Food of the poorest served to the richest

"The whole project of indigenous ingredients is a tricky one. It's obvious that people living in Australia should use and be proud of abundant local flora and fauna. But it's quickly troubling." Dani Valent - Good Food Guide

Dani Valent's review of Attica, possibly Melbourne's top restaurant, was reproduced in the Age's M magazine at the weekend. Attica used to be in the world's top 50 restaurants but I believe it has recently fallen off of the list. I only mention this to point out that we are talking about a top end restaurant here. The degustation menu - I think that is all you can have - will set you back $295.00 (why don't they just make it $300.00?), before you even look at the wine list. Suffice to say it is not food for the poor - or even the moderately well-off.

And yet, it's current thing is bush food - the food of some of the poorest people in Australia. Which is extremely ironic is it not, but also as Dani Valent says - troubling. To her it is troubling because:

"Who profits? Who tells the stories that are interwoven with the foods? How do non-Indigenous people use them without uncomfortable "white saviour" undertones?

I think her second point about the stories is somewhat pretentious and uncomfortable for me. To be honest I know so little about Aboriginal culture that I can't really comment, but it sometimes seems to me that in our attempt to put right the dreadful things that we did to them, we overcompensate by almost turning them into spiritual beings. Hardly of this world. We all have stories associated with the food we eat. Those stories are mostly to do with our childhoods, or our adventures when young, our life experiences. And I don't doubt that Aboriginal Australians have their own personal stories about food - but I would also imagine that food must mostly be a matter of survival. Until recent times they were hunters and gatherers and whilst they might have created legends about the animals they killed and the landscape around them, I imagine that their first concern was to eat to stay alive. We also have lots of folk tales and legends about the animals and plants we eat. Are they any different to the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories?

Besides I am not sure that Attica itself is saying anything about Aboriginal culture. It might be trying to help some Aboriginal communities develop a supply chain of their native foods, but the way it cooks that food has nothing to do with Aboriginal culture. It might be more the reviewer reading something into it all that isn't there.

Language evolves from the bottom up - I learnt this at university and it is certainly true. Just think of the all recent changes in the way the world speaks, the words that have made it into dictionaries, and think of where they came from - slang, technobabble, mannerisms of speech derived from the young ... So is it the same for food? Not quite I think. I think that in the case of food, it initially comes from the bottom up - as is the case of Attica appropriating the food of the poorest Australians, and turning it into a gourmet delight for the richest. But then, if successful, in the sense that others copy and the word spreads, then it will travel from the top down. A bit like green chicken curry about which we have spoken so much of late. Food of the peasant Thais, appropriated by top end restaurauteur David Thompson and then passed down to everyone, via cheaper restaurants, cookbooks, magazines and supermarkets. Not quite true I know, as the cheaper restaurants opened by Thai immigrants played a substantial part in the process. But anyway peasant food does quite often evolve into really high-class food served in Michelin starred restaurants and then in every tourist restaurant in town until it finds its way into the supermarket.

Giving indigenous food a hefty 'cultural' loading is however, well to my mind anyway, not the way to go. It has a whiff of that 'white saviour' thing. And besides the food has been completely transformed. Take the witchetty grubs that are served at Attica.

"As the waiter tells me, this grub was hand-harvested by skilled people of the Wamba Wamba Nation near Deniliquin. It's to end its days in a three-hatted restaurant in Ripponlea. The grub is carried away on its branch-cum-sedan-chair-cum-death-transport and returns beheaded, fried and sprinkled with finger lime salt." Dani Valent

Here they are as presented at Attica:

Yes they are alive in that picture on the left and also in the picture at the top - artistically arranged on artfully chosen twigs. And here they are as eaten and cooked by the Aborigines:

Not the same thing at all. The boy on the left is about to just pop it in his mouth and the cooked ones are just thrown on the ashes of a fire.

