100 Million Years of Food by Stephen Le Read Free Book Online Page B

Australian plants have long roots, which allow them to tap water from deep within the soil without increasing salinity. Kangaroos, wallabies, and emus have relatively soft feet, which do not compact the soil, and they feed on native plants with long roots. The plants along riverbanks are preserved, and the currents of rivers are slower. Salt-adapted trees have small, intensely flavored fruits that contain high levels of antioxidants, including vitamin C. Kangaroo flesh has high levels of zinc (which plays an important role in the immune system). Saltbush lambs are not native, but because they are adapted to arid environments, they consume natural vegetation that is rich in salt and other minerals.
    So with all the positive environmental and health benefits and superior tastes of native plants and animals, why aren’t people flocking to places like Charcoal Lane? Ashan, Charcoal Lane’s manager, explains that when the restaurant tried to offer “kangaroo tail” on its menu, people stayed away from it. The tail was unfamiliar to diners, and its location far down on the animal made the meat less appealing. If it was called simply “kangaroo,” there was more interest. Still, kangaroo is unlikely to become a local staple. The kangaroo appears in the Australian coat of arms and holds a place of honor for many Australians. Other people simply are put off by the notion of native Australian cuisine, which conjures images of Aboriginal staples like grubs, peculiar foods that require effort to consume, rather than something to eat on a regular night out, like Italian.
    Mark Olive is an Aboriginal cook who runs an Aboriginal food catering business located in a nondescript warehouse just a few blocks away from downtown Melbourne. He is widely known and has been featured in TV shows. When I visit Mark’s catering business, I find him to be soft-spoken and charming, resembling a gentle bear. He once started an Aboriginal restaurant in Sydney, the Midden, but he says that the restaurant opened before the public was prepared to accept Aboriginal foods.
    His current business offers an impressive range of native herbs and fruits: bush cucumber, desert lime, spicy desert raisins (kutjera), lemon myrtle leaf, marsdenia (bush banana), mountain pepperleaf and native pepperberry, muntrie berries, native basil and thyme, passionberry, quandong, rivermint, saltbush, sea parsley (also called sea celery), tanami apples, and the wattleseed that found its way into my meal. Ironically, the biggest consumers of Mark’s herbs and spices are overseas buyers. Mark is dismayed by Australians’ reluctance to recognize the bounty of native plants and animals and their inability to see popular “cute” animals as food.
    â€œWe have to get our own people in our own country to start utilizing more and more of these herbs and spices. We’ve got kangaroo, emu, and crocodile in this country that people tend to walk away from. I think that’s because it is our coat of arms. For Aboriginal people, it was never their coat of arms. Just like sheep, pigs, everything else, it’s a food source. Yes, they’re cute, but I think lambs are cute, yet we eat them.” Throughout much of recent Australian history, Aboriginals did not exist, in political life or civic society, and so their cuisine was also ignored. “If you weren’t counted, you weren’t part of the country,” Mark says. “It wasn’t until 1967 that we got birth certificates to say we’re actually here. There have been big changes. Australia still has a long way to go, I think, in owning its Aboriginal history, being proud of it, for our immigrants to understand the history of this country. These sorts of things have to change.”
    Jon Belling, an Aboriginal man who works with Mission Australia, the group that runs Charcoal Lane, expresses similar frustrations. When I meet him at his office in downtown Melbourne, he looks