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. Andmy 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?Around midnight,
I ordered my Jumbo Burger for 50c,
a bargain. Then I turned around, just
to gaze at where I parked my car, in a
no-standing zone, and it wasn’t there.
I checked my pockets and I had the keys
- I just didn’t have my taxi. I went out
and someone was saying: “Help, there’s
been a terrible accident! A runaway
driver-less taxi rolled down the hill and
smashed into cars.” Sure enough, there
were six smashed-up cars. The Jumbo
Burger wasn’t tasting very good by then.
You were a doctor at a children’s hospital,
when an incident inspired you to become
a science broadcaster.A Current Affair
kept pushing the false claim that there
was equal scientific weight on each side
of the vaccination argument. At the kids’
hospital, after 20 years of zero deaths
from whooping cough, suddenly we had
deaths from whooping cough. Seeing a
baby die, a baby that didn’t have to die,
because this single TV presenter onA
Current Affairsuccessfully drove the herd
vaccination rate down for whooping
cough, inspired me to use my power for
good in the media. Being a doctor in
a kids’ hospital was the best job I ever
had, but all I could do was deal with one
person at a time. But as a broadcaster,
I could deal with hundreds, thousands,
tens of thousands of people when I say
on the radio, “get your kids vaccinated”.In your latest book,Vital Science, you
address the media hype about cockroach
milk being a new superfood.Practically
all species of cockroach give birth to eggs.
But one species – one in the whole world- gives birth kind of like platypuses do,
so the milk just diffuses through. When
I say “milk”, it’s a liquid, it’s white-ish.
On the grounds that it had lots of fat in
it, theDaily Mailclaimed that it could
become the next superfood. Well, if
that’s their grounds, they should say
that cooking oil is the next superfood,
because it’s 100 per cent fat.
One heartbreaking
story inVital Science
is about the scientists
who protected a seed
bank during the Siege
of Leningrad.It’s very
elevating that they would
starve themselves to death
rather than eat the food
around them, because that was the
seed stock for the next generation.
Nine of them died. They were very
honourable people.Your father, a concentration camp survivor,
once interviewed job candidates at the
Water Board, and recognised one as a
brutal camp guard.Yeah, someone who
had killed my father’s friends at the
concentration camp. My father didn’t
say anything and took him through thewhole procedure of getting a job and
then said, “I remember you.” The guy’s
face went white and he asked, “what are
you going to do, call the police?” He said,
“no, you’ve got the job. I’m not doing
this for you, I’m doing this for your
children.” The man’s son did electrical
engineering and became the boss of a
very big European electronics company
in Australia and that wouldn’t have
happened if the father had gone to
jail and the family had struggled.You have a planet named after you,
18412 Kruszelnicki. A guy called Robert
H McNaught, who discovered a big comet
that came past a few years ago, named
it after me because he liked what I was
doing with science communicating. It’s
in orbit between Jupiter and Mars.You visited 15 Australian deserts in one
road trip. What was it like staying fed and
watered?We had to carry around all of
our food, because there were no shops
to buy anything from. We got our water
by navigating to a well every second or
third night, on the Canning Stock Route.
We drank one and a half tonnes of
water in that month, because we were
evaporating so fast. An orange peel would
get dry and crumbly in half an hour. It
was 48°C in the day time,
dropping down to about
32°C at three o’clock in
the morning. We had a
140-litre fridge and filled
it with oranges. So we
had frozen oranges and
everything else was just
dried food.What do you eat at home?I follow the
wisdom of Michael Pollan: “Eat food, not
too much, mostly plants.” For breakfast:
different fruits chopped up, with random
seeds and yoghurt. For lunch: some
vegetarian thing, with protein from either
a bean mix, meat or cheese. Dinner,
I don’t have very much to eat at all. The
thing is to have a variety; go for variety.●Vital Scienceby Dr Karl Kruszelnicki
(Pan Macmillan, $34.99, hbk) is out now.GOURMET TRAVELLER 31How I eat
We got one egg a
week, and they gave
that egg to me.
That’s what parents
do for their kids.