Eating With Dr Karl

The science commentator on Polish dishes, burgers and surviving in the desert.

After World War II, your parents ended up in Australia at the Bonegilla migrant camp, near the Victorian/NSW border. Do you recall your early years there?

In general, kids don’t remember anything under the age of six, except for a few special memories. The story was that we got one egg a week, and they gave that egg to me. That’s what parents do for their kids. The food wasn’t particularly good, but it was food. And there was nobody trying to kill us. So it was a very good place to be.

Your parents came from Poland. What did you eat at home?

I remember having brown bread with halwa on it. Nobody had brown bread – everybody else had white bread. And nobody knew what halwa was. So the meals that I ate were completely different. And my parents were, perhaps unfairly, scathing of the fact that the only deli meat available, apart from at the delicatessens, was devon.

You were a taxi driver for 10 years. Is it true that cabbies know where the best food is?

Not best, but different. You could go and get what you wanted quite easily. One of my friends went to the trouble of eating proper meals, whereas I was more hungry for the money. So I started early, finished late and grabbed hamburgers. I have a traumatic memory about a place called Jumbo Burger: as a result of going into one, I smashed up six cars.

What happened?