Good evening. I'm Professor Naomi Stead, and I am the Associate Deputy Vice Chancellor of Engagement in the College of Design and Social Context here at RMIT. And it's my very great pleasure to welcome you to the iconic Storey Hall for this evening's event. 

It's my great pleasure to introduce tonight's event, where we ask, what will we eat in the future?

This is part of our signature Public Talks programme, Provocations, presented by the RMIT College of Design and Social Context.

These are provocative times, indeed, and we've planned this series to channel some of this vexation and incitement in positive directions by bringing together leading experts, academics, innovators, and change makers to debate ideas, informed thinking, and work together towards positive change. 

And I'd like to particularly acknowledge Bhavna Middha, who proposed the topic of tonight's conversation, and you will shortly also be seeing her as a speaker.

Tonight we are here to address the question, what will we eat in the future? How can we eliminate food waste, recycle and extend food life, and secure food systems in the face of the climate emergency, plastics dependence, and a tumultuous water, energy, food nexus.

What does the future of food taste and smell like? And who gets to decide what's put on our plates?

To answer these questions, tonight's speakers are Bruce Pascoe, Aboriginal farmer and writer of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and children's literature. His publications have won numerous awards, including the ground breaking bestselling book, "Dark Emu". 

Ben Shewry, internationally renowned chef, restaurateur, and creative obsessive. Owner of Attica in Melbourne, and writer of the books, "Origin", and "Uses for Obsession".

Bhavna Middha is a sustainable consumption scholar and Deputy Associate Director of the Regenerative Environments and Climate Action Theme at RMIT's School of Global, Urban and Social Studies. 

Natalie Jovanovski is a health sociologist and Vice Chancellor Senior Research Fellow in RMIT's School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, and the Social Equity Research Centre. 

Our brilliant host for tonight's discussion is ABC Radio presenter and RMIT alum, Hilary Harper.

Please join me in welcoming the speakers to the stage.

Hello, I am Hilary Harper. I'm a daytime host on ABC Radio National, and my favourite thing is food, so that's why I'm here. Lovely to see you all tonight.

Very excited to have Bruce Pascoe, Bhavna Middha, Ben Shewry and Nat Jovanovski with us tonight.

Really different perspectives and fields of expertise to being brought to bear on this topic.

So I'm just going to hit Ben Shewry with a really, really big one to start off with. What won't we be eating in the future? What will be gone if we keep going the way we're going now? 

It's funny because I considered that question as I was thinking about tonight, today. And you know, what I thought wouldn't it be great if in 50 years or in 100 years, that we've reversed the last 230 odd years of what we've been eating and return to Aboriginal foods and foods of Torres Strait Islander peoples?

That would be really something. And you know, few people in this country have done as much on that as Uncle Bruce alongside us here. But that would be something that we could all celebrate in, something that we could all have pride in.

But we're a very, very long way off that. 

Well, and some of the things that indigenous people ate sustainably here in centuries past and millennia past, we can't eat sustainably now, can we? Because the colonisers have overfished them or overrun the country. 

Bruce, is there ways you can see where we can take an indigenous approach to agriculture or land use more broadly and bring some of that back?

I think there are plants that we can use which are begging to be utilised. And it's always bemused me that the country eats so little kangaroo given that that animal is so soft on the land and doesn't cause erosion. And farmers will tell you they're hard to catch. Well, so is a baby lamb, you know?

If we can't find a way of harvesting kangaroos, then we haven't really tried.

It's not the difficulty that's the problem. It's in our mind, our colonial mind. And the problem is the colonial mind, the attitude, that Christian capitalist attitude to extraction from the earth, and not putting anything back, and having no ethos about the soil.

And that is our problem. And when I talk about Mother Earth, you know, 75% of men roll their eyes. I'll have to find another way of saying that that doesn't upset the man.

But there's no other way of saying it. She is Mother Earth. We have to think about her as an organism, and start doing things which we know she can do, that she can tolerate forever. Not for five years, not supported by industrial chemicals which are being held up in the Strait of Hormuz now, but to treat the soil like a relative and look after her. 

I was harvesting vanilla lilies the other day, and it's been pretty warm down in far East Gippsland. And the soil was like dust. And yet those tubers were fresh and vibrant.

And I harvested a plant I'd harvested four times that year and I got 20 tubers. This is a miracle vegetable. Anyone could grow it. And yet our aversion to new food, our aversion to any kind of understanding of Aboriginal achievement and understanding is such that we can barely look at warrigal greens.

We can barely look at tubers. And when we think about killing a kangaroo, we weep. And yet a baby lamb is about as cute as you can get, and we kill millions of them. 

When we think about the ways that you farm and the ways that you would like to see the land farmed, what effects do you see on the land of that kind of farming compared to conventional farming? 

When I bought the farm on the banks of the Warrego River, all the dams were empty, and it was April. It wasn't drought.

It was hard hoofed animals meant that the runoff was so severe that after a heavy rain, the water was just running off the land, not staying on the land. We got rid of the cattle, we let the grass grow, which slowed down the water, and all the dams filled up.

