what footballers eat

On Wednesday I sat in a bakery cafe and read an article in The Age about Gablett Jr's neolithic diet. Sorry, palaeolithic diet. Meat, fish, "birds", nuts, fruit and vegetables he eats, but not dairy, pulses, grains or potatoes. This diet confirms he is the AFL Son of God. While reading I ate a slice of reheated pizza (possibly vego) and guzzled a 600ml carton of coffee-flavoured milk.

In the good old days Stone Age folk didn't eat wheat. They didn't store beans or oils in heavy clay vessels, and they didn't tend cows, or goats, or camels, nor did they milk them. And they didn't eat potatoes. Well not the paleolithic Europeans at least, because those guys hadn't yet sailed across the Atlantic and discovered the Americas. Though palaeolithic Americans must have. Eaten potatoes. If they lived in the tropics. High up in the Andes.

Which begs the question, does Gablett Jr not eat bananas too? What about tomatoes, green beans, corn, capsicum, chilli, AVOCADO? Does the football genius live on beef, birds, cabbage, apples and turnips alone? What about honey? Fat grubs? Nits?

Today for lunch I had half a berry muffin and some red-bean slice this lady from Hong Kong made too much of so I got a couple of pieces - its gelling agent was corn flour - and an instant coffee with milk and one sugar. It was 100% un-palaeolithic.

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David King is way fatter than Michael Voss. King may be the elder, he may have literally eaten more meals, but he also eats continuously, throughout the day. When he and Voss present their half-time thoughts behind a low desk-like prop, there's always a toasted ham, cheese and tomato panini a-cooling on a custom-built shelf specially installed beneath the desk-like prop. And when the studio cuts back to the Fox Footy panel out comes the lukewarm panini for a quick gobble.

King mentors the younger, slightly slimmer Voss, showing the former Lion how to keep the carb intake continuous when performing live to camera. The duress these men are under to present pertinent, off-the-cuff stats in front of the national pay-per-view audience requires sustained energy inputs. And thus Voss before each show now packs a bag of peanut chikki's in the inside breast pocket of his suit coat, unrelenting in his bid to beef up his screen presence.