It makes me happy that a story about “paddock to plate” practices in Australia and how you can have a fun foodie vacation there was written by someone named Leah Greengarten. It almost keeps me from grinding my teeth when she quotes a chef who says: “Our customers really like the journey we are taking them on, as it’s as wholesome as it can be.” If you go there on your Australian vacation, it’s a bonus journey within a journey!

But I cannot ignore that one of the things she mentions is a $770 butcher class. There is probably a 20-syllable German word that means “travel to the other side of the world to spend tons of money doing what Sam the Butcher on the Brady Bunch did every day before you go back to your desk job,” and I wish I knew it. How is that even a vacation?  Nothing sounds less relaxing to me after a 21-hour flight than learning the “ins and outs of cutting and utilising a pig, from nose to tail, including making sausages, slow roasted pork belly in the wood-fired oven, pigs trotter and potato pie and pig’s head terrine.” Massages are so over.

—Snacktime