This essay investigates the recent incorporation of Australian 'native' ingredients into a range of food products. Examples of the packaging of products containing such ingredients are analysed to provide an overview of 'native' food packaging, demonstrating the semiotic diversity of ideas of 'indigeneity' in this context. The essay then explores how these multiple inflections relate to wider discourses of racialised difference in contemporary Australia, focusing on how discussions of 'natural' phenomena reflect confusion over who can be said to 'properly' belong to a place-a question that involves such urgent concerns for postcolonial societies as the (il)legitimacy of settler claims to land ownership. Much analysis of contemporary racisms positions them as articulating cultural rather than biological differences. Understandings of difference nonetheless continue to be inscribed with reference to particular bodies. 'Native' foods are a potent site for investigating such processes: food is often presented as a key site of cross-cultural exchange and interaction, but despite this cultural inflection, 'native' foodstuffs are often marketed as 'natural'. This constitutes a crucial difference between native foodstuffs and the extensive range of products branded through references to 'exotic' ethnicities. Exploring the entanglement of multiple narratives used to position native food products, this essay reveals how the realm of ecology, conceived of as 'natural' and therefore exterior to politics, is used as a forum for very political questions of 'belonging'. introduction The past three decades have seen the emergence and popularisation of food ingredients sourced from flora and fauna billed as 'native'1 to the australian continent (ripe 1996: 216-23). an increasing range of products, restaurant dishes and home-cooked meals feature ingredients such as lemon myrtle, mountain pepper and bush tomatoes (for some indication of the extent of native food article • Craw
This paper investigates the alignment of environmentalist and nationalist narratives through an examination of discussions of kangaroo consumption in popular media such as newspapers and cookbooks. In her bible of contemporary home cooking, The Cook's Companion, Australian chef Stephanie Alexander remarks that using kangaroo meat must, as an indigenous product, ‘qualify a dish as Australian’. And, she adds, such usage makes environmental as well as iconic sense. As I discuss in this paper, Alexander's comments are indicative of the framing of native foods: indigenous ingredients are billed as the solution to both the search for an authentically Aussie cuisine and the plight of the continent's devastated ecologies. Using John and Jean Comaroff's work on the politics of ecological discussions, the paper examines the entanglement of territory and ecology — the slippage between the ‘native’, the ‘natural’ and the ‘nation’ — to reveal how the realm of ecology, conceived of as ‘natural’ and therefore exterior to politics, is used as a forum for very political questions of ‘belonging’. The paper demonstrates how the framing of environmental discussions in the public sphere cannot be separated from wider questions of the politics of settler (post-)colonies.
In this article, I critique the historical narratives surrounding the consumption of Australian native foods by European settlers. I argue that culinary historians and other commentators present the contemporary consumption of native foods as a means of rejecting the colonial attitudes of the past. In this narrative, early settlers lacked appreciation for Australian native foods and, by extension, Indigenous Australian culture and knowledge. Based on this depiction of colonial history, the current interest in native foods becomes symbolic of a wider revaluing of Australia’s previously denigrated indigenous flora and fauna and Indigenous people. However, as I relate, some early European settlers and their descendants ate a wide variety of native Australian foods. These historical episodes challenge the conventional narrative of Australian culinary history and, in particular, the idea that contemporary consumption constitutes a novel break from past culinary practices. Moreover, as I demonstrate, settler interest in native foods was often consistent with the attitudes that justified and underwrote colonisation. By drawing attention to the role that native foods played in the colonial project, I complicate the idea that recognition of these foods is sufficient to address this history.
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