I suppose if you eat them raw at Attica it would be the same as eating them raw in the bush. One customer compared the taste to 'creamy avocado'. But I bet he paid a fortune for the privilege. As for the cooked version, Dany Valent describes it as: "mild, nutty and eggy with a gently crisp shell." And the customer says that,

"cooked and dusted with finger-lime salt, they’re a bit more like a very rich crinkle-cut chip, tasting to me quite a lot like prawn head, or, to one of my my pals at the table, like yabbies." Pat Nourse

But what is so very pretentious is that Dany Valent adds to her description that: "Eating it is privileged access to First Nations' culture." How so? The Wamba Wamba people may have harvested them but they have been prepared in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with First Nations' culture. Now if you go to an Aboriginal cultural centre somewhere out in the bush you may well get them prepared the Aboriginal way, but is even that "privileged access to First Nations culture." It's the same with all the indigenous nations around the world that share their culture for the tourists. Is it a good thing, a privilege? Or is it an insult, an actual demeaning of their culture? It's difficult isn't it? It's a way for them to earn a living - when money comes into the equation we automatically think it demeaning - but it is genuinely also a way to learn more about those cultures and appreciate them. After all we have been making money out of our own cultural icons for centuries.

What Attica is doing, it seems to me, is introducing rich people to unfamiliar foods in an inventive and no doubt delicious way. The hope is that those rich people will spread the word and that the Aboriginal people will be able to set up businesses that supply the market and that along the way we might learn a little bit about how those foods are harvested.

"The hope is that more education and understanding from the mainstream won’t just change the way Australians eat, but also how they see and involve indigenous communities." Chloe Chaplin - Kounta

Although maybe because the food is prepared in such fussy and complicated ways the experiment will end there. So what else does Attica have on offer?

An outback platter. of this and that. I'm guessing this is the introduction to the meal.

"a platter of morsels – quandong, pearl meat, ants (a crisp pop), macadamia cream and more." Dani Valent

Then there are emu liver bagels. Now this sounds truly revolting to me and doesn't even look that wonderful either. It was apparently a bit of a challenge to chef Ben Shewry as well.

Emu farmers aren't shipping lots of livers. Shewry and his team discovered why, working for months to express the organ's creamy brightness while toning down overwhelming ferric flavours. It works: a thin smear brushed with Davidson plum jam on an emu-bone-glazed bagel."

What on earth is an emu- bone-glazed bagel?

Then comes crocodile, which,

"took more than 100 tries to shift the dish from dry and tough to succulent and finger-licking. The ribs are brined, smoked, slow-cooked, grilled, and glazed with spiced honey. The meat is flaky like fish, mild like chicken, but a porky richness is elicited too. It's thrilling to eat." Dani Valent

I can believe that it might be thrilling to eat, but again, not much Aboriginal cultural heritage there. I doubt even that the Aborigines supplied the crocodile. I suspect that the crocodile farms up north are run by white people. I may be wrong. I sort of hope so.

It also sounds as if it's a bit difficult to turn crocodile into something worth eating.

And for dessert - Fingerlime and sugarbag honey:

"Cooked lime is stuffed with raw lime and drizzled with rare and expensive sugarbag honey, laboriously harvested from stingless indigenous bees." Dani Valent

So, so pretentious - both the dish itself, and the description of it too. And no Aboriginal would prepare it like this. They might pour some honey over a finger lime, but most probably not.

So is it offensive to the Aborigines or a tribute?

I suspect that most subsistence cultures of the world - for the First Australians, were surely a subsistence culture, living hand to mouth on what they could find - would not have spent a lot of their time on contriving complicated ways of preparing their food. Quick and simple would have been the way.

Top end food is like haute couture. It starts fashions and trends, the most tempting bits of which are then adopted and adapted by the populace at large, with some of it becoming mainstream, bastardised and popularised. Bottom to top to bottom again. Although, on reflection, I'm not sure that this pattern will happen here, because the food preparation is so complicated. Will it make others want to try too, in a simpler way?

POSTSCRIPT

I realise I have implied that I think that the Australian Aborigines have no significant culture. This is not at all what I meant. They have a complex legal and social system, they traded, I believe they even grew some crops rather than just foraging. They're music is unique, they have a rich oral tradition of stories and history and I surely need not mention their art which is just wonderful. I merely meant that I did not think that there was much of a culture around food. But I said this out of ignorance and perhaps should look into it for another post some time. I was really trying to say something about the good and the bad aspects of appropriating and changing native foods. Although you would have to argue that the foods are there for everyone wouldn't you? As long as one is sustainable and careful about them that is.