A Townsville man in his late 30s says Australians must not forget the horrors of choko - the bland, watery, nothing vegetable inflicted on previous generations by their parents.

Mr Daryl Slater said today’s young people are “running around plugged into their iPods” without appreciating the trauma their predecessors had to endure at the dinner table forcing down their well-meaning mums’ choko creations.

“My mum used to make this steamed, cubed-up choko, topped with white sauce, garnished with parsley,” he said, knuckles whitening as he gripped the armrest of his Jason recliner.

“Yeah, mum’s recipe was this trilogy of every kid’s worst fears. Translucent green semi-liquid slop, topped with tasteless white goop and then on top the parsley, which has been proven to be good for nothing but getting stuck in your teeth and in recent years bulking out doner kebabs.”

While choko has largely disappeared from supermarket shelves, Daryl Slater believes it has just been driven underground.

“I was at McDonald’s the other day with my mate Jacko and I bought one of those apple pies and he said ‘Mate you know those things are mostly made out of choko, they only put enough apple in there to meet the minimum standard of it being called an apple pie’.

“I couldn’t bloody believe it, fair dinkum I nearly chucked it out but I’d paid the extra buck to upsize and didn’t want to waste it because I’ve had to tighten my belt since they caught me doing cash-in-hand whipper snipping and getting the dole at the same time.”

Mr Slater said he considered himself lucky compared with other children of his day.

“The bloody mongrel things have a skin like Yoda’s facial complexion and I remember one poor little bloke whose mum left the skin on when she cooked it, well he thought his mum had butchered Yoda and served him up because I imagine a sliced-up Yoda would look a lot like that.

“There were other kids whose dads had a choko vine in the garden — the bastards of things would grow like weeds and they had to eat them every, bloody, night, just about.”

Mr Slater said he believes choko is being snuck into other foods but is only listed on the labels as a number, like the codes used for flavourings and colourings.

“There’s all sorts of crap in foods that you don’t know about. I bought some salt and vinegar chips the other day and I looked at the ingredients and there was no vinegar but it said ‘beverage whitener’ so what in Christ’s name is that about?”