But that was also telling us that so too were the aquifers, and that those aquifers kept on feeding those dams right through the dry spell.

And other people have done this in the past. There are some great soil scientists and pharmacologists who have been doing this for years. And many farmers have begun doing it.

Charlie Massy, for instance, wonderful book called With the best title in the world, "The Call of the Reed Warbler". Magnificent book. And these thinkers are out there, they're doing this.

But big chemical is overriding these people, deriding these people. And when they talk about the word environment, half the world turns off. More than half the world. We can't afford that anymore.

And the other thing we can't afford is to turn back refugees, because if we don't come up with a scheme as a world about how to look after displaced people, we're in for a huge shock because they're going to come anyway.

They'll have to. Even under the enormous threats, they'll have to. And we'll have to feed those people. So better start looking at the plants that grow in Australia that don't need fertiliser, don't need extra water.

It's a real human urgency. It's not a national urgency, it's not a political urgency, it's not a race urgency, it's a human urgency.

It's really interesting, isn't it? Because often the argument is framed in terms of resource limits, you know, how much a bigger population the land can sustain.

But it sounds like you're saying it's more about resource use and resource distribution.

Is it possible to scale up the kind of farming that we need to do to regenerate the land in order to feed more people? Because our population's growing regardless. Can we do that? 

I think we can. We are working on a forest now which has been logged and clear felled three times. The land is nearly ruined. And we're working to restore that land. And one of the ways is to establish grasslands because that'll stabilise the soil.

And we're going to make sure that we can run our harvester through the trees. So we'll be able to harvest grain off that land, which will be turned into flour.

But one of the things that we can do about feeding the world is for the Western world to eat less. We don't need to eat as much as we eat. We certainly don't need to waste it.

And that will go a long way too, towards feeding the world. But we also need fewer people.

We have to think in terms of Mother Earth and what she can sustain. And you know, there's too many of us, and there's too many mouths, and we're too greedy. And Christian capitalism is saying to us, you have to have perpetual growth. Well, we can't, we just can't.

We have to be sensible. And, I think in 50 years' time, it'll be so bloody obvious that everyone will be saying, no, we can't afford to have a new suburb, therefore we can't afford to have that population increase. And it'll be one of the conversations we have.

No one talks about population now. We talk about oil, we talk about food, we talk about water, we don't talk about human birth rate. 

The text line at Radio National does. But perhaps there are not enough for out in the rest of the world.

Ben Shewry, what did you learn about food systems and sustainability growing up in New Zealand, catching eels, picking berries, working out how much the land could give you.

It's foundational in my understanding of food, both at where it comes from and how it interacts with the environment, with communities.

But probably more importantly, I learned from a very young age that food wasn't just about something that you could consume or something that you could eat. That there was culture and people attached to that food. And that was there from the time that I was born, thankfully.

I grew up in a very remote and rural place. And in this environment, of course, were Maori people. Had always been. And there was lots and lots of evidence of history in that area.

And my parents would point it out to me. They would point out the pa, the hillfort sites. 

Dad could dig a musket lead shot out of a bank on our farm, and explain, the war that happened in this area.

But the culture, of course, like it is in Australia, was vibrant and living. And hangi was a big part of my childhood. It was a big part of our community, a big part of the province. And I grew up with hangi, and there was no uncertainty about where hangi came from, and who owned hangi, who was the inventor of hangi. And to me as a child, this seemed like a very important thing, very special and ingenious actually, because the idea of digging a hole on the earth, and building a fire above it with rocks, and then cooking, covering your ingredients with soil.

And it might sound simple, but the flavour was so far different than anything else that we had eaten in our diets, our regular sort of European diets. And I understood as a child, wow, this is really magical and this feels like us. 

A lot of these other things, they didn't feel kind of like home is probably the best way to describe it, even though, I wasn't Maori, the culture was such that Maori people generously shared that with us, with our family.

We had friends and family, of course, who were Maori, and the aspect was slightly different in New Zealand because of treaty and lots of other reasons. And this was something that we took a lot of pride in.

And so, just having this experience, this time in the environment, my father was a farmer, my mother was a school teacher. I went to a school with only seven students, two of whom were my sisters. And my mother was the teacher as well, I should say.

Also the administrator and lawnmower. And there wasn't much to do, and I didn't have very many friends, and the only friend that I had was three years younger than me.

And when you're nine and somebody's three years younger, it's quite different. I had a lot of time on my hands, I had a lot of time to explore. I had a lot of time to observe. And I acutely understood and knew what it looked like when cattle was slaughtered. I remember the smell of the guts of a cow being accidentally nicked with a knife as my father broke down that beast. And it was a very visceral experience.

My mother gardened and grew. We didn't have a lot of money. Food was very, very important to us. It was our main source of entertainment. It was how we communicated and how we told stories.

And none of it was portrayed as anything special or exceptional.

But later in life I would learn, in some ways, I don't want to sound like a snob, but how different that would make me, and how differently I would begin to see things, and how much more easily I would move in the worlds of farmers, and culture, and the things that are so vital actually to being a cook.

