I am trying out a new cafe near me and having spent the best part of 9 months in Europe I’d forgotten how utterly ridiculous cafe menus are.

Here on the Gold Coast – to match the predominant view that everyone is super healthy and fit – businesses are having a christmas breakfast party rather than buy a couple of crates of cheap beer and champagne and hope the photocopier survives the night. This is upsetting the balance of the traditional christmas party…So too are the outrageous descriptions on cafe menus for your basic food and drink.

Apparently we cafe goers in Australia are unable to consume our eggs, muesli, or ‘smashed avocado’ (don’t even get me started on that!) without knowing exactly…and I mean exactly where it came from. There is always a longwinded tale about the eggs….free range and hand massaged by a qualified shiatsu master allowed to roam in lavender filled meadows to give the extra hint of flavour to your scrambled eggs on toast. The bread is always organic sourdough or spelt or some shit  flame grilled because toasted was so yesterday…… (tasting no where near as good as my Auntie Marie’s uber fattening gluten and wheat filled brown bread made from full cream milk straight from the cow by the way). The coffee is now single origin from an organic farm deep in the Amazon or in a newly formed African country. All this so you can be charged a kidney and second mortgage to have bacon and eggs.

But really I hope this comes full circle back to a normal menu that serves good food and coffee at reasonable prices and we the customer will decide with our taste buds if it is good…not be told it must good because of the source of the food…like everywhere else in the world! Just like the humble christmas party where you wake up in the morning with shards of memories of telling your boss to Bugger Off in a sea of photcopied sheets of people’s backsides……

For now however you can enjoy your hangover breakfast or christmas party breakgast with extra “hand harvested macrobiotic unprocessed sea salt” (yes it exists) and hope the poor hand harvesters didn’t drown in the sea for your macrobiotic pleasure.