ROUND TABLE

ByAlan Wood>

LAST year, as I headed for the family Christmas dinner, I fell to talking with the taxi driver about the disappearance of the baked chicken as the centrepiece of these festivities. Before long we were regaling each other with lurid tales of the annual chook slaughter in our childhood backyards. The cabbie's father used an axe to decapitate the birds; my father cut their throats with a little silver penknife.
Either way, unless the bird was firmly trussed, the result was a chook rushing around the yard with a geyser of blood spouting from its neck. Unforgettable, as Irving Gordon wrote, although I don't think his lyrics were about a chook.
This took place In ordinary, urban, middle-class backyards. The chooks tasted great and we were under no illusion how they had arrived on the dinner table.
I doubt that it happens in many suburban backyards anymore. For modern youth chooks come out of supermarket freezers and frequently only the breast is served, peeled of its skin and tasting like blotting paper. The local butcher's shop, with the blunt honesty of its hanging carcasses and grinning pig's head, is, sadly, quickly vanishing.

While we maintain carnivorous habits, there is now an Irritating and hypocritical squeamishness about the slaughter that lies behind them which is spreading into a form of food wowserism.

A few months ago I went to one of my favourite Chinese restaurants in Sydney and ordered drunken prawns.
If you are not familiar with the dish, live prawns are brought to the table in a large glass bowl and Chinese wine is poured over them. They leap and slither about in spectacular fashion for a few seconds before falling in an inebriated heap in the bottom of the bowl. (As to why they leap about, the only enlightenment I can offer is that 25 years ago I had some Chinese wine poured on me in a moment of exuberance after a State banquet in the Great Hall of the People In Beijing and I leapt around quite a lot, too.) The sodden prawns are then taken away and cooked.
Not anymore. New Class squeamishness has had drunken prawns banned, which means they now do their leaping in the privacy of the kitchen - if you are a trusted customer.
The difference between dropping prawns live into boiling water and pouring some wine on them first Is trivial - except that little yuppie ladies and their SNAGS don't see the former and therefore don't interfere. Personally, if I were a prawn, and praise the Lord I'm not sir, I would prefer to be boiled drunk rather than sozzled.

I wonder how long it will be before the same crowd of hypocritical busybodies realise that truly fresh oysters are always alive when eaten? Oysters, thank God, are like Ogden Nash's caterpillar: from the cradle to the chrysalis utterly speechless, songless, whistleless. They also don't jump about.

The same interfering twits will happily eat, say, beefsteak and blackbean sauce. Where do they think the steak comes from? Perhaps when schoolteachers are looking for a day off they could take the kiddies to an abbatoir as well as an art gallery?

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Writen for The Australian , Sunday, December 21st, 1997.