Gourmet Food and Drink Quiz Question
When swearing an oath, ancient Egyptians would place their
hands on what?
Restaurant Australia
‘In response to the growing demand globally for
food and wine as part of the travel experience Tourism Australia has evolved
our ‘There’s nothing like Australia’
campaign to put the spotlight on Australia’s finest array of produce served in
the most stunning locations in the world. If your business provides food, wine
and beverages experiences that international visitors will enjoy you are
encouraged to share it through our Restaurant Australia campaign.’
Following up the ort in the last Compost, it turns out (ta
Barbara Santich and Helen Greenwood) that the Aussie food truck in Paris was an
initiative of Tourism Australia as part of its Restaurant Australia program.
There’s one of those awful ad co films that’s big on slo mo of young, rich,
couple on beaches, in the outback, at MONA who do by the end of the film
actually get served some food tho it’s pretty much all seafood or mod-Oz-fusion
– no pho in Cabra, no saleep in Auburn, no BBQ duck from Chinatown – set to a
meaningless moaned song from some obscure Oz bloke. Gees, all it needs is Laura
Bingle. The accompanying film that explains the strategy compounds the view that
‘Restaurant’ in Restaurant Australia means fine wining and dining on mod Oz.
Kylie is the only one in there who uses the word ‘multiculturalism’ and there
is one clip of something in a balti, but the rest of it goes back to the
predictable. I guess it’s all based on research about what tourists with money
want to spend it on but it does quite kibosh a promotion of the greater feast
Australia offers. Oh, also, no bush tucker of course – a corroborree around a
fire, sure, but please, no roo, goanna or witchetty grub.
I can’t believe it’s not meat: scientists create vegie
burger patty that bleeds
‘But the latest in vego-burger innovation takes mock-meat
patties to whole new level. American company Impossible Foods has created a
realistic-looking faux-patty that can be grilled to blushing-pink medium rare,
leaches a red juice when cooked and develops a charred crust.’
Why would anyone think a vego or a vegan would want their
burger to bleed?
Has Britain’s street food revolution run out of road
‘As if to prove that street food is reaching saturation
point, even
KFC now runs a truck, and the street food vendor is a trope of romcoms (see Chef, The
Five-Year Engagement, etc)’.
Curse the Brits. First they take a probably Tamilian word of much
contested meaning and transform it into ‘curry’ and foist it on us to
homogenise South Asia’s abundance of regional cuisines, and now they have
corrupted the term ‘street food’ to mean hipsters in vans turning out over
fiddled fussy on trend edibles. No, no, no...some thing’s are not forgivable,
as Blanche Dubois said, and this, to me is one of them. Street food remains for
me a foodway that is characterised by its informality, its simplicity,
generally family (broadly defined) run, often generations deep, within a cash
economy outside of the regulated food markets. It certainly is nothing that can
have a system of national awards built around it and there sure ain’t any
venture capital invested.
I Eat, Therefore I Think. Food and
Philosophy. Raymond D Boisvert
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 2014-10-11
I mentioned this book in the last Compost. Not about food so
much as the stomach and eating, it’s a plea for move away from a
spectator/autonomous/mind focussed philosophy to a stomach-sensitive philosophy
that favours ‘a philosophical orientation emphasizing relations, or, stated
grammatically, prepositions’, significantly the preposition ‘with’ as ‘the
stomach forces us not only to engage with our surroundings, with those who grow
food, with those who store, transport and prepare it (but) also to mix
different food with each other’. It’s a philosophy that emphasizes the
‘importance of combinations’, that ‘inclines toward thinking in terms of an
original multiplicity’. It’s a philosophy through which neediness and
dependence are not a defective state but represent occasions for enhancing
good’, and a good life becomes defined as one ‘having a healthy nexus of
interdependencies’. You can see why this book and its stomach-sensitive
philosophy would appeal to me as it deals with hosting strangers at the meal,
the communal table, and multiculturalism.
Banquet
Some of you who know me know I am not averse to singing from
time to time. So I thought from time to time in Compost I thought it would be
fun to post a food related song, both for the pleasure but also to keep
expanding our notions of what food writing is.
This week, I thought I would give you link to a lesser known
Joni Mitchell song, one from the album I think that marked her transition to a
different level of musicianship – For the Roses. When I first heard it I was
knocked out by its use of a banquet as a way of singing about her concern with
inequality – derrr, you might say, but to a young me, well, an early 20’s me,
this song was revelatory of the way a ‘pop’ song could also do what folk songs
did.
What happens when Second Graders are treated to a 7
course, USD220 meal?
‘One Saturday afternoon last month, six second graders from
P.S. 295 in Brooklyn got a head start on the fine-dining life when they visited
the acclaimed French restaurant Daniel. There, five waiters presented them with
a seven-course tasting menu (after the trio of canapés and an amuse-bouche, naturellement).’
I like the kid who early on asks ‘When’s dessert?’ and the
one at the end who toasts ‘To Vampires’. I’m not sure what the point of it was
other than a promo for the restaurant but the kids have fun and do eat some of
what’s offered. I would have loved them to have had a discussion about the
experience afterward because they don’t get to voice their views on the whole
process of the restaurant meal and let’s face it for most of us the theatre or
fine dining is as much a part of the eating.
Rise and shine. What kids around the world eat for
breakfast.
‘Americans tend to lack imagination when it comes to
breakfast. The vast majority of us, surveys say, start our days with cold
cereal — and those of us with children are more likely to buy the kinds with
the most sugar. Children all over the world eat cornflakes and drink chocolate
milk, of course, but in many places they also eat things that would strike the
average American palate as strange, or worse.’
They same could of course be said for many Australian kids.
I am trying to recall what I ate in Sri Lanka for breakfast; I’m pretty sure
there were eggs and toast, porridge at times, often buffalo curd with kittul
(palm syrup), porridge occasionally, and
on Sunday’s always hoppers with usually fish curry and some seeni sambol. When we
hit Australia we did shift to the sacred trio of Aussie soggy sugary cereals - Cornflakes, Rice Bubbles, and Weetbix. But
somewhere along the line I stopped eating breakfast at all except when I travel
when I revert to having eggs bacon and toast in Aus and invariably hit the
hoppers and curry in Sri Lanka.
Is the ‘classic’ balti curry dying out?
Gees I hope so.
Quiz Answer:
An onion.
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