A week when a number of things focused my foodie mind on indigenous food in Australia aka bush tucka.
I am looking forward to hearing Barbara Santich’s Scholarly Musing ‘Nineteenth-century appetites for indigenous foods’ at the NSW State Library in June. I will report on this post the event.
And also to reading John Newton’s paper for the recent Symposium of Australian Gastronomy ‘Uninvited Guests’. John is going to give a few of us a reading of it accompanied by some bush tucka inspired dishes and I will post about it post that.
And here are a couple of articles from The Conversation:
1.
A contribution from Jon Altman and Sean Kerins
on the every thorny issue of the convergence of animal rights and indigenous
rights and sustainability, in this case looking at dugong hunting in Northern
Australia which has a reference I am eager to track down to the work of the
late Elinor Ostrom,
who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, and the new institutionalists,
focused on how humans interact with common property resources
to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields.
2.
A radical suggestion to consider subsidising healthy foods for low income people in remote
parts of Australia which extends to suggesting a system incorporated into
primary health care with doctors able to provide ‘prescriptions’ for healthy
food which raises questions for me about the dangers inherent in an approach
that can be taken to more interventionist extremes like sequestering part or
all of income benefits if the daily dose of healthy food is not taken. I make
clear that the article does not suggest this, but recent interventions in the Northern
Territory urge caution I suggest.