Because you just can't know enough about your ingredients, and the history and the culture of them if you truly love this work. 

I'm just thinking about the year nine rural studies field trip that my little state school took to the abattoir.

There were people fainting left, right and centre, but it was such an education about where the cattle go when they leave your farm.

I mean some of the farm kids knew this already, but the rest of us who lived in the town were like, oh, right, that's where it ends up.

I mean, Bhavna, I feel like the food systems we have here that we have access to here and now are quite different from this authentic relationship to land, and food, and nature that Ben's describing. What, can you give us a little potted summary of what's wrong with our food systems right now? What's wrong with our food systems?

I have to say, I'm going to start this off with a little different approach. We are part of the food system.

It is our everyday practices that shape the food system as well.

As well as the way food systems are organised is what shapes our practices as well. 

It's not as if the demand, and consumption, and production is different from each other. The second thing is that food system itself is not siloed.

It is connected to so many other things, as we just saw with the oil crisis. The food system is oil here, which was visualised.

I don't think we think about it enough. So maybe that's another thing to think about.

What are those connections that our food system or our food practices have, and how they can be reconfigured in a way that we can think about food in a way that Ben just described or Bruce has been talking about as well.

So in that sense, what is wrong? The food system, our food practices have evolved over the years, and we have given lots of names to it, the Christian capitalist or non-authentic.

But it's all us. It's all us. I have conducted, I have followed 40 people in the last one year

in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Brisbane, and doing shopping trips with people, going to different supermarkets, markets, little weekend markets. And the kind of challenges facing people in the everyday are different from how we see the food system as a structure.

The everyday is about caring for children. The everyday is about providing nutrition. The everyday is about health. The everyday is about saving money so that you have enough food in the fridge.

The everyday is also about going to Costco and doing a bulk buy and then storing it for six months, and then the weevils get to it as well. I think there is some merit in thinking about

what we do in the everyday, and how that change that we are talking about, thinking about connecting back to nature in terms of regenerative agriculture can happen, because at this point, there is none, the way it's evolved. Change is more difficult.

The evolving has happened over the years, so we can't expect it to happen in the next two years or three years for sure.

I'm thinking compulsory farm stays for every child in primary school.

That's another thing, right? Like we haven't been able to get school lunches or college canteen set up here. Everyone's been left to do their own thing as an individual. You provide your own nutrition. If you have classes back-to-back from nine to five, you get your muesli bar and that's your nutrition for the day. So those are the kind of things that I think we need to look at a little bit more.

Well, I love how you talk about that food systems are not these siloed little things. They're connected to the economics of the world, but it can feel like that, can't it? 

As a consumer, it can feel like you've constrained by the time you have in the week, what your kids will eat, the ads on TV that they are watching about food. You know, all the little pinch points in your life that mean that what ends up on the table is a burger that week, you know? Are there ways we can push back as consumers?

Because I know that your research looks strongly at waste, and I see this massive hunger in the community to lower our waste and our greenhouse gases, and be kinder to the planet with our food choices. 

But we can't get to the co-op because it's open once a month. How can we push back there? 

I think, first of all, putting the responsibility of food waste on households and individuals is something that we are doing wrong. The food waste is the fact that this food is going to be wasted somehow starts when it's produced. The quantity in which it is produced.

Then the way it's wholesale and then provisioned as well, the kind of specials supermarkets give, which means that they're just transferring their extra stuff into your refrigerator, which can go waste as well. But then coming back to your everyday practices, and you said it all, you don't have the time to think about how many meals, which meal, and which meal gets missed because suddenly you have to go out for dinner as well. 

I think there is something to be said about changing our lifestyles without making it an individual behaviour change issue.

It means that our social norms, our cultural norms have to match, and we have to think about the land that we are living in as well. I think, in that sense, it's all contextual as to where we are. I think, I'll get to that in the later part.

Yes, well I note that you've called waste in particular, a wicked problem, and I'm looking forward to talking about how we untangle that with the help of our policy makers from above.

Natalie, you've done a lot of work about our relationships to food and our bodies, and each other's bodies. But also about the socioeconomic impacts of the availability of food. Could you tell us a little bit about how it affects people if they are on low income, and they can't get the food that they want or need? 

Yeah, unfortunately in my research, I've had to talk to a lot of people who have dealt with food insecurity and food insufficiency in various ways. For example, about 10 years ago now,

I can't believe I'm saying that. I did a study looking at the experiences of low-income single parents and food provisioning, and specifically focusing on their children's nutritional health. And something that the low-income single mothers were telling me a lot was that the welfare payments that they were receiving were just not enough to feed them, to feed their children a nutritional diet, but then also to feed themselves that nutritional diet.

And one quote really stood out to me, and it's something that comes back to me in my research over and over again.

It was a mother who was talking about how she knows that nutrition and focusing on her own nutrition is really important, but she's always going to focus on her children first.

And she said, "You know, it's like when you're on a plane, "and they tell you that in case of an emergency, "you put the breathing equipment on yourself first, "and then you lean over and you put it on your children."

