When Asia Pacific leaders gathered in Singapore last year for the ASEAN summit, some of the region's biggest challenges were on the agenda.

During one of the press conferences, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was asked to comment on a heated issue gripping Australia in his absence.

"Frankly, I'm not going to give them any recipe hints," he said.

The controversy was about the location of onions on a sausage sandwich.

A hardware store had stipulated that their sausage sizzles must serve onion underneath the sausage, rather than on top. The idea was that the onion would be less likely to fall on the ground; slips would be prevented.

Outrage. Panic. A national conversation.

Although the sanga saga might seem ridiculous, the existential crisis was warranted.

Because the sausage sizzle is sacred.

The genesis of the 'humble sausage'

The Australian sausage was never glamorous, but in the early 1940s it was undesirable.

During World War II prime cuts of meat were rationed, but sausages were not.

You could eat as many sausages as you wanted.

During World War II prime cuts of meat were rationed, but you could buy as many sausages as you wanted. ( Getty: Michael Dodge )

But Jacqui Newling, colonial gastronomer at Sydney Living Museums, says that doesn't mean people embraced them.

During the war especially, butchers couldn't afford waste. And it was also a time before the pet food industry existed as a commercial alternative for meat scraps.

"It's a way of using up the parts of the animal that won't sell as their own cut. So, they're minced up and put into a sausage skin," Ms Newling says.

"People didn't trust what went inside the sausage. It might be 100 per cent pork or beef, but which bits?"

This could be why sausages have always been associated with a lower class, and why they became 'humble'.

After the war, nobody was racing out to cook a snag for dinner.

Ms Newling says there was a food snobbery effect — "sausages were associated with the war, denial and poverty".

But Australians love an underdog.

More than a sausage

Did the early association with humility set it up for the ultimate rebrand?

One of the earliest references to 'sausage sizzle' in Australia was the year after World War II ended.

The "Full Moon Sausage Sizzle" in Forbes was run by the Country Women's Association (CWA), which was collecting food to be "parcelled up and sent to England".

Either way, by the 1960s our perception of the sausage had shifted. The Aussie battler was becoming a hero.

By the 1960s sausages had graduated from 'humble' to hero. ( ABC Rural: Eric Barker )

The sausage sizzle might be criticised for being derivative, reductionist and frankly, basic, but Ms Newling disagrees.

"I think that's unfair, because what Australians are doing is being practical; queue up, get it, eat it, enjoy it and get on with the day," she says.

Besides, the sausage sizzle was always more than the sum of its four or five ingredients.

From that first sizzle reference in 1946, it's always been associated with charity.

It's also an egalitarian meat.

"Sausages are something you can cook up dozens at a time, it's not like a steak where it has to be cooked to someone's particular liking — you just keep on turning them and you can't really ruin them," Ms Newling says.

"It's a populist thing, lots of people — they're really not there for the food, you're actually there for another celebration, but that's the catering."

It's more about the community event than the food. ( ABC News: Clarissa Thorpe )

Rob Oerlemans backs up that sentiment.

He'd have a good idea — he's the chief executive of Lions Australia, a charity which has cooked thousands of sausage sizzles.

Mr Oerlemans believes the sausage sizzle was initially all about community bonding. The fundraising is just a bonus.

"We know there are certain things that are important to building solid relationships and community," he says.

"And that's about events. The glue that makes all of that work is a bit of food and something nice to drink and pleasant conversations. So, people hovering around the barbecue is key to that."

Lions' most recent marketing campaign, titled "more than sausages", aims to highlight the power of the sausage sizzle.

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"We reckon the sausage can do just about anything," the promotion explains.

"It helps people to walk, see and hear. Supports families after fire, drought and flood."

Considering how simple they are to cook, the sausage sizzle is surprising complex.

The political sausage

Values matter, and the sausage sizzle's reputation is built on being a commoner's food.

Accessible. Affordable. Easy.

Brand sausage sizzle is associated with community and celebration, being outdoors, the weekend.

Our variations of tomato or mustard, with or without onion, even give us a bit of ownership.

Our identity wrapped up in a single piece of unbuttered, no-frills white bread.

Mustard, tomato sauce, onion ... how do you have yours? ( ABC RN: Mike Williams )

It's for these reasons the sausage sizzle holds a special place in our arteries.

To mess with the ritual in any way could threaten those values.

That's why a discussion about where the onion goes makes international headlines.

And that's why politicians want to be seen at sausage sizzles.

ABC chief political writer Annabel Crabb says a politician at a barbecue is high stakes.

"Because it is a truly unifying experience and a symbol of ordinary personhood, that is why politicians get in trouble when they don't eat one when they're expected to," Ms Crabb says.

"It's funny, but it's also not funny — it's really a serious infraction of the social contract."

When Malcolm Turnbull rejected a sausage in 2017 it was like he was rejecting those values.

"You could hear jaws drop all over Australia," Crabb says.

"It's a serious slap in the face."

But what was more memorable is the image of Bill Shorten's unconventional sausage experience.

Bill Shorten made headlines for eating a sausage sandwich sideways. ( ABC News: Nick Haggarty )

"Rather than putting a long sausage thing straight into his gob, he went sideways," Crabb says.

"Well, that's just hilarious. If you look like this is not your normal beat, it's as bad as not eating it."

And who can forget #oniongate — perhaps the ultimate deconstructed sausage.

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It's easy to write off these sausage sizzle faux pas as silly, because the sausage is unassuming.

But Crabb thinks there's more to it.

"It's so bad that we put [politicians] through these stupid paces, but really, I don't think there's anything wrong with working out whether they effectively share your values," she says.

"Something as ridiculous as what they eat and how they eat it will feed into it."

#Democracysausage

Try as they might, politicians will never be able to hijack the sausage sizzle.

It's symbolic that the ritual of the sausage sizzle — the most egalitarian meat — is intrinsically linked with our ritual of voting.

Sausage sizzles have been at elections forever, but the term #democracysausage gave the uniquely Australian experience a name.

"The democracy sausage is familiar to everybody, because voting is something that we make everybody do," Crabb says.

The term really took off during the 2016 federal election.

It was the longest official political campaign, and the sausage sizzle brought voters together in a way no political party could.

The term 'democracy sausage' really picked up steam during the 2016 election. ( Getty: James Morgan )

"That's terrible isn't it — that we turn to a stick of processed, ground meat when our living, breathing politicians disappoint us," Crabb says.

"But I think one of the antidotes for disappointment in the political system is, you look around at your local community and think, 'well actually, I live in a pretty good place, and I quite like sausages, so there's that."

Annette Tyler describes herself as a "senior sausage analyst" with democracysausage.org, a crowd-sourced map that identifies which polling stations are running sausage sizzles.

The Democracy Sausage website helped cement the term in Australian vernacular. ( Supplied: democracysausage.org )

While she doesn't claim to have coined it, the website she helped set up went a long way to helping popularise the term.

"The map got picked up. News outlets embedded it on their page and we thought, 'this is pretty fun, we could do this again'," she says.

By the end of 2016, 'democracy sausage' was cemented into the Australian vernacular when it was crowned Word of the Year.

But despite the hard work in running the site, and its success, Ms Tyler refuses to monetise it.

She says that would go against the spirit of the sausage sizzle.

"It's all about community groups making money for themselves and helping promote what the community groups are doing," she says.

All these years later, the sausage continues to inspire humility.