October 18th, 2026Kyle’s Rant

I love a sausage, but I was recently cornered at a barbecue by a bloke who reckoned “they were okay in my day, but nowadays they’re full of crap”.

So, cast your mind back 50+ years. It’s 1973, the butcher wraps your snags in yesterday’s paper and nobody asks what’s in them.

I remember our NZ country butcher standing on a floor of sawdust, feeding the mincer with a smoke hanging off his lip. The ash would grow and grow, defying gravity like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, then suddenly it was gone, into the mincer along with God only knows what else. But mum cooked them, we ate them and we were better for it – we were raised on dirt, tank water and good luck.

Fast forward to 2026 and the humble snag comes with an ingredients list longer than some of my columns. So, has the sausage changed, or have we just been told more about it?

According to my AI research it’s mostly the latter. Sausages have long had a little help from sulphur dioxide, additive 220, which keeps the meat pink and the bugs at bay.

It’s capped at 500 milligrams per kilo and banned outright in plain mince, which is why the odd city butcher still cops a fine for slipping it into the budget beef. The rules also say a sausage must be at least half fat-free meat flesh, a phrase which can include rind, connective tissue and, for chicken, skin. Bon appétit.

So, the yuck bits were there in the ’70s too, the difference is that since 1987 every additive in packaged food has had to be named or numbered on the label. Nobody suddenly put chemicals in our food, they just made them sign the guest book.

Then there’s breakfast. Nutri-Grain was flogged to a generation of teenage boys as iron man food, though nobody mentioned that before 2011, about a third of the box was sugar. Iron man food my arse – it was a dessert with a picture of a surf lifesaver on the front.

It has since been quietly reworked, and in 2023 came a vanilla malt version with 25 per cent less sugar. Apparently, that took more than two years of taste testing, which means there’s a former employee out there somewhere, slightly rounder than when he started and sporting two heads.

What drove the change? Not a sudden attack of conscience. In 2014 the Health Star Rating turned up on the front of the box, and nothing motivates a cereal maker quite like being handed two stars out of five in front of everyone at Coles.

Chips are a funny one though. Smith’s has been frying spuds here since 1931, back when the salt came in a little twist of paper you tipped in yourself. Flip a bag of plain chips over today and the list is almost boring: potatoes, oil, salt and a few antioxidants including rosemary extract and vitamin C.

But reach past the plain for the flavoured stuff and whammo, out comes the chemistry set. Maltodextrin, “flavours” and our old mate 621, better known as MSG, which the label politely calls a flavour enhancer. So, a plain chip is a spud with a bit of salt, and a flavoured chip is a science project with a spud in it. Was it any different in 1973? Probably not, we were just too busy licking our fingers to read the back of the pack.

Which brings me to biscuits, and the great Shapes revolt of 2016. Arnott’s tinkered with the barbecue and pizza recipes, baking the flavour in rather than sprinkling it on top.

I can’t be bothered with the stupid looking things myself, but apparently the nation lost its collective mind. Facebook groups formed, a petition was launched and grown adults described a savoury biscuit as disgusting – first world problems, anybody? By September the same year, Arnott’s had backflipped. Wars have ended with less fuss.

So, has food changed in 50 years? Some of it, yes. Sugar has come down in cereals, the oil has changed in chips, and we even have allergen warnings in plain English, which is more than you can say for most government paperwork.

But a lot of the so-called chemicals were always there, what’s really changed is the labelling. We went from knowing nothing to knowing everything, and most of us still only look at the price. The sausage didn’t get dodgier, we just got the receipt.

For the record, there’s plenty of ultra-processed food out there, and back in the sales game we used to say “we’d sell the sizzle, not the sausage”. Well, in this case the sizzle is the tomato sauce. It’s basically your nan’s recipe with an awful lot of sugar and salt, so much so that a tablespoon-sized squirt is roughly a teaspoon of sugar, so pass the mustard? Less sugar, more salt, you can’t win.

Snag rant over…