And she said, in reality that's not how it works. You are always going to put that equipment on your children first, and then you're going to worry about yourself last. And unfortunately, what we are finding is that the health of, for example, low-income single mothers is affected by the fact that they just don't have enough of an income to support themselves as well. 

But just more recently I've done research looking at low-income people's experiences with healthy eating for example. And I've heard just incredible stories about people juggling postgraduate degrees, two jobs, and still trying to find a way to have a healthy diet.

And I remember speaking to one young man who said that he needs to spend his weekends to travel 40 minutes to buy himself fresh vegetables, because everything else in his area is unavailable.

He says he can get himself fast food as much as he wants, but he has to drive out 40 minutes to get fresh vegetables.

I think this gives us some indication just how difficult it is for people living on a low income.

Well, that pales into comparison with how far you have to drive in regional areas or remote areas.

Exactly. Just to get a hideously overpriced cabbage or something.

But how quickly does the equity in our food systems fall down under stress, for example, like this fuel crisis or COVID?

Yes, absolutely. I think Bhavna made a really fantastic point earlier by saying that it's not just food systems, it's health systems, it's education systems, it's all sort of other systems or networks that are contributing to the relationship that we have with food and our availability of food.

Absolutely, and that's what my research shows consistently. Like it's never just about does my local Coles have this packet of spinach?

It's always, it's got to do with transport, it's got to do with gas, it's got to do with lots, and lots, and lots of other factors that we don't ordinarily think of when we think of our relationships with food.

I love how you put healthy eating in quote marks. Is it because no one really knows what it means?

I'm quite embarrassed. I've always put this in quote marks and it's because I am an embarrassing health sociologist. I have to put it in quote marks.

I put everything in quote marks. But yes, people don't really know what it means. It's interesting in the research that I'm doing at the moment, I've asked people, people who are deemed at, once again, more quotation marks, at risk of diet-related chronic illnesses.

I've asked them what they think healthy eating means, and I'll often give me the response that you would see in the Australian Dietary Guidelines, for example. It's about the content that you're eating, it's about the portion sizes, caloric intake, and things like that. 

But then when you ask them about their relationships with food, you get a really rich kaleidoscope of information, of emotions, of memories, just as Ben was explaining earlier about his memories.

And that's where I think really important elements of healthy eating need to be, I think it's an important element of healthy eating that needs to be considered, but isn't. - Well yeah, I mean in a really diverse multicultural society, do some groups feel like perhaps the foods that they grew up with in their families or their countries of origin are bad foods? You know, they're not part of the kind of iconic Mediterranean diet, and so maybe they're too starchy or something. Do people feel like they're not doing the right thing by accessing this rich heritage that they brought with them?

Absolutely. And a lot of people who look at the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating, which is the healthy eating plate, I'm sure that most of us have seen it, although most people tell me that they've never seen it before, which I think is quite interesting in and of itself.

The people that I've shown that plate to will say, well where is my cultural heritage on that plate? I just don't see it and I don't identify it with it at all.

And I think that's a really significant problem. 

Bruce, I was thinking when Natalie was talking before about, the way our society at the moment in some areas doesn't prioritise providing food to the community, particularly in times of crisis. And that idea of scarcity, or inequitable access to food would've been completely foreign to indigenous people, wouldn't it, who, from modern viewpoint, seem to have eaten so little, and had a more precarious relationship with the land, which we now know is not true.

Yeah, the Aboriginal people in the past, and were hardworking, because they were attending food plants, they were organising fish traps. And so, it's work.

A fair slab of the day was spent culturally, but that is also work, because you're teaching your children. But more than that, you are respecting the earth.

All of the cultural activities we do are about respect for the earth. The people in those cultural activities are really the last consideration. It's the earth herself. And providing food was a big part of the Aboriginal day, and it was thought about a lot. And it was embedded in history.

Our farm looks across at a mountain which is called denga, and denga is bread. And it's a story about sharing it. Too long to tell, but it's basically about sharing, that all food has to be shared in equal portions according to need. It wasn't communism, it was about feeding your family equitably.

And I think, I'm writing a new book which is talks about colonialism, Christianity and capitalism. And apart from that it's completely uncontroversial.

But we have to start thinking about those things. And any change, we've got a bit of competition tonight because apparently the Prime Minister is talking.

We don't know what he's going to talk about, but you'd like to think that he would talk about these things as well as fuel subsidies and things like that. But we have to start thinking about, is capitalism working the way we want it to? 

If Africa starves, if parts of Asia starve, South America starves, that's a result of colonialism. 

And we're a colonial nation.

So it's part of our responsibility. And to criticise that is not communism, it's about wanting capitalism to be better. To criticise Christianity for provoking wars around the world. That is not being the words of a heathen, they are the words of someone who would like Christianity to serve the people better.

I think we can do all of those things. I have great hope that these things are starting to happen. And mostly my hope is embedded in the young. My generation's hopeless.

I'm a proud heathen, just so we know. I just wonder how the young people feel about our massive hope in them. It's quite a burden I expect. 

It is, it is. I feel sorry for young Aboriginal kids in my district, because I keep reminding them how important they are. And you can see them go, ugh.

