(I remember someone pointing out to me once that it would probably better for the environment if Australians ate kangaroos rather than beef but I prefer beef)
Just a guess but it may be the second instalment from a series about food published by the Conversation.
Our new series “Tastes of a nation” looks at our food crazy culture: from the politics of “Dude Food” to the moralising that now accompanies our eating choices.
https://theconversation.com/macho-k...iracle-diets-how-did-food-get-so-tricky-54332
Why is food such a big deal these days? Both inside and outside academia, it has become a veritable cultural and political obsession. Pop culture was there first: since at least the late 1970s, a vibrant array of media devoted to home cooking and fine dining has existed.
(The first chef’s hat to celebrate outstanding Australian restaurants was awarded in 1977; the 1980s witnessed the explosion of American half-hour cooking shows like
The Frugal Gourmet (1983-1995)).
https://theconversation.com/can-we-be-australian-without-eating-indigenous-food-53742
American food historian
Waverley Root once wrote:
food is a function of the soil, for which reason every country has the food naturally fit for it.
Every country, that is, except Australia.
By Australian food we mean the plants, fruits and animals that have grown here and sustained the indigenous people of the land for over 50,000 years. If we eat only the food brought by the first settlers and all those who followed, can we call ourselves Australian?
The British who colonised – or
invaded – Australia arrived with an intact culture, which included their cusine. They brought with them the fruit, vegetables and livestock from their home. From the outset, they imposed that food and food culture on their new land and,
to their detriment, its original inhabitants.
They ignored the intricate environmental management of indigenous peoples, a management that heavily informed their world view. Historian Bill Gammage
argued in The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011) that for the original inhabitants “theology is fused with ecology”. The colonists overlaid an alien system of agriculture which began the process of ecological imbalance in which the continent now finds itself and began exporting back to Europe the European foodstuffs they planted and raised. And, for around 150 years, we adhered to the diet of the first settlers.
In short, European Australians lived on, not in, this continent. This culinary determinism is the most material evidence of the disjunction between where we are, and what we eat.
