Tag: Australian food

Posted on

Confessions of a Masterchef viewer – my secret shame!

So tonight we get to see the grand “finaleee”, not final, of yet another Masterchef. And I care because…? Because I’m a shameless baby boomer TV-head who needed something to replace My Kitchen Rules when it finished. And my good friend Anne-Marie watches it too, so we further amuse ourselves exchanging vacuous text messages.

Yes I thoroughly enjoyed MKR because I love seeing Pet Evans eating all that non-Paleo food and who doesn’t like Manu? But what I really liked is the frisson. You know, watching people tearing each apart under the cold glare of the camera (yes still enjoying the afterglow of divorce) and then there’s the jaw dropping lack of boundaries some folks have. I mean was that woman really a lawyer? Does she still have a job? How far can a pouty puss extend her bottom lip? All the reasons I enjoy a bit of TV cookery bullshit.

Masterchef is something else. Its producers also know no boundaries – why should they when they claim credit for the food revolution sweeping Australia? When they have attracted a number of food heavy weights who should know better? (Marco Pierre White are you really such a pompous git? Maggie Beer I forgive you because you are a genuine legend and promoting the great work you are doing for geriatric nutrition).

So tonight’s “finale” will see Elena cook off against Matt. I’m not surprised to see that Matt has survived this far – he has clearly been singled out for glory early on, though why I can’t imagine. He certainly seems to have some flare but little commonsense or ability to read a recipe.

But what really annoys me (apart from the awful dramatic music, pomposity of the judging panel, watching George eat and the miracle of everyone always finishing their dish) is those over the top chef-inspired challenges. Torture to watch, I don’t really understand their relationship to food. I thoroughly enjoy the invention tests and mystery box because folks are actually being creative. But tonight we will be subjected to the alchemy and uber-pretension Heston has become famous for.

Ah Heston. I used to love you! I understand Masterchef has increased your profile in Australia but do you really need this televisual ego-massage? And how do the smoked parfaits, the powders and foams relate to cooking?

How much vacuous padding will we hapless viewers endure before seeing the result?

And dare I ask the obvious question? If food is all you want to do why not do an apprenticeship or work in a restaurant to achieve your “food dream”?

I want Elena to win but I’m not sure I can sit through 2 hours of schmaltz. Reality TV? A secret pleasure – sweet as a Street’s Magnum and it also leaves a nauseating taste in my mouth.

Posted on

It’s All Over Now

Do read this, at least some of it:

http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/august/1406815200/malcolm-knox/supermarket-monsters

Monsters indeed. This is why I put up with my local IGA supermarket. They don’t have a couple of products I like to use but I put up with that because it is owner -operated. I get help if I can’t find what I need, sometimes from people over the age of 16. I don’t wait for ages in the queue because they open an extra checkout when customers are lining up.

I buy my vegetables and fruit from the vegetable shop, the owner Tran grows much of it on his own farm and sells produce from neighbouring farms. Hell, I even go to the butcher for meat and have my favourite bakery. But that’s because I’m a latte slurping inner city, devil-worshipping, chardonnay swilling.. you know how it goes.

Don’t wait until Coles and Woollies take over the world before you ask what happened to all those great little shops you used to shop at, except that you didn’t, and now they aren’t here anymore.

These folks have ground our farmers into their own dirt, stuffed their shelves with processed foods that make us ill and cheap imports they promote over local brands. So while I am at it, a pox on both your houses Heston and Jamie. As the Rolling Stones once almost stated so well: “ I used to love you but it’s all over now”.

Posted on

Slow Shopping

I recently sat on a panel dedicated to the discussion of food sovereignty – a fancy title for a discussion of the ways we Australians might have more say in deciding what we eat, where our food comes from and how it is produced. Yes, it was a slow food event.

What stuck in this member of the chattering class’s mind was a comment from a senior National Party MP on the panel. Though he was a charming and sincere gentleman, we certainly parted ways on a couple of issues. My suggestion that we take responsibility for those less fortunate, that is, those who don’t have enough to eat, being dismissed with the comment that “We’ll always have the haves and have not’s”. Should we accept malnutrition because it has had such a long and distinguished tradition?

Then there’s the role of women. The gentleman referred to a phenomenon I must confess I hadn’t heard of, he talked of the “Wednesday” shop, which he compared with the weekend shop. It went something like this:

“Well it’s been well documented the way in which women do a hasty shop on Wednesdays and then do their ‘proper’ shopping on the weekends”.

He then went on to explain the bleeding obvious – that harassed Mum’s on their way home from work will tend to buy rather more prepared foods than on the weekend, when they are more likely to shop and cook from scratch. Should we overlook his clear understanding that shopping and cooking is the women’s domain – no matter if she also works fulltime? Perhaps we’ll deal with that one later.

I’m more interested in his acknowledgement of the distinction between the fast shopping that takes place on weekdays and the slow shopping we women do on the weekends. While I’m the first to acknowledge that I’m more willing to do the food shopping than my male partner, and better at it, I’m less thrilled with the notion of shopping as leisure.

Shopping for clothes, shoes and accessories, at least for myself, is something I consider to be a leisure activity because I do it during the time which I consider to be leisure time. I’m sure you women know what I mean here, the weekend, that time when we are supposed to enjoy not being at work. This leisure time we spend driving our children everywhere, cleaning our houses, cooking, shopping and doing the laundry.

