I had half the under-12s basketball team in the ute, driving them home.
“What are you up to tomorrow, buddy?” I asked our point guard, riding shotgun.
“Dad shot the family cow. Tomorrow we’re cutting it up. He says I have to wear gumboots.”
“It’s gonna be pretty gross,” he sighed. Then he brightened. “But we’re having spag bol for lunch. And steak for dinner!”
“MMMMM,” the whole ute hummed in unison.
When I got home I told my wife. She’s vegetarian. She looked at me the way a vegetarian looks at a man who has … just described a spleen to a ute full of children.
My five-year-old looked up from the floor.
“Yum.”
The kid is an animal. He won’t touch anything green (that’s cow food). To him, the paddock is just the menu with legs.
Now Sunday night is documentary night at our place, so I decided to give the kids the sanitised city version of the same story. On went Dr Karl’s ABC series, How Things Work.
First up: meat pies.
My kids inhale meat pies until Dr Karl appeared in a hairnet beside a dumpster-sized pile of what he politely called “beef trim.” (ABC-speak for the bits that didn’t make the cut.)
“That is disgusting,” said my thirteen-year-old, who swore off pies on the spot.
The five-year-old leaned in. “Yum.”
But it was time for dessert. Next episode: how lollies are made.
All four sat open-mouthed as Dr Karl showed them the vats of liquid and paste that become jelly snakes.
“Now this is more like it!” said the five-year-old.
I hit pause. “See that gelatin? What do you reckon it’s made of?”
“Jelly?” my daughter said hopefully.
“No. Cow. Skin, bones, hooves. The lot. Chucked in a pot, soaked in chemicals, dried out and ground into powder. That’s what makes your snakes wobble.”
Blank stares.
“So, hands up who wants a snake?”
One hand went up. You know whose.
The lesson?
The further your food gets from the paddock, the harder it is to know what you’re eating.
The point guard’s old man gets it. Old Daisy was a lawnmower until Friday. But with beef up 13.5 per cent in a year, she’s grass-fed gold in a second-hand freezer. Their family beat inflation with a rifle and a chest freezer.
Gross?
Sure. But that kid knows exactly what’s on his plate, and what it costs.
Your super works the same way. The further it gets from a basic index fund, the shinier the brochure, the more “sophisticated” the fund, the less you know what’s inside.
Buried deep within it is the financial equivalent of that gelatin. A fee on a fee, on a fee, that you never knew you were paying, ground into powder and stirred through your balance so you never taste it.
It’s all disclosed of course, deep in the fine print the size of the ingredients list on the back of a lolly packet. Which is to say: printed so nobody reads it. Not hiding the hooves. Just listing them in a font you’d need a magnifying glass to find.
The point guard eats better than most grown adults invest. He looks in the pot.
So should you.
RIP Daisy.
Tread Your Own Path!