I can’t be the only Speccie reader who’s lost sleep thinking about the Crown Resort employees awaiting trial in China. The idea that a bunch of Aussies doing their best to make James Packer a bit richer could be bundled unceremoniously out of their luxury apartments, limos and five-star restaurants, and forced to spend even a few hours in an overcrowded, insanitary, unventilated prison cell – and perhaps be subjected to unspeakable indignities by other inmates is almost more than I can bear. But not quite.

It would be nice to think that Premier Xi’s crackdown on corruption reflects a wish to impose Western standards in all the areas of Chinese endeavour which have attracted foreign censure. The persecution of Tibetan and Falun Gong practitioners are tired old causes which no Australian except John Pilger ever understood, let alone cared about. But the case for reducing our fart-in-a-field contribution to global warming would be a lot more compelling if China decided to shut down just a few hundred of its existing 2,500 coal-fired power plants (we have 30), or at least rethink their plans to build a thousand new ones over the next few years. Weaning the Chinese population off fossil fuels would be a walk in the park compared to persuading them to stop ingesting the body parts of endangered animals. A bowl of tiger penis soup will set you back about $US500 in Guangzhou or Tianjin these days, but thanks to the bacterial growth rate of China’s millionaire class, demand has never been higher. It’s not just a taste thing, of course (like chicken penis, since you ask). One of the fundamental principles of traditional Chinese medicine is that the rarer an animal is, the greater the health benefits of eating it. Tiger penis like bear paw and shark fin is considered to be a particularly effective way to boost male virility. There may well be some truth in this, but why a nation struggling with overpopulation for the past hundred years feels the need to put more lead in its pencil is a mystery.

The only animal you’ll never find on a Chinese menu is the giant panda, which Chinese people find just as adorable as we do. In fact, the status pandas enjoy in their homeland has become so totemic that animal rights lobbyists are now planning to leverage it for the benefit of other species. Like all great ideas it’s very simple. Basically, for every 20 elephants or 5 rhinoceroses found slaughtered for their tusks and horns in the wilds of Africa, a panda in a Western zoo will be publicly beheaded and then spit-roasted and served up to wealthy businessmen. A video of it all will then be uploaded onto Chinese social media. People power will do the rest.

Most Australians would find eating koalas equally offensive, but judging by the success of Heston Blumenthal’s new Melbourne franchise our appetite for other exotic protein sources seems to be growing. I do not speak for our kids, though. Having munched, slurped and loafed their way into the international top ten for obesity, Australian children (aka the swollen generation) have now also been found to suffer the world’s highest levels of diet sensitivity. This doesn’t mean we should avoid using terms like ‘doughboy’, ‘jumbo’ and ‘lard-arse’ in their hearing, but it does mean we have to be increasingly selective about the foods we give them. I, on the other hand, suffer from allergy intolerance. If the person next to me at dinner or in a restaurant identifies themself as having a problem with gluten, dairy, seafood, eggs or nuts, I experience intense sensations of tiredness and, depending on how much I may have drunk, break into tourettes-like abuse.

I get a similar reaction in the proximity of certain kinds of modern art. Especially when it is art purchased with my taxes. Jackson Pollock’s ridiculous Blue Poles, which our government bought for $1.3 million in 1973, is a case in point. A curator of London’s Royal Academy, where the painting is on loan, has said that ‘while this purchase was controversial at the time, it has turned out to be a brilliant investment’. The thing about investments is that they are only good if they deliver a return to the investor. The last major Pollock went for $140 million, so for Blue Poles, widely regarded as Pollock’s masterpiece, we could expect at least $200 million. Enough to cover the cost of one twenty-fifth of a Barracuda submarine.

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