If Marchant’s lemonade was so sparkalarkalarkaling why isn’t it around any more? How do you make a genuine Cornish pasty and why can’t you call it that? Did Australia’s “Mad Men” live and lunch like their American ad agency counterparts? Why did Kathmandu cafés do such a roaring trade in chocolate cake in the 1970s? And how did two giant supermarket chains become such a big part of our lives?

These and other burning questions are answered in Me and My Big Mouth, a personal account of how Australian food has changed in the baby-boomers’ lifetime. It’s the story of a generation that can remember life before pizza – a generation that has seen the demise of the local grocer and, decades later, the resurrection of the small local deli.

As well as taking a nostalgic look at growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, this memoir gives you an insider’s view of the “Mad Men” era of Australian advertising – a time when lunches were long and liquid, television was the new medium, and jingles were all the rage. It embarks on various culinary journeys – on the hippy-trail from Kathmandu to London, in the old cities of Europe and around Australia’s perimeter – and finally comes to rest in country New South Wales.

Accompanied by generous helpings of tasty trivia, it’s a story of technology, discovery and social change.
Includes bibliographical references and index.