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The ghosts of lunchboxes past · The Front

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  Speaker 1: From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey.
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  Speaker 1: It's Thursday, November twenty one. Treasure Jim Chalmers is unlocking
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  Speaker 1: Biden administration's most powerful diplomats, Deputy Secretary of stat Kurt Campbell,
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  Speaker 1: back on Australia in the face of a relentless China.
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  Speaker 1: Those two big stories and what they mean for all
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  Speaker 1: of us are explained in detail right now at The
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  Speaker 1: Australian dot com. What are the kids in your life
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  Speaker 1: having for lunch today? I bet it's not a devon
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  Speaker 1: and tomato sauce sandwich on white bread. How times have
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  Speaker 1: changed and today we've got to treat our treasured senior
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  Speaker 1: writer Matt Condon on the ghosts of lunch boxes past.
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  Speaker 1: Let's make some lunch for my kids. It's so cute
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  Speaker 1: out there on social media. Women are joyfully making their
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  Speaker 1: children's school lunches. I'm tapping it off with their clear
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  Speaker 1: egg and fleaky salts. This food is nourishing, organic, inventive.
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  Speaker 1: A tortilla, add some hummus, lettuce and some turky. Matt
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  Speaker 1: Condon is a senior writer with The Australian and today
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  Speaker 1: he started a new column. His first is a treatise
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  Speaker 1: on how generations of parents raised on white bread and
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  Speaker 1: plastic cheese have found themselves preparing bento boxes for their children.
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  Speaker 2: My mother would just sort of chain saw a bit
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  Speaker 2: of devon and chuck it between two bits of bread,
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  Speaker 2: and then it did go into the lunch box and
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  Speaker 2: then five hours later, in thirty five degree Brisbane heat,
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  Speaker 2: it had come out again as a completely different product.
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  Speaker 2: This is before microwaves. I mean it was just Brisbane
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  Speaker 2: humidity was enough to completely transform the horror that it
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  Speaker 2: initially was into some new, absolute new culinary monster. And
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  Speaker 2: yet now kids are getting sushi like what was sushi
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  Speaker 2: in the seventies. Sushi was I don't know. It was
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  Speaker 2: like a martial art type of martial arts was it?
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  Speaker 2: Who nobody knew what sushi was. The biggest event in
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  Speaker 2: Brisbane in the early seventies was a pizza hut opening.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, it's incredible how in a single generation. The
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  Speaker 2: culinary arts have evolved extraordinarily.
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  Speaker 1: Have your children ever tasted devon?
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  Speaker 2: It's dog food now, I mean, but having said that,
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  Speaker 2: even the dogs eat better quality, more quality Devon than
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  Speaker 2: we had as kids. So no, to answer your question, no,
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  Speaker 2: they've never eaten devon. I mean that the concept now
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  Speaker 2: of a roll, a kilogram of processed sausage that comes
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  Speaker 2: in a dog food style roll pinched at either red
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  Speaker 2: is literally beyond their comprehension.
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  Speaker 1: I've got very powerful Devon memories, Matt. You see kids
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  Speaker 1: being pushed around in the supermarket now, sitting in the
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  Speaker 1: trolley with an iPad. But when I was a kid
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  Speaker 1: in canber in the eighties, I was sitting in the
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  Speaker 1: trolley with a packet of devon. My mum would the
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  Speaker 1: first storf in a supermarket would be the deli counter.
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  Speaker 1: She would get six slices of Devon and they'd wrap
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  Speaker 1: it up in paper, and then she'd give it to
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  Speaker 1: me in the trolley and I would eat it while
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  Speaker 1: we went around the rest of the supermarket. It was
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  Speaker 1: sort of quite cheap entertainment.
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  Speaker 2: Oh why do I understand that so well? You know,
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  Speaker 2: with lunches today there are sort of this myriad of
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  Speaker 2: one hundred thousand types of snacks. So there's all sorts
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  Speaker 2: of musally sugar free musli bars and different sort of
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  Speaker 2: types of seaweed. That's sheets of seaweed that's graded in
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  Speaker 2: different thicknesses and got different condiments and flavors of different
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  Speaker 2: types of seaweed sheets.
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  Speaker 1: Here's some of Matt's essay, which you can read in
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  Speaker 1: full at the Australian dot com Are you right now?
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  Speaker 2: Oh? Dinner time? In the nineteen seventies, I tell my
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  Speaker 2: children over dinner, closing my eyes with the pleasure and
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  Speaker 2: simultaneous pain of remembrance. What was it like? Dad? Tell us,
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  Speaker 2: tell us, what did you eat well? I said, we
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  Speaker 2: didn't have organic stuff way back then. Anything organic just
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  Speaker 2: meant it had either been grown in the earth or
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  Speaker 2: was rotting back into the earth. What did I eat well?
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  Speaker 2: Tripe for starters, stripes tripe the stomach lining of a
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  Speaker 2: cow or a sheep or a pig, cleaned, trimmed, cooked
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  Speaker 2: and served with white sauce and onions. My daughter placed
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  Speaker 2: her hand across her mouth. It was awful. Nobody laughed.
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  Speaker 2: Stomach lining, I stressed. Then there was lambs fry and bacon.
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  Speaker 2: The lamb's liver, that was the fry bit wrapped in
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  Speaker 2: bacon to make it even remotely edible. My youngest almost
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  Speaker 2: dry wretched. But I was on a roll, a roll
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  Speaker 2: of horror rissoles, endless rissoles, and curried sausages or normal
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  Speaker 2: sausages with some sort of tined curried powder sprinkled on top.
