food
9 Feb 2010
Is There Life Beyond The Barbie?
Are we really what we eat? The perennial notion of a national dish may be a nonsense, but discussions of an Australian culinary identity reach far beyond the table, writes Tammi Jonas
According to Sam Kekovich, "our world would be a better place if we just came together as mates over a lamb barbie, just like we do down under." He warns us that "we’re facing a pandemic: UnAustralianism" because "as a planet, we’re not eating enough lamb."
So … mates. That old Australian leveller. Mateship, we’re told, is a core Australian value with roots in the interdependence of convicts, ANZAC soldiers at Gallipoli, surf lifesavers and the CFA. Note the blokiness of the string of ubiquitous examples trotted out each time somebody wants to wax lyrical about the egalitarian values of mateship — then try to imagine discussing the "mateship" of the Country Women’s Association.
It seems we have a gender situation on our hands — which is where we would be even without the invocation of "mates" by getting to the "barbie" anyway. The great Australian barbecue is a gendered culinary space and many a woman has sneered about "mates around the barbie" and how little labour most men actually do to prepare or to clean up after a barbecue dinner, let alone to create any of the side dishes. Is this really the inclusive national imagery of over 20 million Australians?
To be fair, if we really want to talk about "national" food, a barbecued meal is well suited to our climate, the freshness of our ingredients and the relatively casual lifestyle of Australians — factors that are to a great degree present across culture and class. So it seemed reasonable enough for Matt Preston to carefully avoid naming a national dish and instead to gesture toward a national style, the barbecued meal (as long as you ignore the common barbie discourses of hyper-masculinity). Maggie Beer backed him up with a similar claim, arguing that to barbecue lamb rather than roast it is more suitably "Australian".
Around Australia Day this year, it wasn’t just the meat lobby who was pushing for discussions of a national dish, there were the usual discussions of national identity and food. Former chef and advocate of local, seasonal foods, Rebecca Varidel conducted an informal poll on Twitter and posted her results which showed more diversity than the roast lamb, meat pie and sausage responses to News Ltd’s poll, including a number of responses asserting the distinctiveness of Australian salads, lightness and ubiquitous seafood.
And yet, when Masterchef finalist Poh Ling Yeow claimed that salt and pepper squid might be emerging as Australia’s national dish, there were some rather strong and negative responses. One food blogger went so far as to assert that he "can’t accept something [his] grandparents never heard of as a national dish", and continued, on the topic of the UK’s chicken tikka masala, "I don’t care that it was invented by an Indian chef in the UK, that makes it Indian, not from the UK."
This is the kind of nationalist fervour more often expressed around questions of religion than food — though the recent petition to remove the halal certification from Vegemite certainly indicates the depth of feeling engendered by food as a national symbol, especially when combined with religious mores.
Here’s the rub: who appointed any of us as authorities on Australia’s national dish? Differences in cultural, class and familial histories will obviously inform the variety of opinions on what constitutes such a thing. And further, chefs and scholars will often bring a critical perspective to the discussion, as evinced by their unwillingness to pin down a singular dish, and their apparent interest in discussing styles, hybridity and what cultural theorist Ien Ang has called "complicated entanglements" which are a necessary condition for "living together-in-difference".
Just as Keating promoted the national benefits of multiculturalism in Australia, so Howard turned it into the "m" word. Where is the leadership that will lead us out of the darkness of dogma and help to reclaim our sense of Australia as a hospitable, cosmopolitan nation ethically engaged with the region and the globe?
It’s also worthwhile asking what’s at stake when so many Australians leap to defend nostalgic Anglo-Celtic meals as the national dish, particularly when for most of them it’s a childhood memory rather than a weekly experience. What happens if we collectively agree that something about the national dish has changed?
Or if we go further and declare that our national dish is now salt and pepper squid? It is arguably more pervasive than roast lamb and certainly cuts across class and culture: salt and pepper squid is loved by punters down at the pub; served with aioli it will win the hearts of most so-called "foodies"; drizzled with Shaoxing wine and five spice, it is a local Chinese hit.
In her 1998 book We Are What We Eat, Donna Gabaccia reminds us that "eating habits both symbolise and mark the boundaries of cultures" and later argues that American "food reveals that we are cosmopolitans and iconoclasts […] We ‘play with our food’ far more readily than we preserve the culinary rules of our varied ancestors."
Similar lines have been advanced about Australian foodways, like Cherry Ripe’s 1993 insistence that "it is not to do with lamingtons or Vegemite, meat pies or sausage rolls, pavlova or peach Melba. We have actually developed a particular, and distinctive, Australian style in our food."
Food historian Barbara Santich reiterated Ripe’s claim a decade later, arguing that "we refer to a contemporary Australian style, the product of inventiveness and a certain insouciance applied to a strong foundation combining familiarity with, and respect for, other culinary traditions."
