The health food store near the Fawkner Street corner closed for ever one afternoon in the early 1970s. The health food boom had begun. Begun? With a closure? The paradox was simple. Whereas the original health food store sold bulk grains, dried fruits, nuts, flours, unwrapped loaves and cheeses to first-generation eastern European migrants, the health 'boom' left staples in its wake. Amid the new-found mobility of the 1950s, post-war children tired of their migrant parents' villagey habits, and turned to supermarkets and shopping malls, often walking greater distances across endless acres of car parks than had their forebears to the corner shop. It was yet another age of progress, not to mention irony. Snake-oiled with health claims verging on promised immortality - e at yogurt and live to 108 like the Bulgarians - manufactured food products made anything not so produced look like the quaint output of some gnarled grandma in a bucolic stone cottage surrounded in the unpav...
Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.