious bottles of milk flavoured by barber-pole straws impregnated with substances and dyes that the German petrochemical juggernaut insisted were fair approximations of strawberry and chocolate.  They weren’t but they tasted better than luke-warm raw milk.

Flash back a couple of hours earlier in 1960.  To play lunch – or for anyone born after the baby boom, “little lunch”.   It’s winter, and only the wealthy kids had appropriate socks and ! Shorts and mittens.  Tuck Shop Mum solutions to the icy conditions (for the climate change denialists that was when you had to walk across white, frosty lawns crackling your way through your suburb) – vats of hot steaming cocoa – served in china mugs – with the thickness of a Steve Fielding or Barnaby Joyce parliamentary speech.  No, seriously, they weighed as much as well.  You could drop one from a standing height onto the asphalt – and it would bounce and not break.

This was an even more challenging situation.  Only 20 minutes to deal with the boiling brown lava – as well as get in a few games or watch Alan Mackie punch some hapless victim into next week.

Solution: peel the skin off the top of the cocoa and blow.  Repeat.  Alternate with the consumption of a vanilla slice (suspiciously like Sunlight soap with pink icing )– or the real thing – a pink-iced finger bun.

Let’s be honest here, the only thing standing between we kids becoming the same size as the mums with the generous aprons and the prototype tuck shop arms – was the fact that we used to run around non-stop – both sides of refuelling at the tuck shop.

And then suddenly, our world was turned upside down when the P&C (or P&F for some) went on a health kick.  Yum ! A salad sandwich, no lollies.  No cocoa, but little boxes of sultanas and nuts.  Bloody reconstituted orange juice in little cardboard boxes.  (I hate them to this day).  Worse was to come – forget the peanut butter sandwich – it was vegemite with or without cheese.  And wholemeal bread.  Had these people no kid compassion ?

This brought on the velvet revolution.  There were two approaches.  Cruel parents cut lunches.  I had a short confrontation with – what Dad called “Soggy Sandwiches”.  Mum used to slice tomatoes – those delicious Grosse Lisses – and by lunchtime all the juice had seeped out into the bread.  Texture nightmare.  Disgusting.  Then Mum got a paying job and heaven happened.  Back to lunch money !  But not back to the Tuck Shop.  The corner shop did a roaring trade in Fry’s Cream Bars, Freddo Frogs, Violet Crumble Bars, Hoadley’s Pollywaffles and Sunny Boy iceblocks.

This sounds pretty disastrous – and it was – except for Mr Mackenzie – the local dentist.  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Mrs Jones, but young Michael here has 15 fillings to come.  So much for Mum’s second source of family income.  But in truth these confections were nothing in comparison with the new big gun – the Mars Bar.  And the writing was on the wall when Coke eclipsed Tarax.

And over the horizon was fast food and over the horizon after that – was computer and video games.  So the die was cast.  The pandemic of obesity had its roots in the innocuous and well-meaning decision to cut the cocoa and the flaky pastry pie and to banish the vanilla slice and the pink-iced finger bun from the Tuck Shop.

I have to confess that I did attempt to turn back the tide when the Emmlets were at school.  While I was treated with courtesy and kindness, in their Tuck Shop, I did feel a little like a trespasser in a female domain and was shunted out to help the delivery dudes unload the incoming supplies.  If I was a bigger sexist pig I’d say there was a bit of misanthropy going on there – but I suspect the real cause was the faux pas of mentioning “tomato” and “sandwich” in the same sentence.