And yet here we are another decade on, still "debating" whether our national dish should be roast lamb or meat pie, both hangovers of our colonial heritage and both deeply unsuitable as staples for our climate and contemporary cosmopolitan lifestyle.
In Benedict Anderson’s seminal 1983 work on nationalism, Imagined Communities, he argues that although most of us won’t know the vast majority of our compatriots, we have "complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity". Central to Anderson’s conception of how a national community is imagined is that it is reliant on a shared vernacular language. Australia’s multicultural food scene offers a multitude of vernacular foodways and by weaving them all together we build a cosmopolitan society.
The nation I want to imagine myself into is the one built upon our collective openness and committed to maintaining the idiosyncrasies of Australia’s vernacular foodways. And so, 101 ways to cook a squid?
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Newsvine
Facebook
Twitter
Discuss this article
To participate in the discussion Sign in or Register
News Ltd’s poll was advertising dressed up as either science (as in statistical
survey) or journalism … okay it wasn’t very well dressed as journalism. I love to let
figures get in the way of unbridled speculation, so here it is, in 1968 Australians ate about
40 kg of lamb and mutton per year. This has now dropped to under 14 kg. Clearly both
mary’s little lamb and Sam Keckovich are on the nose. The concomitant rise in
factory farmed pig and chicken pieces shows that Australians are not just wierd
but inadvertently (or perhaps deliberately) a cruel and vicious mob.
I have never heard of or eaten salt and pepper squid, so also have not realised it was overly popular. Perhaps it is, amongst the latte set, or some such select group - but as a national dish, definitely it is a long way from being accepted to that extent!
@GeoffRussell All useful points, though your conclusion is somewhat bewildering. The decrease in lamb consumption surely supports my broader point that roast lamb is not necessarily a current favourite, though I agree it’s why the lamb lobby needs someone like Sam K. Mind you, I’m certainly not suggesting that lamb isn’t still popular, and enjoyed by people across the nation from many cultures and in many forms. In fact, I’m quite a fan myself. :-)
@salamander I concede the point that salt and pepper squid is probably not a suitable national dish, insofar as I don’t believe there is or should be one, which was the point, really, of my article.
I still remember the famous movie title “The Silence of the Lambs.” That particular ethical stance still holds true in my opinion.
I remember an Australian-born Italian chef who travelled to Italy, some years ago, in order to ‘spice up’ his restaurant. What he found, however, was that Australia’s restaurant cuisine was more creatively developed than Italy’s. The Chinese food we eat here, as well as all other cultures’ cuisines, is not necessarily what each respective culture is eating… back home.
Australia’s diverse ethnic community has actually created new popular dishes to suit the tastes of the Australian palette. I can remember salt and pepper squid in Italian cuisine my whole life but I first came across Chinese salt and pepper ‘pork’ about 20 years ago. It’s become quite popular here (many revamped pub cuisines serve it). Not sure who actually invented it but I don’t think it really matters.
During the ‘flag debate’ spaghetti bolognaise was Australia’s favourite dish.
I still remember the famous movie title “The Silence of the Lambs.” That particular ethical stance still holds true in my opinion.
I remember an Australian-born Italian chef who travelled to Italy, some years ago, in order to ‘spice up’ his restaurant. What he found, however, was that Australia’s restaurant cuisine was more creatively developed than Italy’s. The Chinese food we eat here, as well as all other cultures’ cuisines, is not necessarily what each respective culture is eating… back home.
Australia’s diverse ethnic community has actually created new popular dishes to suit the tastes of the Australian palette. I can remember salt and pepper squid in Italian cuisine my whole life but I first came across Chinese salt and pepper ‘pork’ about 20 years ago. It’s become quite popular here (many revamped pub cuisines serve it). Not sure who actually invented it but I don’t think it really matters.
During the ‘flag debate’ spaghetti bolognaise was Australia’s favourite dish.
A well written piece, tammi, and a clever analysis of Australians and their anxiety to possess “complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” around the barbeque.
As you suggest, it’s where this steady and simultaneous barbie activity is not so anonymous that all the cracks and disunities in national tastes show up most visibly. Of course I imagine that no group of Australian men congregating around a barbie hankering for red meat would turn down Poh if she were to appear in person to offer them her white squid. This is not, however, a serious threat to a sense of steady and homogenous Australian identity. While lamb, beef and chicken sausages and steaks rule the barbie, and even squid can be added without too much fuss, add a vegetarian or (oh my meat) a vegan to the mix, and you’ll see the men around the barbeque suddenly do a Sam Keckovich, a living puppet testament to the way in which such lamb adds are tapping into the power of food.
