"Let's de-clutter the Opinions section of all those toxic columns compendia of idiocy", said no Dom-Post editor, ever

It has been brought to my attention that I have been lardering wrong all this time. These days, it appears, no-one clutters up their kitchen cupboards with anything as gauche as provisions. It's all about the open space and the Feng Shui. Gesundheit, I said.

Now this may sound like just another of Another Kiwi's elaborate but unconvincing excuses for the absence of Chocolate Tim-Tams in the appropriate jar on the Riddled tea-room shelves. But he was insistent -- marshaling columns from the Lifestyle section of the Com-Post to buttress his point -- that I have been committing a Faux Pantry and will forfeit the respect of the young peoples and the trend-conscious hipsters. Columns that fill the space between the advertisements and bring the secondary advantage of providing material for lazy bloggers.

The opinions of Rachael Javes and Janella Purcell were particularly dispositive, on account being paid for, and I have garnered from them the bouquets of wisdom that follow. Not content with Nutritionist and Naturopath, Purcell styles herself as Celebrity Chef and Wellness Coach, as if to compensate for the growing public awareness that "nutritionist" is a term of art meaning "lab-coat cosplayer with no training or qualifications".

• Throw out anything containing ingredients that you can't pronounce. Even better, give it to a chemist or biologist with better pronounciation skills. Every sector of society benefits from a stupidity tax.
• Throw out the vinegar and soy sauce and dried seaweeds, they all come from Japan and are therefore contaminated with molecules of Earthquake and Tsunami.

• Ingredients with four or more syllabubs are especially menacing. I am not sure what a syllabub is but they also come from Japan -- possibly aboard a syllabus -- and 17 of them together make a Haiku.
• Gesundheit, said Another Kiwi.
• Dried fruits are poison pure and simple and MUST GO, what with their concentrated fruit sugars.
• The only cure for unpronounceable syllabubs are CAPITAL LETTERS.


• In fact you might as well abandon "nutrition" altogether and take supplements to stave off the self-inflicted vitamin deficiencies and "to flush out toxins". Just don't try to pronounce the ingredients, and be sure that they "are of good quality and contain only wholefoods"
• Roles like 'celebrity chef' and 'wellness coach' are crying out to become Julian-&-Sandy skits. The task of writing "Bona Bullshit and Bafflegab" is left as an exercise for readers more adept at Polari than me.

This whole job of parachuting into New Zealand as a spokespimp for the Orthorexia industry and being paid to stovepipe halfwitted magical-thinking bollocks into Wellingon's paper of note, it sounds like a real doddle. I have therefore changed my name to something more Celebrity-Chef sounding, and am available for interviews.

Regrettably, according to a Riddled Unfocus Group (i.e. the usual shower of pissants propping up the bar in the Wigglesworth Lounge at the Old Entomologist), "Smutella" sounds more like a Huitlacoche-based sandwich spread.