I think it all sounds very tasty. And please enjoy the food you like. the more you know about the history,the more enjoyable the food wll be. But please enjoy playing and discovering and exploring. Joy is what food is all about.

When I read recently that British chef Jamie Oliver had hired an appropriation consultant, I snorted. From the very beginning of his career, Jamie has cooked mainly Italian food. But his use of Italian recipes and ingredients does not harm Italiancooks or culture. Italy is big enough and established enough to look after itself.

But in the case of Texas Mexican American cooking, this clearly happened when the gringos trampled all over and obliterated your roots.

In my book abou (non-Indigenous) t Australian Cooking,The Getting of Garlic, I quote Imaginary Homelands, in which
Salman Rushdie writes of his book Satanic Verses that it:

‘celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the
transformation that comes of new and unexpected
combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas,
politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization
and fears the absolutism of the Pure. It is a love-song
to our mongrel selves … Perhaps we are all, black,
brown and white, leaking into one another … like
flavours when you cook.

This is a powerful definition of what the best Australian chefs are doing, ‘using diverse paradoxical and
sometimes contrary influences to make something that will be entirely their own’. Australian food is, as
Rushdie writes of his book, ‘a love-song to our mongrel selves’, flavours, ingredients and origins leaking into
one another

It is this loosely linked network of Australia’s multicultural population, each with its own ideas of what
and how to eat, that at the same time denied us thechance of a traditional food culture and gave impetus
to our most talented chefs at our high public tables to daily create a mongrel cuisine, a cuisine lauded globally.

More bricolage than appropriation