BREAKING: Do sausage rolls have inherent meaning, or is their significance a construct of human perception and interpretation?

More to come…

September brings witness to my quest in locating the Fleurieu Peninsula’s finest sausage roll. It’s my higher earthly purpose. Heading to Port Elliot for my annual writing retreat, I call into the Platy Pie Bakery.

Strolling in I announce myself with the chirpily invitational, ‘Hello there. How are you going?’

Behind the counter the woman serving stares through me with the dead eyes of a cyborg and allows my words to hang in the air before they die shamefully, undeservingly, on the scratch-resistant, modestly industrial flooring.

This is not how I wanted our relationship to begin.

I press on. ‘I’m pretty keen on a sausage roll.’

‘Sauce?’

Ahh, she speaks.

As my task-oriented, chit-chat averse comrade digs about in the warmer I wonder. Beyond physical sustenance, what nourishment does a sausage roll offer to the human spirit, if any, and how does it contribute to our overall well-being?

Dodging a delivery man by the door I slip out to the front veranda of the bakery and pop onto a chair. The breeze is pushing the trees about with considerable energy, and I reckon it’ll turn into a typical spring day: windy and warm.

I then unleash the beast and It’s the most colossal sausage roll onto which I’ve ever clapped my blinking eyeballs. Its girth reminds me of the weapons used by the chimps in 2001: A Space Odyssey to cause violence to each other, thus signifying the vital evolutionary leap when our progenitors began to assert control over their world and, tellingly, each other.

As is often the case I was then distracted from my reflections upon Stanley Kubrick’s cinematography by some carrot.

Yes, my mega-sausage roll was happy host to sizable chunks of carrot. This constituted rare, positive, orange-hued news. Despite the pastry being somewhat flaky and on the cusp of oiliness it tasted, as the man once said, good.

Of course, a key thematic omission in 2001: A Space Odyssey is that none of the dramatis personae ask the following question of themselves or the villainous computer HAL 9000: Is a sausage roll more than the sum of its parts, and if so, what metaphysical properties might it possess?

Coming from a small family I’ve never had to tear competitively through my food with any urgency (although my wife Claire enjoyed her childhood tucker with an almost cricket team of nine gathered around the table her meal-time etiquette doesn’t reflect this at all). Today, on this gusty patio I inhale my lunch with primeval, almost disturbing haste.

I next contemplate the thoughts of Aristotle or maybe it’s Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski. I can’t never remember which. He might’ve remarked, what role does our appetite play in our enjoyment of a sausage roll, and how does it relate to our broader desires and cravings in life?

My lunch now done, I walk about town before pressing on towards Port Elliot.

The Platy Pie Bakery serves up a mammoth sausage roll and for carrot-lovers it’s a double treat which gives clear rise to this eternal, epicurean conundrum-

How do sausage rolls symbolise cultural identity and heritage, and what can their evolution over time tell us about cultural change?

Dunno.