Australia Eats

"Australia Eats offers a sophisticated reading of culinary culture, power, and the politics/poetics of remembering and forgetting. It has made me reconsider my conceptions of mobility, materiality, and eco-cultural sustainability."

---Krishnendu Ray, Professor of Food Studies and Director, Food Studies PhD Program, NYU, USA

"Bold, field-defining, and incisive, Australia Eats brings Indigenous, settler, and migrant perspectives into rare and rigorous dialogue to reveal food as a vital arena of identity, power, and belonging in contemporary Australia. It sets a new benchmark for scholarship across and beyond food studies, anthropology, history, Indigenous studies, and migration studies."

---Sophie Chao, Co-convenor Australian Food, Society and Culture Network, University of Sydney, Australia

This volume brings together a diverse group of Australian scholars who offer a range of perspectives on Australian identity and "being Australian" through the lens of food. It addresses the complex nature of Australia's always-evolving culinary landscape where multiculturalism and enduring Indigenous foodways are entangled with settler-colonial legacies. How has Australian food culture been shaped by the way Australians see themselves and by their cultural assumptions and aspirations in an increasingly globalised world? What role do foods from Indigenous and immigrants' cuisines play in Australian culinary identity - how have they been acclimatized and acculturated, interpreted or adapted, adopted and at times co-opted in Australian and global contexts? And how do Aboriginal Australians and immigrants assert their senses of identity through food?

Through its multidisciplinary approach to these and other contemporary debates around food and identity in Australia from both non-Indigenous and Aboriginal scholars, this book makes a unique contribution to the literature on food and food culture in Australia.

Jacqui Newling is a gastronomic historian who specialises in Australian settler-colonial food culture and social identity.

Alison Vincent is a food historian whose research focuses on Australian cultural history.