This was rather sad news. I am, in general, not especially interested in food, I have a very limited palate and to be honest I often feel like if I didn’t have to eat I probably wouldn’t. There’s a deep-rooted psychological issue in there, I’m sure, maybe an autism thing but that’s not the point. The point is that Ian Parmenter (who I was thinking about just the other day, maybe I shouldn’t do that) has left us, and I actually watched and enjoyed his cooking show, which I didn’t do with many other TV chefs. I kind of like that it was an off-screen passion for him at first, too; he was trained as a journalist and he produced TV news in the late 80s, but then he managed to parlay this off-screen interest into 450 episodes of Consuming Passions… I recall it being like a bumper segment before the ABC news, something like that; I don’t know that I would’ve eaten most of the things he made, but he was fun to watch while he was doing these things, I remember him having fairly animated facial hair, and I am rather sad to know he’s gone.
