You might think that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's rejection of a sausage in bread in Lismore this week is no big deal.

"It's only a sausage," you may scoff, "what difference does it make if this man, whose job is the manipulation of the levers of our national interest, eats it or not?"

How naive you are being. How, when, where and why a prime minister eats a sausage — or indeed anything else — can make all the difference to his career, and his country's course.

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Throughout history food and leadership have been inextricably linked.

When Cleopatra dissolved a pearl in vinegar, it sent a strong message to her subjects that she was out of touch with their everyday concerns.

When Alfred the Great of Wessex burnt a peasant woman's cakes, it cast doubt on his general competence and caused Anglo-Saxon morale to plummet — how could a man who couldn't bake defeat Vikings?

Tony Abbott gets it... sort of

It's the same today, and the magnitude of the tactical blunder that Turnbull committed in Lismore was hammered home when Tony Abbott, the man who would be Mal, tweeted a picture of himself at Tumut Lions Club, getting stuck into the snags like nobody's business.

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Abbott had sensed a weakness and pounced on it, pausing only to smother it in tomato sauce.

The message was clear: Turnbull's claims to be a man of the people are a sham, a hollow facade; in Abbott's simple, manly sausage consumption can be seen the patriotic appetite that Australia demands, while Turnbull remains detached from the ordinary man and woman and sausage in the street.

Of course, Abbott knows the terrain here: during his own prime ministership, he too ran afoul of the subtle nuances of the politico-culinary landscape.

He made the opposite mistake to that which Turnbull has now stumbled into: where the current PM suffered a failure of nerve at the crucial moment and appeared painfully aloof, his predecessor was stricken by an excess of enthusiasm.

So desperate was Abbott to prove his everyman credentials that he went in like a bull at a gate, determined to seize and eat anything put in front of him, and ended up biting into a whole raw onion like some kind of rookie pod person.

Tony Abbott eats a raw onion on a tour of Tasmanian onion farm. ( ABC News )

His leadership was doomed from that moment, and Abbott learnt a harsh lesson: Australians want their politicians to tuck in with enthusiasm to the traditional comestibles, but there is a limit, beyond which they'll just think you're a lunatic.

Because people pay attention to these things

They watch what leaders put into their mouths, take notes, and vote accordingly. Australian politics is basically The Biggest Loser, but with Australian cultural stereotypes rather than kilojoules.

Bob Hawke could easily have entered the public consciousness as dangerous socialist subversive, if he couldn't prove his Aussie credentials.

But he held a beer-drinking record, and so when he acquired the Labor leadership, the voters knew they could trust him.

Former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam have a beer and a chat. ( ABC Archives )

Certainly more than Malcolm Fraser, who was the sort of guy one strongly suspects of being a vegetarian.

If people have had similar suspicions about Malcolm Turnbull, they've surely been confirmed now.

Turnbull has outed himself as a sausage denier, and it'll be almost impossible to walk back from this — any sausages he eats from now on will seem like token snags, eaten just to pacify angry factional interests.

The whispers will grow: "What sort of man turns down a sausage sandwich?" people will ask. "His regressive fiscal policy I could take, but I cannot accept a prime minister so out of step with his own sausage-loving country."

A free kick for Bill Shorten

The worst thing about Mal's misstep is that it's not only a free kick for Tony Abbott, but for his other opponent, Bill Shorten.

The last time Shorten was faced with a test of his gourmandery, he failed miserably, biting into a sausage sandwich from the side as if the prime ministership were Lassie and Bill was telling it he hated it so it'd run to safety.

Nothing could have turned the public off quicker, especially if they recalled the time Shorten threw a tantrum over a pie.

What this meant was that the Opposition had vacated the sausage sizzle space, leaving it wide open for Turnbull to step in and claim the protein high ground for himself.

All he had to do was eat sausages normally and the country would be giving him a huge tick in the very square that Shorten already had a cross in.

Instead, the PM saw the sausage, but missed the memo: "here is your chance to connect with the electorate".

Thus was the story of Malcolm Turnbull, the statesman who, like George Bush when he vomited on the Japanese Prime Minister, made a poor dietary choice and lost his standing with the people forever.