Tea for Twenty, Western Australian Style

Today I received a calendar invitation at work for morning tea to celebrate a colleague’s birthday. Great, I thought muffins, pastries, and maybe some fruit would be a great morning break from excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. So 10 o’clock rolled around and I went over to the conference room for morning tea and was greeted by a box overflowing with:



Meat Pies. At 10:00AM. Apparently I was the only person surprised to find meat pies at morning tea and I was only the only person who was not overjoyed by the overwhelming scent of meat and ketchup early in the day. As everybody else dug in, popping the fist-sized pies like they had just come off of a hard night of drinking, I stood off to the side of the room drinking my tea. And then the questions came,

“Hey, do you know what these are?” asked Colleague S.

“Umm, meat pies?”

“Exactly, have you tried one yet?”

“No, not yet, but I’ve seen them everywhere. I had a bit too much for breakfast (ignore loudly grumbling stomach). What exactly is in them?”

By this point, a few very entertained colleagues had joined in the conversation and one piped up, mouth full of pie,

“Meat, gravy, and well the rest, you don’t really want to know. They’re great though, you have to try some.”

I promised to try one later and went back to my desk where suddenly my excel spreadsheet had started to look much more appealing. And later instead of trying a meat pie, I googled it and found the following:

1. Meat pies aren’t necessarily beef pies. If the ingredient listed says meat instead of beef, the contents may include kangaroo, buffalo, camel, deer, goat, hare, rabbit, pig, or mutton. Additionally, according to Food Standards Australia New Zealand, the government body responsible for developing food standards for Australia and New Zealand, meat can also be defined as snouts, ears, tongue roots, tendons and blood vessels. So if the meat pie you purchase has “meat” as an ingredient, you could be eating a pie full of snouts and blood vessels.

2. Meat pies are so unhealthy that a former Australian government official announced at a Childhood Obesity Summit that feeding children meat pies was akin to child cruelty.

3. Australians are thought to be the world’s largest consumer of meat pies per capita. The numbers I found via Google for this suggested that each Australian consumes over 12 meat pies per year. I think this number is a bit low as I watched individuals consume 4+ pies per person over the course of twenty minutes in one day.

Apologies to my host country, but I will not be consuming any meat pies. And friends, if you come visit, you won’t find any in my freezer. But I promise to help you find some if you feel the need to try this Australian staple. Please don’t request any for morning tea though.