Kiwianarama

Sorry mate, you can't park there.

New Zealand Crown Law¹ permits only one mode of fundraising for charity^b.  To collect money for, say, a new Surf Lifesaving clubhouse, or indoor toilets at a local primary school, organisations must set up a barbecue at a busy Saturday shopping location and sell fried meaty logs to an unsuspecting public.

Colloquially, this is known as a Sausage Sizzle.

Certain charities try to boycott, or mess with, the Sausage Sizzle law.  A tactic of SAFE - the animal rights group popular with man-hating vegans and Capoeira dancers - is to draw in a hungry crowd by displaying life-sized photos of tasty-looking pigs. But it is a trick. They do not have any delicious pork sausages to sell, just a bunch of whiny rhetoric about how food should be allowed to roam free in the forest or something. Which is kind of funny, when you think about it.  Not like their spokesperson, Mike King, who stopped being funny back in 1994.

That aside, Sausage Sizzles are an effective source of revenue, timed to coincide with the short, hungry space experienced by shoppers between morning tea and lunch. And, by combining the serious work of ‘doing something for the community’, with the fun of a barbecue, a Sausage Sizzle is the ultimate mix of business and pleasure, contributing towards the kind of Zen-like state that all Kiwis aspire to achieve in their work/lifestyle balance, a.k.a “Living The Dream”.  Other examples include “Jandals at the Office”, “No Tie at a Wedding” and “Checking Emails from the Beach”.

But putting on a Sausage Sizzle is actually quite a serious business. There are rules. It can take several years study at a tertiary institute like the University of Auckland University of University Technology (slogan.. “Did we mention that we really are a University?”) to become a qualified Sizzler. The Re: Sauce Management Act - a gargantuan set of policy that makes the Magna Carta look like a drycleaning flyer - lays out specific guidelines, including;

• A Sausage Sizzle must be positioned between 10 & 20 feet from, and upwind of, the store front door of either a Warehouse, a Bunnings or a Mitre10 Mega.
• Any tomato sauce provided must contain black bits, taste of candy & be served in unmarked, 4L plastic bottles.
• Napkins must be exactly 10% absorbent and  90% waterproof.
• Bread must be at least a day old, white, and cost less than 10c loaf. Each slice should also be manually stressed the night before, so that it breaks apart evenly as soon as it’s wrapped around it’s designated sausage.
• Entertainment may only be provided in the form of either a) an 80s ghetto blaster playing dub/reggae, or b) an old man blowing a harmonica.
• Child labour is compulsory.
• Signs and banners should be designed in Microsoft Word, with ample Clip Art, then printed at home and sellotaped together.
• Sausages must contain no more than 5% meat or (preferably) meat by-products, from inorganic, factory-farmed pigs only.

Interestingly, the shortest section of the Re:Sauce Management Act is the part covering Hygiene & Food Safety, which simply states..

“Cook everything till it’s black, and you should be sweet as.”

Sweet as indeed. But sweet as what? We’re not quite sure. Like the question “What really goes into a sausage?”.. sometimes it’s best not to ask.

1 - Section 22b, clause (a) of The Treaty of Waitangi (1840ish, I think. The whole thing was a bit vague, apparently).
b - Telethon, it should be noted, was not a charity. It was a joke.
* - Some experts go so far as to suggest that Mike King was never really funny at all.