One Continuous Picnic: a gastonomic history of Australia

The Never Ending Picnic

1982 was a big year for Australian food writing. The Sydney Morning Herald began publishing the Good Living section in that year (Cheap Eats, always ahead of the game, had kicked off the year before). And Michael Symons published One Continuous Picnic. A history of eating in Australia.

And publish it he did under the Duck Press imprint, with help from his friends chef Gabriel Gaté and Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Dale, who also edited the book. Angus & Robertson had rejected it – or rather wanted to cut it in half – and Penguin dilly-dallied. That first edition sold around 3000 copies and a subsequent edition, by Penguin, another 2500.

Writing about food or food history was unheard of at that time in Australia. Indeed, much later, I rang a university and asked to speak to a historian who specialised in the history of food and was asked what food had to do with history. As Symons proves in this book – plenty.

And now, 25 years down the track, his intriguing, contentious but ultimately indispensable history of why we eat the way we eat and how we came to eat that way has been reprinted by Melbourne University Press with a foreword by Gay Bilson. A new section – The Widening Gap – brings it up to date and a subtle subtitle change makes it now One Continuous Picnic: a gastronomic history of Australia. The ‘g’ word would not have played in 1982. For those of you who haven’t read the book, here’s a quick rundown of the original 300-odd pages.

Symons’ major contention is that the history of Australian cooking – and eating – has been shaped by the occupation of Australia by white settlers at the height of the Industrial Revolution (usually given as 1740-1840, although the term was first used by Arnold Toynbee in 1884). And so, from the outset, European Australian food was grown by large, industrial (broadacre) farmers for domestic and export markets rather than by small-scale individual landholders for local consumption.

“There has never been the creative interplay between society and the soil,” he writes, “…almost no food has ever been grown by the person who eats it, almost no food preserved in the home and, indeed, very little preparation by a family cook. This is the uncultivated continent. Our history is without peasants.”

Symons goes on to say “…the lack of peasant experience – or, conversely our total history of industrialisation – explains why we have traditionally cared less about food than any other people in history.” Not to mention our beginnings as a penal colony (prison food) with the English as jailers and, in the main, the Irish as prisoners: neither of whose homelands were celebrated, at the time at least, for the bounty and interest of their tables.

Towards the end of the original book, he notes we were, at the time of his writing, passing through what he called a “gourmet boom” but wondered “could such a revolution be permanent without an agricultural base?”

The first edition ends on a note of romantic optimism, quoting Brillat Savarin’s much-quoted and misquoted maxim, “Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you who you are”, and concludes: “When we enjoy a healthy diet of fresh, local produce treated with proper respect, when we learn from peasants, Brillat-Savarin might venture that we have at last found a national cuisine and cultivated a continent.” Yeah, right. There’s only one problem. The idea of such a cuisine died, Like Brillat-Savarin, with the last peasant.

While the industrial genesis of Australian food is the core issue of the book, it takes the reader on a journey that covers so much more, from our reliance on food imported by ship – while largely ignoring the food growing all around us – that included salt meat, flour, sugar and tea to the monotonous meat-based diet of the bushman.

A chapter discusses the first Australian cookbook The English and Australian cookbook: cookery for the Many as well as the ‘Upper Ten Thousand’, published in 1864 and written by “an Australian Aristologist”, in reality one Edward Abbott. There’s a fascinating and, as far as I’m aware, unique history of the early restaurants of Sydney and Melbourne and much more. The final chapter, The Art of Eating in Australia, concludes that at the time we had “the world’s worst cuisine”. He wasn’t far wrong.

Generally, the quality of what we ate was woeful. Tomatoes were hard and pale and tasteless; beef was stringy yearling, invariably overcooked; salads were dressed, if at all, with “salad cream”, a concoction of vinegar and condensed milk. Sure, there was good food in a handful of restaurants and in a few private houses: there will always be good food.

But it was about this time (1982) that we started to head out and see the rest of the world. And we found it tasted very good indeed. Coming back from a holiday in Italy or France or Indonesia, we decided we deserved better than what my wife remembers as “charcoal chops and mushy vegies”.

