Fast food - beyond KFC and McDonalds

It can be an occasional treat when no one feels like cooking, or a lifestyle choice leading to morbid obesity and early death.  But what are your options if you find yourself in Australia and you're too lazy or incompetent to make something healthy?

This is the question that literally no one has asked me.  However, my mission is to tell people what it's actually like to live here, and for almost everyone it's a question that will crop up at some time.

Of course, KFC and McDonalds, the undisputed heavyweight champions of feeding the heavyweight, are well represented and can serve you all your favourite artery-cloggers from back home.  If you're looking for a more authentically Aussie experience, though, you're not short of options.

Skippy, Rolf Harris and the Sydney Opera House are all authentic Australian icons, but arguably none of them are as Aussie as the meat pie.  Everyone claims that their pies are the best, but as a rule of thumb the smaller the operation producing them, the more enjoyable your experience will be.  Try and find a bakery that makes them daily on the premises.  Having found the best meat pie, the locals do their best to make it taste like a mass-produced condiment by smothering it with tomato ketchup, which has permeated the national consciousness to the extent that it's just known as "sauce".  You'll know that you're on the way to naturalisation when this seems like a good idea.

Mmm...sauce

The benefit of a vast coastline is that Australia has a lot of good fresh fish, and fish and chips is arguably Australia's highest quality quick meal.  Most fish shops will sell you at least four different varieties, and you can choose to have them breadcrumbed and grilled, or deep fried in batter.  Some of their other offerings are only for the hardy.  The Chiko Roll is not, as it name might suggest, made of chicken, but instead consists of bits of beef of indeterminate origin.  These have been added to vegetables, and a whole load of other stuff, in order to make a product intended to provide an answer to the age old question of what to eat at a football match.  Dim sum is one of the high points of Chinese cuisine, but by the time that little savoury dumplings have been re-engineered for the Australian market, deep fried for several minutes in chip fat, and re-christened "dim sims", there's little to identify them as such.

Perhaps it's purely a Melbourne thing, arising from the high number of Italian migrants, but the major international pizza chains haven't made that much of an impact in Victoria's capital.  Melburnians are far more likely to get their pizzas from small, family owned outlets.  These places will often also sell takeaway pasta in a variety of sauces.  A word of caution for Europeans:  ham on pizzas here is generally shredded.  For some reason, if the pizza is in any way overcooked, shredded ham instantly turns into something similar to the chargrilled relics you clear out of the bottom of your toaster.  You can ask for sliced ham instead, but you won't always get it even then.

A common feature of the Aussie takeaway scene is roast chicken, often cooked on a spit over charcoal, and there are a lot of shops that offer it.  Although the chickens themselves are often a good way to feed the family, watch out for the chips.  Before I first came to Australia I had never heard of the abomination known as chicken salt.  This is a vile concoction of chemicals that some of these places (and KFC as well) apply to their chips after cooking, apparently under the impression that it turns them into an even more delicious accompaniment to the meat, by adding an extra hint of chickeniness.  What it actually does is to replace the delightful taste of chip with the manufactured flavour of the laboratory.  Unless you're a particularly dissipated character, make it clear that you don't want it.

Looks good, but watch out for the chicken salt

Melbourne's Greek heritage means that there is always a variant on the kebab on offer here, often in the form of a souvlaki.  British visitors may be disappointed to find that eyeball searing chilli sauces are less in evidence as accompaniments than they are back home.  There is also the usual array of ethnic cuisines - for example Chinese, Thai and Indian.  Australians have no macho culture associated with finding the hottest thing on the menu and then eating it until they bleed through their pores.  For afficionadoes of the curry as it is sold in the UK, Indian food as served in many places may even seem a little bland, so if you want it hot, ask for it.

Finally, there are indeterminate independent fast food joints which will serve a variety of most of the above, along with other things as well.  If you're in the mood for culinary novelty, these places will be able to serve you a burger with The Lot, as seen on When Burgers Go Bad™.  If you're the sort of person who's always felt that what your meat patty really needed was to be accompanied with thick slices of beetroot and pineapple, and perhaps topped off with a fried egg, then this is for you.  

Australia's national obesity rates are ample evidence of its ability to punch its weight in the fast food stakes.  With all this on offer, the problem may be choosing how to get those crucial excess calories into your life.