Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

Harry’s Kewell, tapioca’s not

Some terrific news from the UK today:

• The Australian soccer team trounced England 3-0 3-1 (this is roughly equivalent to Australia’s beating Canada at ice hockey).
• The British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s announced that in April they will introduce a fully biodegradable plastic carrier bag made from tapioca.

I didn’t get up at 6am to watch the game live because I didn’t think Australia had a chance of winning. Wrong. I was confusing Australian soccer—which is a scandal-racked shambles—with an Australian soccer team made up of players from the English Premier League and other overseas competitions (talented Australians are immediately snapped up by foreign clubs).

I watched the full replay tonight and, although it wasn’t a stellar game, Harry Kewell performed superbly and it was pleasant to see an Australian team that hadn’t played together since their World Cup qualifier against Uruguay in November 2001 win against two English teams (Eriksson replaced the England firsts with “an experimental under-26 side” in the second-half).

<update>This Sydney Morning Herald story took the gloss off my delight by revealing that Manchester United’s Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger had denied Eriksson full access to their players.</update>

The news about the tapioca shopping bag probably made me happier than Australia’s football success. I’m not a picky eater but, whenever I’m asked if there’s anything I don’t eat, I reply without hesitation: “Sago and tapioca.”

For those lucky enough never to have encountered them, both are starchy grains used for puddings and other dishes: sago comes from a palm while tapioca is obtained from the cassava tree. When I was a child my mother used to make sweet puddings by boiling the hard sago or tapioca grains with milk.

I recall being made to sit at the dinner table until I’d finished my dessert. Our family had a strict rule about eating everything on one’s plate and my parents were fond of delivering homilies such as “Think of the starving children in Communist China. They’d be grateful if they could have tapioca pudding.”

(Years later, when I read Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, I nearly fell off my chair when she recounted how her parents used to say: “Think of the starving children in the capitalist countries. They’d be grateful if they could have rice.”)

Even now I can conjure up the feeling of revulsion, of forcing myself not to vomit as I tried to get the lumpy gelatinous mixture straight into my throat without its coming into contact with the interior of my mouth. I hope the tapioca shopping bag takes the supermarket world by storm and that within a few years every cassava tree in the world is devoted to biodegradable plastic bag production. (According to the Guardian article—titled At last, an edible form of tapioca - in the shape of a carrier bag—”any starch can be used, but tapioca rather than potato starch has ended up in the final product because most plastic bags are manufactured in the far east where cassava… is plentiful.”) With a bit of luck they’ll run out of cassava trees and start to use sago starch too.

Then no kid in the tropics will have to eat tapioca or sago and no parent will get the chance to say: “Think of those poor children in the northern hemisphere. They’d be grateful if they could have tapioca or sago instead of McDonalds.”

Permalink | TrackBack (1)