But it's true. You know, we need to experiment by choosing an eight year old girl as Prime Minister because they're totally fair. Even-handed, logical, fair.

We could do a lot worse than have an eight year old girl as Prime Minister. I've got one in mind actually. 

I was thinking, you were talking before about some of the foods that have been grown by Aboriginal people for millennia, and treat the land well.

What happens if we scale up production of those things so that they're more available and that more farms are run like that? What happens when those things meet the existing food systems?

Do we need to change beyond the farm gate to make that a good thing?

One of the things with our food that we grow is that some of it has to be eaten within three days. We're not sending it to market. We will sell it locally.

We have to make our food production and our consumption localised.

This'll be the end of large supermarket chains. We will eat better as a result. We will eat more economically, and we won't have trucks driving from Western Australia to Melbourne to deliver watermelons, which are mostly water.

We can organise ourselves a lot better, but the Aboriginal ethic of looking after Mother Earth first is replicated in other indigenous cultures in India, in Asia, and South America, Russia, Ukraine all have great examples of an indigenous land use, but it's been reviled and ridiculed, and made illegal so many times by a capitalism which is out of control. 

When that capitalism is destroying the Middle East at the moment. It's not about religion, it's not about race, it's about bloody capitalism. - Yeah, oil. 

That's what Albanese is talking about right now. We'll all find out in a little while. Don't go anywhere. 

Natalie, when Bruce talks about localisation, do you have thoughts about how we could localise people's access to food more, and make little kind of avenues where people don't have to travel so far and can get fresher food more easily, and could walk there for example instead of using their cars? Is that something you've come across?

Not a lot in my research, strangely enough. But I have heard of people going to co-ops, for example, or local markets. Sometimes, in my suburb varies like a local market that comes along once every month in a park.

Little things here and there, and people are making do with what they have.

I found in my research that people are extremely conscious of finding opportunities for affordable fresh produce as much as possible. And sometimes I'm amazed at just how much conscious energy goes into our thoughts about food. We just don't realise it.

It's like just an everyday practice for so many of us. 

Yeah, it's a lot of calories, isn't it? We're using that in our mental load thinking about food.

Bhavna, is this something that you've come across, this idea that we could have more local seasonal access to food?

Or is that a bit tricky in this kind of economic system that we live in with, you know, the school run, and the nine to five and things like that?

I think it's absolutely possible. It's even happening in more in the inner suburbs in the CBD, and it gets sparser and sparser as you get into the middle suburbs and the outer suburbs. 

And don't even talk about the greenfield sites that are being turned into new developments, because there's absolutely no infrastructure there. And I'm assuming that participant kind of came from there to get their fresh food. It's very much possible, 15 minute cities and 20 minute cities is an urban planning concept that has been adopted all over the world, especially in Europe, in US as well.

So that's something that I would propose as one of the ways where all the systems that we've been talking about, the food system, transport, urban planning, all of those come together where people live as a community as well and which we are missing. 

I mean, who's not missing the corner milk bar, right, where you can get your bread and milk. 

But the problem is that the smaller grocers, green grocers are not able to compete with the larger supermarkets. And it's only fair that people travel a little longer so that they can get the best prices, because they have the whole weekly shop to do, and they fill up their car and come back, and then dump in extra refrigerators, bigger houses. 

There's all that connection as well.

Australia has one of the biggest houses in the world. It's 214 metres square. Big houses mean big appliances, it means garages that have extra chest freezers and fridges as well.

I'm just making connections to everything, but it is all connected, because we all live our life.

There's no space around the house to grow anything.

Our backyards are becoming smaller, also because there's lots of units being built, but also the fact that the houses are becoming bigger as well. And I think we started with the quarter acre block because of this, that everyone could grow their own food.

But that's also a big effort. Exactly like you said, you've got a whole week to go through and do things, and not everyone can grow food as well, so that can't happen equitably as well.

That would be something I would look forward to seeing in regulation and policy and everyday practices as well.

And sometimes I wonder, because it's so conscious, how sustainable is it as a practice? Because if we're constantly thinking about something, can we continue that practice naturally in our everyday lives, or in a position where it's not causing us grief?

Oh yeah, it's a headache. One of my participants, because I was doing packaging research, they said that, they'd never look at packaging.

They know the five or seven kind of things that they buy. But today, let's go and look at packaging.

One and a half hours, we both looked at packaging, read everything. We both came out with a splitting headache, because never again, I'm never doing grocery shopping again. 

We don't all look at date labels, product labels, all of that. It's just too much of a headache. It has to be something that's intuitive, and unreflective, and subconscious as well.

Absolutely.

Well, and when we are thinking about packaging, it's mostly made from oil at it, isn't it?

Actually there was a really interesting question that's just popped up here. What does the panel think about the framing of food as a national security or sovereignty issue in the context of what we'll eat in the future? And I imagine you'll have thoughts on that, Bruce, but Bhavna, is that the way we should be thinking about food and packaging? 

Oh no, the oil has stopped and so we can't get enough plastic to wrap our food in.

