Forget turkey and mince pies. This Christmas Australians are being urged to serve native foods such as smoked kangaroo with wild lime and brandy sauce and wattle seed pavlova.
Despite an abundance of unique fruits, nuts, and meat that have sustained the country's Aboriginal inhabitants for centuries, Australians are only now embracing native food, with some supermarkets starting to stock indigenous produce this year.
This step into the mainstream has inspired campaigners who have struggled to get indigenous foods onto the nation's dining tables and destroy the image of native food as simply juicy fat witchetty grubs, protein-rich bogong moths, and honey ants.
"For 200 years of white settlement there's been resistance and ignorance about indigenous foods and it's only in the past year the market has started to take off," said Juleigh Robins, founder of native food group Robins Australian Foods.
"But it is so logical to use indigenous food, with foreign crops and livestock contributing to severe land degradation problems. I think in the next year or so we'll see a major increase in the use of native foods in Australia and overseas."
When the British first colonized Australia in 1788, the ill-prepared settlers didn't know where to find food and overlooked the fact that the continent's indigenous Aborigines had successfully lived off the land for up to 60,000 years.
The British arrivals didn't identify the millions of wild kangaroos or emus as edible protein, preferring to eradicate them and instead raise cattle and sheep with which they were familiar. They also shunned native plants, which were rich food sources, and converted the land to European agriculture to raise cattle and plant traditional orchards for European-style fruits.
Old habits die hard and until the 1950s Australian cooking was synonymous with British food. But gradually the influence of Asian migrants spread to Australian kitchens, with a Chinese restaurant becoming a standard fixture in every country town.
But bush tucker is still regarded as eccentric and niche, with the industry only worth about A$17 million (US$13 million) a year. Tourists are often keener to try unique Australian fare while the locals still opt for beef rather than kangaroo.
Growing interest from the five million overseas visitors to Australia every year has spurred some restaurants to focus exclusively on native foods, using such ingredients as bush tomatoes, lemon aspen (a citrus-flavored leaf), and lemon myrtle (a small fruit) on emu, crocodile and stingray.
This has generated a new respect for native foods within Australia, where Aboriginal art was also largely shunned until it earned international accolades.
Some supermarkets in Britain and Germany have started to stock sauces and pickles made from indigenous foods. They are marketed as healthy, organic and environmentally friendly, and distributors from France and Ireland are also entering the market.
Aware of the market's potential, the Rural Industries Research and Development Corp has set up a five-year plan to develop the native food industry which now involves about 500 mainly small businesses, from harvesters to restaurants.
"There is significant interest from export markets in Europe and North America. This interest is fostered by the success overseas of Australian wines, meats and seafood," the group, funded by the government, said in a recent report.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS