The Sun-Herald

WHO WE ARE: Chipped, baked, boiled and mashed

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A column about Australia by David Dale, published in The Sun-Herald 24/2/2008
Deep within that seemingly staid organisation called The Australian Bureau of Statistics there are wellsprings of wondrous eccentricity. How else can we explain the Bureau's decision to include, among the 778 useful but dry pages in its just published 2008 Year Book Australia, a chapter devoted to "the world's favourite vegetable" -- a hymn which includes this observation: "The average potato, with the skin, has ... more iron and vitamin C than half a cup of spinach and important B vitamins and natural fibre .... If Popeye the Sailorman had known this, he may well have swapped his can of spinach for a baked potato!"

When I remarked to a friend on the bureau's mysterious passion, he offered this explanation: "Ah, they're sucking up to the new Government. The Labor Party is run by Irish Catholics and the Bureau of Stats thinks it'll get more funding if it promotes the spud."

That's too cynical for me. And it doesn't fit with the timing -- the book clearly went to press before November, because it declares on page 115: "Mr KM Rudd MP (Australian Labor Party) has been Leader of the Opposition since 4 December 2006".

The Bureau has good reason to nominate the potato as Our National Veg - even if it originated in South America (allegedly brought to Britain by Sir Walter Raleigh around 1590 and first successfully planted on this continent in 1797).

Australia is a world leader in spud production. Although we limit ourselves to just 12 of the 5,000 varieties available, it's the veg we produce in greatest quantity (1.3 million tonnes a year, well ahead of the tomato on 449,000 tonnes, and the carrot on 272,000).

The bureau's anonymous essayist says: "Average world yield in 2005 was about 18 tonnes per hectare. Australia's national average yield (35.4 tonnes/ha) easily surpassed this rate and was on a par with that for Denmark and Ireland." Equal with Ireland! It doesn't get much cooler than that, potato fans.

But we're not pulling our weight on the consumption side. "In Europe, people eat an estimated 93 kg of potatoes a year," the chapter reports, while the average Australian swallows only 63 kg a year. "The probable causes for this decline in consumption are lifestyle changes, takeup of well marketed substitute products and dietary factors," the chapter laments.

To me, 64 kg a year for every child, woman and man seems quite a lot, but we need to eat faster if we're to match those frying fools in France.

Of course you are asking at this point: "If the potato is the national vegetable, what is the national fruit?" The answer is round and orange. We produce 496,000 tonnes of oranges a year (from 6.5 million trees), compared with 276,500 tonnes of apples (from 8.8 million trees), 177,000 tonnes of bananas and 175,000 tonnes of pineapples (the bureau doesn't count the number of banana plants and, as you know, pineapples don't grow on trees).

And just to complete the bureau's picture of our eating habits, I should unveil the national animal. We share this continent with 2.7 million pigs, 29 million cattle, 93 million sheep, and 94 million hens and roosters. (Of course, we should be eating kangaro, for both health and environmental reasons, but we don't.)

So the message is clear. For the true patriot, it's chicken and chips every night. Even if you're Popeye the Sailorman.

What should we celebrate as the national veg, fruit and animal?

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David Dale is the author of The Little Book of Australia -- A snapshot of who we are (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.