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  Speaker 2: My eldest, a vegetarian, quietly belched. A lot of things
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  Speaker 2: seemed to come out of tins. My youngest son said, quizzically, yes,
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  Speaker 2: they did, I said, because we never knew when there
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  Speaker 2: was going to be a nuclear war, so at least
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  Speaker 2: when the bombs hit, we'd have plenty of tins of
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  Speaker 2: pineapple and apricots and we'd survive. The children were silent.
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  Speaker 1: I know.
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  Speaker 2: My youngest wanted to ask how the tins managed to
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  Speaker 2: survive a nuclear holocaust, but he refrained. I've wanted to add, Look,
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  Speaker 2: I'm not blaming my parents or a generation of adults
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  Speaker 2: that were entrusted with our luncheons. They worked with what
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  Speaker 2: they had. My father, for example, born in the late thirties,
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  Speaker 2: so his childhood was a sort of directly influenced by
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  Speaker 2: the depression, so of course off all et cetera was
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  Speaker 2: just part of the course. And of course in the
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  Speaker 2: seventies came the great movement of quote buying in bulk,
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  Speaker 2: so if you bought in bulk then you could save money.
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  Speaker 2: Everything came in this sort of giant, almost forty four
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  Speaker 2: gallon style drum tins of full of processed fruit. And
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  Speaker 2: Dad would and it's a funny, old fashioned word that
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  Speaker 2: you'd only use with wine nowadays, Mum would tell you
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  Speaker 2: your dad's decanting the veggiemite, because you'd buy it in
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  Speaker 2: a drum and then you'd decant it to a smaller
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  Speaker 2: jar so that it was more manageable, and you might
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  Speaker 2: get twenty jars out of the drum that was sealed
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  Speaker 2: up for the next decantation. So it's just a completely
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  Speaker 2: different planet.
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  Speaker 1: After the break. How post war frugality and industrialized food
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  Speaker 1: production shaped childhood diets. Australia was lucky to avoid the
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  Speaker 1: strict rationing of post war Britain and we didn't have
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  Speaker 1: the unfettered corporatization of food that has cursed the United
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  Speaker 1: States and led to a situation where Donald Trump's nominee
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  Speaker 1: for Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Junior mixes conspiracy theories
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  Speaker 1: about vaccines and fluoride with ideas on food that for
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  Speaker 1: Americans might sound radical, but for Australians seem quite reasonable,
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  Speaker 1: like that kids' breakfast cereals shouldn't contain artificial colors and
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  Speaker 1: that most of our food should be unprocessed. In Matt's
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  Speaker 1: seventies Brisbane childhood, there were some early adopters who believed
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  Speaker 1: food should be fresh and wholesome.
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  Speaker 2: Indeed, I had a great friend of mine at the
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  Speaker 2: school whose mum I look back on her now and
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  Speaker 2: think how progressive she was. That they literally had their
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  Speaker 2: own They actually had a goat in the backyard of
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  Speaker 2: their suburban house in Brisbane, so they would drink goat
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  Speaker 2: fresh goat milk. She would grow her own veggies. Having
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  Speaker 2: said that, he did go to hospital briefly with malnutrition,
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  Speaker 2: but apart from.
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  Speaker 1: That, that's a small price to it.
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  Speaker 2: It is, but there were pockets, but that was considered
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  Speaker 2: sort of highly unusual, if not something to be suspect about.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, So, like so many things about modern parenting, we
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  Speaker 1: try to smack our kids a bit less than our
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  Speaker 1: parents smacked us. We may try to lay our own
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  Speaker 1: emotional baggage on them a bit more lightly than our
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  Speaker 1: parents laid their emotional baggage on us. How do you
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  Speaker 1: interpret the way we are feeding our children as a
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  Speaker 1: kind of indication of the kind of parenting people in
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  Speaker 1: twenty twenty four in Australia are trying to live by.
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  Speaker 2: Well, If I shout at the dog, my children are
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  Speaker 2: slitely all over me, about to report me to the RSPCA.
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  Speaker 2: But you cannot be aggressive, cruel, et cetera to this animal.
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  Speaker 2: But sensitivities, it does go to a point where sensitivities
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  Speaker 2: are completely different than you know. Maybe my kids will
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  Speaker 2: be reflecting as I'm reflecting today on the norms of
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  Speaker 2: when they were children and how things have changed dramatically
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  Speaker 2: for their own children. Maybe we all just try and
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  Speaker 2: put our shoulder to the wheel and do the best
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  Speaker 2: we can in the moment that we live. I do
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  Speaker 2: reach some points with my kids where I just think,
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  Speaker 2: for a flash of a moment, oh, for God's sake,
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  Speaker 2: let them have it and let them be kids for
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  Speaker 2: ten minutes. Are we limiting them and strangulating their childhood
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  Speaker 2: too much? I will literally sneakily buy the kids ice
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  Speaker 2: creams and say just go for it, but don't tell mom.
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  Speaker 1: All right, Well, I'm off to buy a roll of
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  Speaker 1: Devon and some of the fool sugar tomato sauce. That's
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  Speaker 1: another big treat these days. You're supposed to give the
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  Speaker 1: kids the stuff that doesn't have any sugar and isn't
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  Speaker 1: as nice.
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  Speaker 2: Good luck in finding the Devon, I mean, I would
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  Speaker 2: go to the pet section because some of it does
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  Speaker 2: look to my ancient mind, does look quite appetizing compared
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  Speaker 2: to what we had as kids.
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  Speaker 1: Matt Condon is a senior writer with The Australian. You
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  Speaker 1: can read Matt's full essay right now at Beaustralian dot
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  Speaker 1: com dot au slash health, along with a suite of
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  Speaker 1: other inspiring and informative yarns about the science, ethics, and
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  Speaker 1: taste of good health today. Ah, thank you, that's very funny.