So what should I do with the remaining hours of the weekend? Would I rather go shopping or sit in the sun reading that weekend paper that takes a week to get through?

It’s quite a simple task, rescuing a few slow moments from my weekend. Slow shopping? Maybe this happens on holidays, but doesn’t that leave an awful lot of slow activity for those two-week breaks? So when did holidays suddenly become so fast?

 

Dr Felicity Newman is a member of the Centre for Everyday Life at Murdoch University

Posted on

Eating the coat of arms

Travelling out of my latte-luvvy comfort zone for a Saturday night BBQ was never going to simple, though we love the old friend wishing to re ignite the friendship by inviting us to meet his fiancée.

Their flagpole was visible before we saw the house, in fact it could be seen for miles. As our friend opened the door I managed not to express my joy that he was marrying Quentin Bryce, after all, who else hangs out a flag as big as WA?

Am I snob? A food snob for sure, I thought, as I watched her put out an assortment of processed, high salt, high fat, low-fibre snacks from their individual (read unsustainable) packages. I saw these snacks as symbolic of the evening ahead. Where were the olives?

Multiculturalism has not made great inroads in this locale. The bride-to-be, evidently thinking a spot of refugee bashing would go down a treat with her two migrant guests, provided a diatribe about all these refugees getting everything including new cars apparently, while we (read white) Australians suffer.

I will not repeat her comments about Indigenous Australians. At some point I managed to steer the conversation towards food and innocently inquired whether they ate kangaroo. Well you would think I’d suggested she cook her puppy dog. How dare anyone eat the coat of arms?

I have always blamed Skippy for the paltry amount of roo we consume in this country but she absolutely insisted on the coat of arms defence and was strident that no one else eats theirs, why should we?

I did point out that there are good reasons for this: the bald eagle (US) wouldn’t taste so good and I’d hate to guess when a lion or a unicorn, were last seen in the UK. The French apparently also have a lion and an eagle. Indeed lions, dragons, large birds and assorted strange mythical creatures abound in the heraldic world.

As usual Australia is blessed. We have our own assorted very strange creatures but they really do exist, here. We’re just really lucky ours are so plentiful, sustainable and delicious.

I would have put all this behind me until I found myself enjoying the culinary magic of Mark (the black) Olive – our own Indigenous celebrity chef, who was, unsurprisingly doing great things with roo and emu. It was when the Black Olive suggested we don’t like the idea of eating our coat arms I recalled my new friend. How shocked would she be to have anything in common with an Indigenous Australian?

Only the Olive was suggesting that we get over it, enjoy our good fortune and slap another emu fillet on the barbie.

Want to express your Australian identity? Might I suggest that eating animals, which are native to this land, is a better way than hanging a flag, a quarter of which sports the Union Jack?

 

Dr Felicity Newman is a member of the Centre for Everyday Life at Murdoch University

Posted on

Everything New..

This week in the Food Studies class I teach, the topic turned to food miles. Having newly learnt that much of our food comes from very far away, students have written guiltily and at length, of the scourge of the carbon footprint as another new manifestation of the problems of life in the 21st century, as though food has never travelled before.

When I tell them globalisation began with Colombus they look startled, as young people who have perhaps never learnt of him, or indeed any other historical figure, might.

Eminent anthropologist, Sidney Mintz argues in his monograph Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, that it all began with the sugar trade. You only have to consider the great sugar producing nations to see the truth of this. Not only did sugar travel across the world, so did the plants themselves and the labourers, and with horrifying consequences.

The Caribbean was largely repopulated by slaves from Africa while indigenous populations were eradicated.   And what of us? Australia’s history of “blackbirding ” of Pacific Islanders to cut sugar cane in Queensland is no less shameful.

This history is of course rarely considered as we tuck into ginger cake, lamingtons or banana bread. These traditional afternoon tea delights are redolent of our British origins. It’s just that we forget how closely tied those origins are to our colonial past.

My grandmother and my mother grew up in the cold, working class, north of England and their dietary preferences reflected those origins. Friday night dinners shared with Nana would inevitably end with “pudding”. This pudding might emerge from any number of strange, but available, ingredients, custard and jam being amongst them. But always desiccated coconut, which I have since grown to loath, my admiration for the origins of that archetypal Aussie sweet, the mighty lamington, not withstanding.

However desiccated coconut, bananas and ginger (powdered, preserved in syrup or candied) have long been staple treats of the British diet. Of course they speak to us of Empire – of the days when Britannia ruled the wave and her British (and Australian) subjects could enjoy the fruits of empire: tea and sugar being foremost amongst them.

We might think those retro sticky date puddings (there’s another one – no date palms in the Old Dart) are very last decade but as sure as winter follows autumn these sweet delights will grace menus this winter, yet again. What of the health messages, the diabetes epidemic, the obesity epidemic? They didn’t emerge from a culture which makes its own puds on special occasions. They are more likely to result from an assault on the freezer compartment of your supermarket, while a homemade pudding offers the enjoyment of shared activity, sense of accomplishment and real flavour.

Less of Sara Lee and more of Margaret Fulton I say. What was that Noel Coward said, something about everything old being new again?

 

Dr Felicity Newman is a member of the Centre for Everyday life at Murdoch University