Craft, cronuts, kale and caramel (salted); foraging, farm-to-fork and mainstream fermentedness
by PHILIP WHITE
Shhh, just a quiet one: as Australian eaters and drinkers, between you and me, does any of that stuff above sound familiar? That's how the Australian government describes our gastronomy on the current Tourism Australia website.
While ANZAC Day's
vainglorious fluff and bluster continued to hide from many Australians the complex horrors we send our
military kids to face in the Cradle of Civilisation, I spent some time
wondering what refugees from, say, Turkey or Damascus would imagine Australia
to be.
Like before they set out
with their families, to escape the types of horror we officially recognised
with Monday's national holiday.
How would refugees decide,
if they have a chance to consider? Imagine the type our immigration Ministers
tell us are always jumping the queue. They tell us these "illegals"
are rich middle class people who want to get away from all that bother and come
to Australia to make some money. Say these folks naïvely check the Australian
government websites.
Let's say they think one
of the things they might do if they can get through is open a restaurant. Good
track record for reffos in Aussie, restaurants. The hopeful immigrants check our state-of-the-art
for potential customer profiles and restaurant trends.
Refugee from Malaysia: Cheong Liew, who changed the way we eat ... without our post-war ingress of peoples on the run, we would have missed incredible cuisines like that introduced by Mr. Good Evening of the Pantz family, below ...
They find the Tourism
Australia site. It's fascinating to see what this faceless gubmnt mob thinks we
have to offer in the sustenance and satiation sector.
Beneath a crooked photo of
a bottle of Harkam Wines Aziza's Preservative free Semillon 2014, yep, none
other, the Fed tells us what to expect of what it calls 'the Future'.
"Australia loves a
good taste trend," they tell us. "In 2015, our food and drink
obsessions included everything from craft beer and cronuts to kale and salted
caramel. While we will remain infatuated with all of the above into 2016, we
also have our eyes fixed on the future.
"Business futurist Morris
Miselowski says although the fashion for foams has dissipated in Australia,
food 'trends' such as foraging, farm-to-fork eating and fermenting are now
mainstream."
wine forager by George
Appreciating their omission
of any of the various sorts of dust intrinsic to the foams fad, this is nevertheless
Tourism Australia's official website, under the heading Food and Wine Trends 2016.
Imagine the surreal
accidents of translation into, say, Chinese.
Miselowski's speaking
specialty and "business-orientation" is what he calls "future-vision".
I think this means
"what happens next."
What happens next? It'll be more wild rabbits from the creeks at about 3/4 adult size, stuffed with garlic, ginger and fresh herbs then grilled and smoked over old French oak red wine staves up my joint ... wrap in linen, carry in shoulder bag, eat with pocket knife over 3-4 days ... photo©Philip
White
I hope I've got this
wrong. It's strange.
I'm sure people all over
the world will be delighted to learn that here in GodzoneOz the parilla
(Argentinian) and robata (Japanese) methods of cooking meat are "particularly
popular" because "barbecuing is being recognised as part of the
national identity no matter where you're from".
Some secret Australian underground groups still prefer to cook and smoke their meat over pre-Cambrian flame, which long precedes the Japanese and Latinate carnivory
So where we up to? Our gubmnt thinks we are, or wishes we were becoming foragers and mainstream fermenters who have adopted Japanese and Argentinian methods of cooking meat. Either that, or they simply want everybody else in the world to think that's what we're like, us Australians.
Like us crooked boat mob that spent a coupla centuries pinching the country from the original owners who'd been here fifty or something thousand years, slaughtered them, and now expects to get away with selling it to the Chinese without anybody actually paying the original owners for it.
So where we up to? Our gubmnt thinks we are, or wishes we were becoming foragers and mainstream fermenters who have adopted Japanese and Argentinian methods of cooking meat. Either that, or they simply want everybody else in the world to think that's what we're like, us Australians.
