Synthetic eggs, honey, sausages! Melbourne weekly Table Talk had cruel fun 100 years ago today with press reports that Germans (starving and obviously losing the war), were reduced to eating synthetic foods. The poet alleged that the chemical diet explained why the Huns had become barbaric.
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"What says the little busy bee that buzzes through the wood/When it observes a factory where rows of hives once stood?/'The hands that tilled my garden sweet dig trenches at the front./What matters it since I am beat by this synthetic stunt?/And where we gathered nectar clear from nodding golden bells,/The loud machinery I hear, and smell the chemist's smells.
"Against the healthy wholesome fare that made the children strong/Small wonder that in German air they can't tell right from wrong./So long upon this diet strange the German bounder fed/That it achieved a subtle change in both his heart and head.
"[Now] his hand is swift to loathsome deeds, his mind is fain to fraud,/He laughs when babe or mother bleeds beneath his brutal sword;/Now here my rhyme and riddle ends, so tell me, if you can,/What else the German is, my friends, except Synthetic Man?"
