A few days ago, it was reported that the Big Prawn, the sole culinary landmark in the town of Ballina on the New South Wales north coast was under threat of redevelopment. I'm not well apprised of the Ballina food scene; there may well be other landmarks but nothing as visible as a gigantic representation of a cooked decapod.

As a nation, Australia is not the sole progenitor of giant food architecture. The US also excels in the field: the website Roadside America titles these giant foods the "Salad of the Gods" . The appropriate architectural style is named "programmatic architecture": an inappropriately banal term for such a lurid art.

Cooked food does not seem to feature as heavily in the American big food ouvre as it does in Australia, but there are a handful of fine examples. I've been to the iconic Randy’s Donuts, straight out of Compton, Los Angeles, still selling buttery doughnuts since the 1950s. These buildings came about as a response to the construction of highways beginning in the 1920s.

In their book on streetside eating in America, Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age, John Jakle and Keith Sculle write:

Architectural experimentation was a hallmark of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Stands were built as giant oranges, lemons, milk cans, inverted ice cream cones and milk cartons..."The American people like novelty and are invariably attracted to the unusual," editorialised Soda Fountain magazine in an article entitled "Unusual Places that Get the Business." The purpose of unusual design, the article asserted, was "to arrest the attention of the speeding public".

The compulsion to build these attractions in Australia was similar. Who can say no to a novelty foodstuff, writ large in fibreglass? Gigantic concrete diversions would convince approaching motorists to waver from driving and stop. Unlike their US counterparts however, most of the kitsch concrete behemoths that stalk rural roadside attractions in Australia exist to memorialise the local food industry. Many stand on the site of farms or food processing plants (both of the Big Pineapples, Big Banana, and various citrus fruits); some built as an attraction for a fertile fishery (the Big Prawn, Big Yabby, Big Trout, and Big Murray Cod). Towns that were previously known for their food became known for the concrete representation of that food.

When these towns were eventually bypassed by bigger highway systems, both the Big food and the local food that they represented began to drop off the map. As highways bypassed these towns, so too it bypassed local food.