What the Keckovich adds have done is tap into what is the national, personal, and gendered power of eating meat. We all know that despite the laidback jokes, on a shallow level the ritual of a barbie involves meat-eaters feeling manly. Because we make jokes around the barbie, as all good psychoanalysts know, we involving ourselves in a situation that is at its the most deeply archetypal and unconsciously powerful. It’s around the barbie that Australians face their demons. Now, when men flock to a barbie, they make jokes about being manly, but because the pieces of weak and defenceless animals they are slapping onto the plate are all the result of kills done elsewhere and many moons ago, it is difficult for the Chef of the Barbie to feel honestly manly. This means that such Australian men need to feel manly in other ways, by beating up vego curry munchers, for example, or by spotting a vegetarian from a mile off, laughing at their petite soy patties or sausages (all the while oblivious to the predomintly soy content in their own blood-filled sausages), and waving pieces of meat in their lilly-faced acquintances, only hinting at their most politest that not partaking of the diurnal sacrifice is ‘un-Australian’, which is efficient shorthand for: an anti-social and elitist act of disdain. This is without a doubt another form of the problem of gender in Australian society, and (putting the vegemite aside) meat is the object around which national, personal, racial, gender and philosophical divisions are at their most visible.
As to national dishes, Australia is merely joining a global trend in its consumption of meat - the most meat it eats per head is chicken, followed by beef. Lamb is comparatively rare on the Australian plate (See e.g. http://www.chicken.org.au/page.php?id=4). Thanks to cheap prices of chicken, created through perhaps the cruelest form of factory farming there is, more Australians are eating chickens than ever before. Australians share this with the rest of the world, except for countries such as India.
As GeoffRussell points out, and I agree, it is less the foody cosmpolitanism (or lack of it) that reveals something about the Australian character, than the absences of respected and affordable alternatives when Australians en masse choose to eat foods that are animals factory farmed in the most efficient (i.e. most sadistic) ways. Squid, let alone the leak or the lentil, will only become an alternative to lamb, cow, calf, or pig, if it can be easily purchased at the supply-side of a factory farm. In making a choice based on affordability and mass product, Australians merely support the unsustainable industrialism that has, for over a hundred years, defined the cost-coting Australian character and polluted all alternative avenues to developing a more valuable national character. Because of this, a life beyond the barbie will be hard to achieve. Australians and factory-farmed animals have that in common.
This is a great article.
A petition to remove the halal certification from Vegemite? Unbelievable. It’s possible that this is less about the ‘depth of feeling engendered by food as a national symbol’ and more about the power of national symbols in an increasingly xenophobic society. I’d love to believe that reactionary nuisances like this are perpetuated only by isolated pockets of disaffected fascist-lites, but when even the Greens are canvassing on whether to include the Southern Cross in their logo, it seems that nationalist paranoia is not confined to any particular part of the political spectrum in Australia at any particular time. It’s a pre-eminent quality of the culture. ‘Aussies’ rarely have to go past our own families for examples. I have an uncle who started the speech at his daughter’s wedding to a Croatian with ‘I have never been too sure about multiculturalism, but I do like kuppa-cheenose’. A Croatian! Not exactly a Dinka tribesman.
tammois: why is my conclusion bewildering? bbear clearly understands that buying factory farmed pig and chicken meat qualifies a person as cruel and brutal … just as surely as eating shark fin soup (they just throw the shark back to die). With factory farmed chicken now the most commonly eaten meat in Australia, it follows that we are a cruel and brutal country.
But the point of my post that related to your article is that talk of national dishes is just a marketting battle. Why on earth would anybody think squid of any description could be a national dish … anywhere? If we accept that a national dish must at least be eaten in moderate quantity by a reasonable proportion of the population then squid fails on both counts.
This is transparently self promotional marketting hype. Hardly anybody eats the stuff … anywhere? Seriously, crustaceans in total are 7/10000 of the global food supply and mostly eaten by rich countries and rich people in those countries. How can it be “arguably more pervasive”, we don’t need to argue about
how pervasive it is, that’s what we have statistics for and it isn’t pervasive, just
very well marketed. As is lamb. Its sales are rock bottom but people think otherwise because Sam gets air time and perpetuates a myth … just like the myth that we are a compassionate people. We aren’t. We continually refer to people seeking political asylum as illegals, we take far less refugees than other first world countries and our most popular food is crippled chickens from factory farms. Hungry people wanting to buy Australian grain are now second in line behind those crippled chickens (and lame pigs) because Australians would rather eat cheap chicken than sell grain to hungry people.
Over dinner last night (neither barbeque, nor squid, but a burger bought from a caravan and eaten on a blanket next to the lake) Tammi asked me to leave a note here promising to return to your comments when she returns home to her computer access.
I think the article is spot on; whose interests could possibly be served by there being a single national dish?
My mate Nigel’s blog gives a critical art perspective on the iconography of the Australia Day meaty advertising.
(And OT for Geoff, some very interesting stuff on shark’s fin at Fuchsia Dunlop’s blog, including an assertion (not by her) that “finning” is not common.)
http//progressivedinnerparty.net @crazybrave