I think it's a national security and sovereignty issue as well. But it is also, as Bruce said, it's a human issue.

It's about thinking about everyone. And the way our global trade works, there are places that grow food, and the other places that import food as well. To disrupt all of that is also something not simple to do as well.

On the other hand, I think trying to grow your own food, or at least protecting the land or the spaces where food is grown and provided to Australians, like our peri-urban land, which is being turned into housing, because we need lots of housing, is one of the bigger mistakes I would say that we are making.

That would threaten security at a local level as well as at a national level as well.

Did anyone else want to comment on that question, the idea of food as a sovereignty issue?

I think it's deeply involved in sovereignty, and I think Australia will turn to some of the Aboriginal plants, kambangi, for instance. Incredibly underrated vegetable.

Vanilla lily I mentioned before, murnong, the yam daisy. All of those things are going to be accepted by necessity because they grow in a dry climate, they don't need extra water, no fertiliser.

These things are going to be seriously important. But how does Australia repay that gift?

How does Australia thank the Aboriginal nation for that?

That's going to be the hard bit. Accepting it is going to be easy. Accepting who provided it is going to be another thing.

But food can bring us together as a nation, and that's why we are growing the bloody stuff, so that we can share it with people. Not just the fruits, but the fish, the tubers, the bread, breaking bread. We did it last night at Eden at the launch of the Jigamy Caravan Park in Eden, and we baked 20 loaves of bread and that was what we ate.

And for some of those Aboriginal people there, that was the first time they'd eaten their own bread.

That's how separated we've become from these foods. But I've always said, and that you can't eat our food if you can't swallow our history.

Yeah, it's all connected. Ben, you have been bringing people together to share food over your restaurant tables for many years now, and you talk a lot to people about having a different relationship with food, and how we can do that on a community level as well as an individual level. How great is the hunger in the community do you think at the moment to have a different relationship with food?

I want to be careful about how I answer this because of the bubbles that we all live in, and the privilege that we have and inhabit is different to the next person and the next person. 

But I guess in small ways, I have a role to play in this conversation of people being endlessly fascinated by food, at least on a surface level. But I think the role of the restaurant is very important.

As Bruce said, it's a way of bringing people together. And I've understood that from the beginning.

And at Attica, which is a restaurant that only of a small amount of people can afford, there's an opportunity for us there to light a little spark. And understanding the complexity of Australia and Australia's inherent racism is something that comes into my mind as I go about that.

When I took ownership of the restaurant in 2015, one of the things that I did was that I placed a Tjanpi Desert Weavers artwork on each table and nothing else. And inside the basket, I placed the seeds of a quandong in that basket.

Now I didn't do that only because that is a beautiful object, which it is. But I did that because I was pretty sure when somebody sat down at that table, that they would sit down, they would look around, they would notice this basket, they would put their hand in that basket, they can't help themselves, they just want to put their hand in the basket. And they will find these quandong stones, these seed pods.

And they will look at them and some people might try to put them in their mouth, which is, I don't recommend.

And, but eventually they would come round to us, and they would say, "What is this?" And then we have this opportunity to share what this is with them. And that's an important opportunity.

That's a moment where, because 99.9% of people that come to Attica don't know what a quandong seed pod looks like. And that's how opportunity to say, well, because you've asked, this is the seed of a quandong. It's a really special, important fruit, has a really long history in this country. It's a very, very important fruit Aboriginal people. It's absolutely delicious.

And later you're going to have that fruit, you're going to eat it. And so that was our subtle way of conveying our values and what we think is really, really important in this country. We think that the food that was here first and the culture that's attached to it, First Nations culture is the most important food, and it's the only food that tells us stories of who we are.

It's the only food, as Uncle Bruce has pointed out several times, is that naturally exists here without the need of fertilisers and additives and excessive water. It's absolutely vibrantly, astoundingly delicious.

And there's just an opportunity here for those of us on the non-indigenous side of things who feel stuck and don't know where to turn, and don't know how to start a cultural education, which is the responsible of all Australians. It's an opportunity to start somewhere.

And again, we can disagree over many things. We can have arguments over many things, politics, all kinds of different things that we'll disagree over, but most of the time we'll agree over what is delicious. And so that's a simple fact, and not one that I forget. 

And of course, from that just very simple idea of putting the basket on the table to start a conversation, if you do the work, that leads you down all kinds of different paths, and evolves and becomes deeper and deeper and deeper.

And that's kind of the idea, I suppose. I'm not sure if I answered your question on the flip side of that just very quickly. COVID was a very, very difficult time on all Australians, particularly hard on restaurants, really hard on our restaurant.

But we had some great advice from my wife, who is here, who's the unsung hero of the business, and also a mentor who told me to basically lead with relentless positivity, to the point that it makes people sick, and they want to vomit, don't stop. 

Now she's an incredibly successful human being. I took her advice to heart. But one thing that we found was that there were thousands, and thousands, and thousands of people that supported our business, who came and bought food, who sent us messages or wrote us letters. We had all these positive interactions.

Most of those people had never been to the restaurant before. It was the first time. And so since then, I thought there was something in that, something that I learned. I didn't know that this community existed. And so, I said to myself, you must not forget them. 