So what does Mr Symons think has happened in the past 25 years? “Australians now eat much better and much worse than when this book first appeared ... It has become easier to do both with so much good food around and so much bad.”

As have many writers before him, Symons blames the hijacking of the market – that place where food is sold by growers and producers to those who will take it home and cook it –that has done a sort of a reverse butterfly and turned into a grub known as “marketing”. In other words, the glorification of non-food by overpaid spruikers. A fresh, juicy apple needs no television commercial; an ApLaDay snack bar does.

“And,” he writes, “we should be wary of super-markets, recognising them as marketplaces held captive by the corporations.” Indeed. As American nutritionist Marion Nestle, another trenchant critic of these institutions, wrote in What to Eat (North Point Press 2006), “The center aisles are filled with miracles of food technology that bear little or no resemblance in nutritional content or taste to their starting ingredients.’ In other words, these are non-foods and many Australians are seduced by them (my younger daughter, in spite of or because of her father’s profession, rarely eats anything my grandmothers would have recognised as food).

And after a far too condensed (I’d like to have seen another 50 pages at least in the new section) rundown of what Australians are eating for better or for worse today, he cleverly recaptures the word “market” and exhorts us to “Trust the market!” Not the one in O’Connell Street that deals in ephemerally valued shares that leap and swoon in price for no apparent reason, but the market you may be lucky enough to have in your suburb where you can buy food from a farmer, talk about the weather and meet the man who raised the meat. That, Symons concludes (again, as he did at the end of the first edition, this time without the intercession of peasants), will be our saviour.

I’ve got a slightly different take on this best food/worst food business. I see Australia being locked in mortal cultural combat. In one corner, the fresh, seasonal and local food, carefully prepared, cooked and eaten with love and enjoyment of our European heritage. In the other corner, the speed-obsessed jittery microwave junk guzzling Krispy Kreme culture we suck through our eyeballs every night as we’re glued to the plasma screen and stuck to our comfy couches. Yes indeedy, it’s America vs Europe. And I know where I’d rather eat.

Two small points before I finish. The book tells the sadly ironic story of Charlie Bell, the man who started cleaning toilets at McDonald’s at the age of 15 and rose to become the boss of McDonald’s worldwide, only to die of colorectal cancer at the age of 44. According to Business Review Weekly, poor old Charlie “ate a McDonald’s product most days”. It abounds with these insightful titbits of food history.

And, finally, one rotten egg thrown across the Tasman (Symons currently lives and works in new Zealand, studying New Zealand cookbooks. On page 331, he states, “The olive oil industry was flying opinion leaders to numerous ‘conferences’ (his inverted commas) mainly in Mediterranean centres to discuss the Mediterranean diet.” These trips were financed by the International Olive Oil Council which, Symons contends in a parenthetical sentence after its name was “(dominated by margarine interests)”.

While it is true that Unilever, a multinational margarine maker, did buy the Italian olive oil company Bertolli some time in the 90s, and Vetta brand oil belongs to Goodman Fielder, which also makes and sells Meadlowlea margarine (among other things), to claim that a UN-affiliated organisation whose members comprise over 20 olive growing nations and whose charter is to promote olive oil and table olives internationally was controlled by “margarine interests” is bollocks.

Now, I went on one of those trips and when I wrote about it, always declared that my trip had been paid for by the IOOC. At no time were we served margarine, asked to write anything about margarine or did the word margarine appear in any of the literature. This is a serious and silly assertion and one that really lets down the admirable scholarship of the rest of the book.

Personally, I think the purchase of olive oil makers by the margarine companies is interesting rather than sinister. Obviously, they can see the writing on the bread: how long will people eat such an unpleasant and artificial non-food as margarine? We’d better have a Plan B.

In her foreword, Gay Bilson quotes the journalist Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, “There’s too much food in food writing now – and too little that goes much further.” One Continuous Picnic goes much further and I do hope it continues its 25-year project of raising ire, counter-arguments and ongoing discussion of all that goes much further.