I wouldn't mind/If I knew what I was missing

When I was a kid, I was quite fussy. I went through a pronounced stage of not wanting to eat any kind of meat that resembled the animal that it had come from (which was not so much a political-vegetarian thing, as it was an aesthetic turn-off).

So a lot of what I ate was cleverly disguised. Beef mince, for example, was a regular on our table, in a variety of forms. Sausages were another frequent meal – while my parents nibbled delicately at lamb chops that I refused point blank.

One of the solutions my father found to get me to consume more protein was a delightful product known as “ham and chicken loaf”. It came in a kind of tube-ish arrangement (those of you with dogs will recognise it as the classic “Chub” food packaging). It was salty, not particularly recognizable as meat, and worked a treat in a sandwich with tomato sauce.

My school lunches were often a source of much derision in the playground. Where everyone else was eating white-bread vegemite sandwiches, I was putting together a pita bread with tabbouleh and avocado. Wholemeal bread was considered weird, and hommus was frankly un-Australian.

Anyhow, back to the issue at hand – “ham and chicken loaf”. So we happily ate ham and chicken loaf for about twelve months, in the sandwiches a couple of times a week, in our desperate attempt to be like the other kids at our (very small rural) school*.

And then one day, ham and chicken loaf ceased to exist.

I say it ceased to exist, because all of a sudden, one could not find ham and chicken loaf for love nor money in any supermarket in the vicinity.

A couple of weeks later, my dad returned home from the supermarket triumphant. He had the air of a successful conquistador about him. And why not? He presented my sister and I with a pre-sliced lump of ham and chicken loaf for the next week’s sandwiches. Although it tasted the same, it was even better than the original, as the slices were now the same size (give or take) as the bread and could be easily sandwich-ified. But when we looked on the deli sticker that had held the processed meat bounty snugly closed, we saw something.

And we were horrified.

This processed meat. This saviour of our childhood. The immediate blocker of all taunts in the playground, was not ham and chicken loaf at all.

IT WAS “BEEF LUNCHEON”.

How did that happen? How did a product that was one day considered predominantly the stuff of HAM and CHICKEN, suddenly transform into a BEEF product**?

I have a number of theories about this:

1. It was 49 per cent “beef and beef related products” and the one day they re-did the analysis to find that the beef quotient had increased


2. They wanted to diversify their market and rationalized that a new name would bring them a whole new market

3. The health department insisted on the removal of “ham” and “chicken” from the product name as it constituted a crime against nature

4. The word “loaf” not as fancy as once it had been, unlike the word “luncheon”, which conjures all manner of la-di-da silver platters and white gloves (linen, not sterile)

Anyway, whatever the cause, that glorious faux-meat was never the same.

Vale, ham and chicken loaf of my youth. You saved me many a lunchtime teasing. What a shame you revealed yourself for the horror you are.


* And it got worse. When my sister started school, my mum went back to work part-time and so we had to endure the humiliation of taking store-bought biscuits to school. Never mind that we really liked them (Chips Ahoy! were a particular favourite at our place), there were scoffs a-plenty that we didn’t have a slice of sponge-cake and several pieces of hedgehog, jelly slice and the like in our lunchbox.

** in a related ew-ness, this would mean that the product in question contained BEEF, HAM and CHICKEN. Is there no end to the meat-related madness?