And so we routinely do series of events which are more affordable and whatnot, but one of the things that I've done to reach that community is started to cook videos online, little videos. I don't like writing recipes.

I only like writing recipes for our restaurant if I'm being completely honest. But I've started writing recipes that home cooks could achieve. And within those recipes a good example is just last night, I'd very much like to recommend if I'm making tofu, that it be this sort of elite level tofu from this little niche shop. 

But the reality is I know that most people can't either afford that or find it.

And I recommended, God forbid, a tofu from Woolworths. I didn't use the word Woolworths, but it's owned by Woolworths. Didn't feel good about it, but it does work really well.

And you kind of have to humble yourself with all of this. 

It's hard, isn't it, Ben? It's hard.

It is hard, I know. I just so want to be a snob and forget where I came from.

Well, someone has asked just before I asked it, why aren't we eating insects given their rapid ability to grow protein from the by-products of our lives?

Well, just on that, we have some of the most delicious insects in the world in Australia,

insects that have had very important place in Aboriginal culture for a very, very long time.

And you've used them in the restaurant, haven't you? 

We used them every day. 

How did that go down? 

Well, initially, it's funny, hey, people have warmed to them, because they're really delicious, so we use green and black ants, both indigenous, and you know, I think the way that you, the way that you serve them matters a lot, that you do justice to them. 

And also the way that they're explained, and the amount of information and training that is going on with the staff matters hugely.

These are not just foods. There's connection and culture attached to these foods. If you've been lucky to share, have been on country and have had information shared with you, language, and you've asked permission, then that be conveyed in a culturally sensitive way that allows people to join in the understanding of why that is an amazing thing to eat.

And at possibly the other end of the spectrum in many ways. What are your thoughts on lab-grown meat? Because a lot of people are saying, look, we can do this without cruelty. We can do it in a smaller space than big farms. What do you think?

Well, my only interactions with lab grown meat have been once when we were really just about on the bloody knife's edge for bankruptcy yet again during COVID. And an American company said to me, "We'll pay you $4,000 if you talk to us for 30 minutes "about lab-grown meat." 

And I said, "Sure."

I didn't have anything to offer them. And I don't think it was a very good investment, but I was grateful for their support. 

And it was not to go on the record, actually, this is the first time I ever told anybody that I've done that. There'll be an NDA. - It's a little bit embarrassing.

Would you use it inadequate? - Ah, god, no. I don't, I just can't see it, no. 

That's interesting, isn't it? Why not?

Well, because, back to Bruce's point too, because we serve kangaroo because it is one of the most amazing meats to cook with as a chef, it's completely sustainable. We don't serve herd animals at Attica unless they have entered the landscape and are a rogue pest, then we are pretty happy to serve those. 

But we serve emu, we serve wallaby, we serve kangaroo, we've served possum, we serve crocodile.

Are they protected in Australia? - Not in Tasmania, no. Yeah, I don't know if you want to eat them anyway, but they're good to eat.

I did write, in a book that there's no blaming of foods.

It's only culinary illiteracy. It's never the food's fault. It's my fault. If it's not delicious, it's my fault. And I learned that from Uncle Bruce as well, who gave me some bimblers once.

And did you give him instructions?

Well, it was my cousin actually, Noel Butler.

It was you first. - Oh, I got the bimlers, but Noel doesn't let me cook them, so I just have to stand there and clean them, because he's the chef and I'm the idiot.

What are they? Excuse my ignorance. 

A bivalve shellfish. When you open it up, it looks horrible. So you don't open it up, you cook it in the shell on the barbecue, and you let it dry out. Not completely, but it cooks in its own juice.

And the flavour of that little piece of meat is divine. But bimbler, and abalone were things that kept our people alive when we weren't allowed any other food.

You'll see a lot of the old camps, from the '30s and '40s were down by the beach because we could still get abalone, we could still get bimbler. And this is the myth about the Aboriginal diet.

The Aboriginal diet was rock lobster, prawns, oysters, bimblers, you know, we had the absolute pick of food. And as soon as the price of rock lobster skyrocketed, when abalone was discovered by Chinese people, and the price skyrocketed. Aboriginal people were the first to be locked out of that industry.

And yet it was what sustained us when nothing else, we couldn't get anything else.

And not in Noel Butler's nephew is in jail now for poaching abalone.

An Aboriginal man whose family ate abalone when Australians called them mutton fish because they were supposed to taste like mutton. And you'll still hear people talk about them as mutton fish.

Well, if you have contempt for that gorgeous food, and the English are very good at ruining food or not understanding what food really is. If you revile that food, then you can't then turn around and blame Aboriginal people for still wanting it.

And this part of the great balancing act that Australia is going to have to do to bring social justice, but not just social justice because that, that's a middle-class desire or it can be seen as that.

It's about nuts and bolts, natural food systems.

And I think we can get there. I think Australians are a generous people, are an inclusive people, but we have to re-educate ourselves about how Aboriginal people lived.

