Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: The importance that food and eating have assumed as components of popular culture in Australia has not yet been matched by thorough historical analysis.This essay briefly surveys existing histories of non-indigenous eating in Australia and outlines a theoretical framework within which an explanatory history of Australian food culture could be constructed.It suggests that, for reasons of relative newness and isolation, the Australian setting is ideal for testing such a framework.Finally, it notes that the processes of communication through which an Australian culture of food and eating developed-whether or not that culture amounts to a distinctive cuisine-largely documented its progress, thus simplifying the task for historians. Food and eating in popular cultureIn the past two centuries there has been a dramatic change in the role of food and eating in Australian public consciousness.Examination of early colonial newspapers, beginning with the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (first published 1803), suggests a society in which food was regarded primarily as sustenance.Public discussion of food was largely confined to matters of supply, distribution and price.There was no gastronomic discourse, no mention of food fashions, no trade in recipes.Towards the end of the nineteenth century some newspapers were offering regular columns of advice on housekeeping topics, including menu planning and recipes.However, eating remained essentially a private activity, even when undertaken in company (Bannerman, Print Media 36ff).Public dinners or gala social events were often 'noticed' in the newspapers as matters of general interest, but journalists confined their reports to questions such as who was present, what they wore and what speeches were made.Rarely was food mentioned in any more than the most general and cursory terms, such as 'the Company assembled sat down to a splendid dinner' (Sydney Gazette, 6 June 1812: 3).By the late twentieth century, food and eating had become prominent public preoccupations.Evidence of this dramatic cultural revaluation abounds.In bookstores, for example, cookery and all things related to it are often among the larger displays.Recipe books and instruction manuals are only the core of an expanding genre of literature in which gastro-porn, gastro-humour, gastro-travel, biography, fiction and how-to-save-the-planet are already well represented.
Source: Australian Humanities Review
Author: Colin Bannerman
Language: English
Subfield: Food Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2809912243