Then we had low-fat milk and then those weird things like soy milk (bad idea that tastes even worse) started creeping in.
More recently we have real low-fat, A2, more omega-3, full cream, no cream, no lactose and, in the end, no idea.
When we were little tackers we drank low-fat milk for years, long before anyone ever thought of it.
Because after the milko filled the billy for us each morning, the old girl would boil it, hiving the cream from the top and into a bowl.
Scalded cream was another name for “so fat you can feel your arteries harden”. But they didn’t. So we happily drank on and got stuck into the cream – if the old man ever left us any – to go on our apricot jam in thick lashings on very thick slices of bread.
And that gets the Whacker to the point.
You may have read or heard about a proposal for Australians to buy cars online now our car manufacturers are all but memories.
Critics say the program just won’t work, because there are – give or take a Mini – 66 car brands already fighting for 1.1 million car sales here each year.
Like you, I just can’t believe one in every 22 of us needs a new car every year. No one I know around here gets a new car sooner than 200,000km or five years. But I digress.
If car buyers think they’ve got problems, they’ve probably never tried to buy big-ticket farm machinery.
Not even I can keep track of all the new models, the advances in engineering technology and the rapid emergence of computer technology to actually run the machines.
That all has to be combined with latest research on no-till farming, for example, where we are now being told we do actually have to break the ground up because of no-till’s compaction – the good old dig and delve.
So we have no-till, sort of, with exceptions every 10 or 15 or so years when all the paddocks need some severe delving.
And that all explains why most of us stick to the one colour in the machinery shed. Not because it’s the best but because at least we can understand it.
So when we run into colleagues at field days, machinery demos or the machinery dealer’s showroom, we can all happily whinge and whine about what our machines of the day don’t do.
Of course no one lets on that we have to whine about the same thing because if we swapped colours and systems we would not be able to carry on as much. Because we would have no idea what we were talking about.
Spooky, hey?
With that kind of stunted outlook and lack of knowledge we could almost be – you knew it was coming – politicians.
So we just moan and groan but at least, when we finally sit down in the cabin, we know exactly what we are doing.
Which would be exactly what the dealers tell us and the satellites overhead confirm.
Have to go now, though, as I can see a low-loader coming up the road with a shiny new toy on the back.
If I had more time, I would go into my real complaint with this. But I haven’t, so if we bump into each other in the near future, be warned – don’t get me started on the price.
