Here we are in the approximate present. In 2018, a Lowy Institute survey found that fifty-eight per cent of Australians saw climate change as a threat. In the ABS census before last, ‘22,000 identified their profession as barista’. That’s the problem with foodways. There often seems to be something small and petty about food interests (a nation of coffee drinkers?) unless we examine the bigger picture, and include agriculture and supply. Van Reyk is very good at correcting this as well as including the currency of food shifts and crazes; the follies of aspirations.

We are beholden to supermarkets and their persistent advertising (this book’s index omits ‘supermarkets’ but lists Aldi, Coles, and Woolworths, a woeful decision). We consume programs about food and cookery on television, unable to taste or smell or touch any of the food. Marketing is indiscriminate and contradictory: an advertisement for a dietary regime is followed by an advertisement for a chocolate that rewards a child. But van Reyk does draw attention to issues such as shifts away from meat-based foods, to the vexed issue of animal cruelty, to the increasing number of children (and adults) with food allergies, and, importantly, to some reforms in what foods are sold to Indigenous peoples in outback areas. But inequality in general is not addressed. The poor choose fast food because it is cheap, because their purse cannot afford the nutritious fresh food that requires cooking, not because it is a version of food from Cockaigne, from Luilekkerland, the lazy, luscious land of myth where pre-cooked geese flew.

By 1997, what chefs and food writers had called Modern Australian Cuisine became the more confident Australian Cuisine. We had become, according to van Reyk, a ‘Foodie Nation’. This description, which I have always seen as pejorative, is used as a compliment. Whatever cultural leaning a menu declared, it was food made from, for the most part, ingredients grown in Australia and cooked by Australians. Influences had been assimilated into repertoires, via migration, travel, and a belated flowering of interest in our geographical proximity to Southeast Asia.

SBS programs played a pivotal, positive role in the celebration of multitudinous culinary practices, not only via restaurants but by recording what Ghassan Hage has lovingly called ‘acts of everyday multiculturism’. (I remember eating injera for the first time, made by Somali women who lived in Kensington, a Melbourne suburb. There were no husbands; they had been killed in Somalia.)

Van Reyk’s emphasis on the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy is misplaced. Gloriously social and educative though the Symposium has been, and continues to be, it is a world unto itself, furthering academic studies rather than influencing Australian eating habits (I need to declare here my participation over a long period). Van Reyk includes the menu from the 1990 SAG, a bush foods buffet, as evidence of a healthily increasing interest in pre-colonial foodways and Indigenous foods. But supermarket aisles have barely a jar of wattleseeds on show. Nevertheless, a number of papers given at these symposia have provided him with useful documentation.

In One Continuous Picnic: A history of eating in Australia (1982), Michael Symons posited that it was our ‘lack of links with the land’ that defined our eating habits. He would, much later, write that ‘capitalism has systematically uncultivated the world, by having trivialised gastronomic talk, along with separating people from the soil, and imposing globalised machine production’. He did not address the foodways of the peoples who inhabited this continent for so many thousands of years before colonisation and the falsity of terra nullius. That wasn’t his project, but his thesis that we colonists lacked links to the land nicely coincides with van Reyk’s 2021 title, which, for a different book, would be seen as ironic. True to the Land begins at the beginning, the pre-human, and the pre-colonial beginning (‘Before people arrived, there was the land. So it is with the land that this history also begins’), and threads it way through evidence of the foodways of the First Nations peoples before Captain Cook’s ‘possession’ of the east coast on behalf of George III, through settlement, Federation, the interwar years, and the postwar years, to the present.

I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, like Gillian Mears, ‘a young girl determined against lambchopdom’ and found van Reyk’s summation of this period lively. Nature and nurture: working-class dependence on free bottles of (too warm) milk at state school, peas picked up on the back of a forkful of mashed potato, the aforesaid lamb chops, plums falling from a tree in a suburban backyard, and then to Italian restaurants near Melbourne University, another forward-stitch to Chinese restaurants and Labor politics in Sydney in the 1970s, and then, as if by magic, to truffle markets in France, a version of Les Murray’s ‘more ortolans, more cabernets’, until old age, much less income, easy home-cooked meals, and equanimity.

I worry about food security – we should all proactively worry about food security. Congratulations are due to van Reyk for his emphasis on climate (droughts, bushfires, flooding rains) and soil (Australia has ‘some of the oldest and poorest soils’). The penultimate paragraph of True to the Land speaks to Bruce Pascoe’s suggestion that we should cultivate native crops, grasses in the main, replacing introduced crops. In 2018, Pascoe said: ‘[These crops] are not as productive as wheat per acre, but the on-costs are nil, they are Australian grasses that grow in drought, tolerate poor nutrition, with no fertilizers or pesticides.’ This sounds paradisical, and at the same time like a penance. We are so bound to crops like wheat, one of the mainstays of our diet, and so bound to it economically (sourdoughdom?). By coincidence, as I finished van Reyk’s book, I read a review by Susan Pedersen of Diet for a Large Planet, by Chris Otter (London Review of Books, 23 September 2021). Pedersen wrote, ‘Hunger still stalks our world but today as many people (one billion) are obese as are hungry, and more than 400 million are diabetic as well.’ Diabetes, a major problem in Australia’s Indigenous populations, might find a partial solution in a return to a ‘pre-colonial diet’ as posited by Pascoe and also by a recent panellist on ABC TV’s The Drum, but it will never be a practical or politically popular solution, a back-stitch too far.

Cooking is more than heating. It is, as Symons has written, ‘nutrition, hedonism, social expression, cultural expression and civilising process’. As such, it plays a pivotal role in determining who we are. Fernand Braudel introduced ‘everyday life’ into volume one of his Civilization and Capitalism (1979). He called it ‘material civilization’, and economics, in all its variations, from household to federal spending, is implicated at every turn.

The fourth aphorism in Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 Physiologie du goût is ‘Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.’ We are the product of time, geography, and consumption, in all our variations.