Native Food Only

Let's eat only native Australian food for a month

I'm planning to only eat native food for dinner for a month! It'll be just like Super Size Me, but with Australian flora and fauna, and probably not as funny.

Here are the rules:

• Every edible ingredient in the dishes must be native: that means no olive oil, no European wheat, no black pepper, no dairy squeezed from a cow.
• No repeating any recipes and eating a wide variety of tasty meals.
• No eating anything that is harvested in a dangerously unsustainable manner (so nothing endangered... unless it's really tasty).

By association, my girlfriend will also be participating. She's not as excited as me.

Why eat Native Food

As Australia's precious, million year old soil rapidly washes away into the ocean, leaving a salty, poisonous landscape, there has been widespread ringing of hands and shaking of heads. This silly display has intensified to a frenzy over the last decade as farmers struggle to make a buck across the south east of Australia.

I was inspired by Prof Michael Archer and Bob Beale's Going Native which is an indictment of the collective silliness of Australia's agriculture, industry, lifestyle and culture.

Archer and Beale's line goes like this:

1. to secure our food source, we must rescue the soil from the rising salty ground water
2. to save the soil, we must save the plants and animals that adapted to that soil over millions of years.
3. to save the plants and animals, it pays to make an industry out of them – eat them, hunt them, keep them as pets, burn their land etc. etc.

I would personally add that moving away from sheep, cow and pig is critical for mitigating carbon emissions; but it is true that salinity is probably a greater and more immediate problem for Australia than climate change.

To invoke the spirit of the long dead Aussie colonial, who would enjoy a tender, coal grilled carpet snake any day over a limp, rubbery four-n-twenty, I ordered a copy of The Antipodean Cookery Book and kitchen companion (Mina Rawson) published in 1897, from vintagecookbooks.com.au.

This book is filled with so much greatness you wouldn't believe, so I'll being quoting from it enthusiastically as I attempt various meals from it. I hope you can join me.

Wombat steamer, here I come, baby.