And when I talk about the food systems at Mithaka in Queensland, South Western Queensland, people think I'm gilding the lily, or they think I'm talking through my hat,

exaggerating it, you know, to promote Aboriginal people. But it was there, that was a civilisation that had mines to make sandstone dishes, to grind seeds into flour.

And in that mine, over a period of time, 3 million dishes were created, and that those people themselves used 1,500. All the others were traded.

There wasn't a Great Silk Road in Australia. There was a great sandstone road, and it came out of Windorah.

And it'll break your heart when Australia can walk through that country and learn about this great archaeological site, because there are kitchen tools all over the ground.

There are blades there that you'll have to warn your children not to touch because they're so sharp.

Australia has an opportunity that it will make you cry and it'll make you laugh, but it'll make you bloody proud that this is your country.

And in this country, bread was invented. In this country, some kitchen implements were invented simply to use the food. It's a great history, and it can be shared by all Australians. 

But once again, you have to recognise Aboriginal people as having created it, and have to recognise people, just like the Referendum and the Treaty From the Heart. Not just created it, but offered it, wanted to give.

And so next time we get this opportunity, we will get this opportunity, we have to accept the hand reaching out toward us, and not invent bitterness, invent division, and invent some myth about Aboriginal advantage or whatever it is. Wish you'd been with me last night to see how advantaged Aboriginal people are, because it's cruel what has been done to communities, Aboriginal communities, because unemployment, lack of education, no money creates its problems.

And those problems are designed to be perpetuated across generations. Anyway, I'm going on, but I'm sorry.

But Australia has this incredible history, that book I'm talking about, which I'm going to plug, called "The European Mind", a modest little title.

That talks about these things, about having to redefine the way we act as humans.

Because in this country, a system of social living without a police force, and without an army, and without soil degradation was conducted for 100,000 years.

What's that scratching? I think that's Andrew Bolt's pen. But 100,000 years, 65,000 years, doesn't matter.

But you'll find because of the archaeology at Point Ritchie in Warrnambool, that it's more likely to be 120,000 years. Over that period of time, no armies marched across the ground. No police forces were required. Sure, there was bad temper. Sure, there were arguments, and fights, and murders, but there wasn't war for land. War for land, that's the thing that is killing our world.

Land, and boundaries of land, nations, states.

I am raving now. I'm sorry.

That's all right. But the question lends itself to that.

This is how we organise ourselves, and if we don't organise ourselves like that, we'll kill our mother.

We've got about five minutes left, and I want to ask Natalie a question or two because you cast a feminist eye over our relationships to food, and how they're talked about online.

What are your thoughts about the whole, the push in some circles to do more baking, cooking, preserving? 

I think often about the fact that women's images dominate any discussion of food online. You know, they're the ones shown to be cooking, and shopping, and thinking about food and making recipes, and hopefully making money from all that as well.

But how do we balance a feminist approach to household management that should be shared, with the acknowledgement that if you're trying to change food systems, you probably going to have to start with women.

That is such a huge question, Hilary, for the last five minutes that I don't think I've filled out, that I think I've figured out in my entire career.

Look, I have explored the way that women resist certain problematic gendered messages around food. I've predominantly done it through the lens of diet culture though. So really destructive weight loss diet practices.

Something that I found was that women, regardless of being, just an everyday woman, an activist or health professional working in the health space, they were all doing really similar things to resist these problematic gendered messages. And their methods were very, very deceptively simple.

It was prioritising the self. Caring for the self. I'm not putting myself through that.

I'm not going to weigh myself. I don't want to scale in my house, and care for others as well.

I'm not spreading this message to someone else. I'm not engaging in diet talk in the canteen when everyone's sitting around and having lunch. Really deceptively simple everyday practices, but caused around those women really significant changes made others think about the things that they were saying, the things that they were promoting, the things that they were doing. So that's an example of how it can be resisted.

It is quite an individualised practice, isn't it? As opposed to saying, I'm going to burn down this system that's making me feel bad about my body and also depriving me of healthy food. 

Yes, well, some of it was.

The ABC does not advocate burning down the system. 

No, and neither do I. But yes, some of those methods were very individualised.

But with the health professionals that I spoke to, these are people who have access to health promotion organisations. These are people who have access sometimes to government, to various other powerful institutions.

Some things that women did were, once again, very deceptively simple. Like for example, being a dietitian and doing a lecture for a dietetics degree, doing one guest lecture on non-diet approaches, for example, ended up resulting in a wave of students coming out of that degree and asking questions about the things that they were asking their clients in daily practices.

Seems like a ripple, but will create a wave and possibly a tidal wave, hopefully, a feminist tidal wave. Yeah, everyday practice, but still very powerful potentially.

I love that we ended up on a feminist tidal wave. It's fluid, it's massive.

And that idea that big changes can happen from small steps, which is I think something that we're all very hopeful about.

Been wonderful chatting to you tonight. Ben and Bruce are going to be signing books in the foyer. If you hadn't read "Dark Emu", I highly recommend it.

I'm sure your books are excellent also. It's been wonderful to be able to share this discussion with you tonight. Thank you very much too our participants tonight.