Like us crooked boat mob that spent a coupla centuries pinching the country from the original owners who'd been here fifty or something thousand years, slaughtered them, and now expects to get away with selling it to the Chinese without anybody actually paying the original owners for it.
Colonial Australia has a history of brutal, unabashed racism and slaughter ... to a milder or more perverse degree this continues under rote electoral (parliamentary-governmental) and bureaucratic societal cadres
Ooops. That just slipped out, that bit.
But for real, this thing
doesn't even mention supermarkets.
I don't need to go on too
long about it but I must at least relate the drinks thing.
" The industry guru [Miselowski]
predicts that, in 2016, we will be drinking more naked wines ... " our
gubmnt informs us.
It could edify somebody in
this chain if this mention of nudity were a ploy to deter the more zealous
followers of any of the Abrahamic faiths, but no.
Naked Wines happens to be a
giant award-winning online wine retailer founded in Britain in 2008 by Rowan
Gormley. It advances funds to struggling winemakers who supply the eventual
wine at a minimal wholesale rate. It works across the UK, USA and Australia,
and is spreading since it sold last year to Majestic Wine, the biggest
specialist wine retailer in the UK. Gormley is still at the wheel.
A thinker would probably
by now be wondering what a terrible accident all this must be when the same
idiocracy has a bit of a go at clarification.
"Naked wines … it's
only natural" is the later headline. It then proffers one Byron Woolfrey,
who runs a mobile bar, to say he's noticed "an upward spike in demand for
wines made with minimal intervention" and our government goes back to
recommending Harkham Wines - at Momofuku
Seiobo and Chiswick - and Lucy Margaux, from the Adelaide
Hills, at Billy Kwong in Sydney.
Syd Long may have seen some upward spikes when he painted Pan in New South Wales in 1898, but I don't reckon he had too much minimal intervention in mind.
Anton Kloppers and his
naturally naked minimal intervention team at Lucy Margaux will probably be delighted
that the 7 or 8 million tourists expected to visit Australia this year have
been advised by the federal government to duck straight into Billy Kwong's for
a bottle of the wine.
This will discourage these
visitors from coming to South Australia to check out Anton's actual Château,
with that unique brand name which must intrigue the winemakers of Bordeaux, not
to menton Corinne Mentzelopoulos, the, er, the owner of, er, Château Margaux.
Corinne's current Margaux,
the 2014, sells for AU$450-$520 per bottle.
As the day wore on and I
made an attempt to discover who chooses these gurus for us, I bumped into a killer
from the USA. Google executive Ray Kurzweil's a serious visionary, the genius
inventor of text-to-speech technology, amongst many other brilliant things.
Since he worked on radical digital musical
instruments with Stevie Wonder in the early '80s, I pay attention when Kurzweil
has a blurt. He just told a heavyweight gathering in New York that he's
convinced computers will "possess emotions and personality" and therefore "match and possibly beat" human
intelligence by 2029.
Skull by Jeremy Maher
"I'm not talking about logical intelligence," Kurzweil said,
having just put a date on it. "It is being funny, and expressing a loving
sentiment ... That is the cutting edge of human intelligence."
As logic and truth and the discernment of it seems to have jumped the
datapack for now, maybe Prime Minister Turnbull could urge Kurzweil and Google
to hurry up with an advance package for the skunkworks propaganda mob out the
back of Tourism Australia.
At the risk of cutting some of Miselowski's
foragement and farm-to-fork foment, a drizzle of wit might save somebody's day.
Give a Digger a bit of a chuckle,
Cobber.
In the precious Adnyamathanha country, called the Flinders Ranges by us northern invaders for the last, well, nearly 200 whole years (!), the author, of Northman background, talks with Arkaba Station owner Dean Rasheed, a man of Afghan background, about geology and how the fuck he manages to run sheep on it all, joking about fantasy vineyard sites ... those rocks are all back around 600-750 million years ... photo Dennis Vice
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