Dramatic evolution of the Australian palate

FIRSTLY an apology. I thought MasterChef was a cooking show and so I didn't watch. But having seen the response I can now see what it really was.

The show wasn't about food preparation; it was about drama. These weren't cooks; they were artistes. This wasn't food for consumption; this was a plated canvas designed to encapsulate all the glory of human endeavour and achievement.

Forget about Michelangelo's Pieta, did you see Poh's sambal petai and glutinous rice dumpling?

Unsure of what I just said? Then not to worry as I just happen to speak fluent foodie. You see, that's half the fun of being a modern-day urban sophisticate: using a language and referencing a dish that only the food cognoscenti understand. Or at least pretend to understand. For your information, a petai is a bean and sambal is a peppery condiment. Don't you lot know anything?

But the Australian culinary scene wasn't always like this. Can you believe it, food in the 1960s was quite bland. No, really, it was.

I was 18 and had left home in the 1970s before I had heard of or had seen a zucchini. In fact, I was quite shocked by this sudden advent of the zucchini. I suspect like most baby boomers I had assumed that the vegetable world was a finite universe.

God had hidden different fruits and vegetables across the planet and it was mankind's job to progressively find them all. He hid the potato and the tomato in the Americas so we didn't find them until the 16th century.

I thought the whole process was not unlike a great Easter egg hunt for edible foods. But, I had latently reasoned, surely by the 1960s all of Earth's edible vegetables had been found.

Not so. It was the Italians who brought the zucchini to Australia. My discovery of the zucchini as a young man was very interesting, I thought. Mind-expanding, in fact. Obviously the Italians were more eagle-eyed than Anglos in spying edible foods.

But this wasn't the end of my vegetable revelations. Almost 20 years after coming to grips with the discovery of the zucchini, I learnt that the flowers were edible and in fact were deep-friable! Where does the culinary ingenuity of the Italians end?

But the Italian invasion of Australian cuisine didn't stop at the zucchini. They also seduced us with pizza, lasagne, cappuccino (the pronunciation of which was promptly Anglicised to cup-o-cheeno) and olive oil. In the 1960s, olive oil was bought from chemists since it was used for medicinal purposes, although I am not sure what ailment required a jolly good dose of olive oil (that is assuming chemists' olive oil was in fact for ingesting).

For 30 years following the 1950s, Anglo-Australians dismissed, and in fact parodied what was commonly referred to as wog food. However, by the 1980s a fusion was taking place: Anglo-Australians tried Mediterranean food and discovered that it was better than the rubbish they were eating. By the 1990s, not only were Anglos eating Mediterranean food but they began adopting aspects of the lifestyle. All of a sudden restaurants spilled on to the pavement. Australians began eating al fresco on the sidewalk in much the same way that the Greeks and Italians would eat in the piazza. (Although I suspect this movement in Australia was helped along by indoor smoking bans.)

By the late 1980s, the Vietnamese were making their presence felt in Sydney's Cabramatta and Melbourne's Abbotsford. Asian influences augmented the Mediterranean in our diet. Anglo cooking retreated to the back stalls.

The wok made its first appearance in the family home; by the end of the century the wok even make it to the barbecue. But if the Italians were astute at finding new vegetables then the Asians were in a league of their own: bok choy, pak choy and witlof were being stocked in mainstream supermarkets by the end of the 1990s.

I was into my 30s before I realised that lettuce wasn't just lettuce. It had a name. It was called iceberg lettuce. (I also discovered that my tea wasn't tea, it was black tea, which was distinct from green tea.)

The lettuce revelation was in some respects more confronting than the zucchini discovery because I quickly realised there were in fact shades of lettuce: mescalin, butter and cos, as well as iceberg. You will appreciate that to an Anglo-Australian this is akin to discovering that there are shades of Vegemite.

The success of lettuce varieties encouraged other forms of leaf life to weasel their way into our diet. The Asians were behind the rise of the choys, but it was the Italians who delivered the consummate leaf invasion. In the 1990s in like a rocket came radicchio, or rocket, the spicy lettuce that is now as de rigueur as goat's cheese and beetroot relish in any yuppie cafe.

Rocket's success further encouraged other leaf life to make a move. Spinach arrived but quickly reinvented itself as the delightfully moreish baby spinach. The same thing happened with broccoli. I had long been aware of the existence of broccoli, but within the last decade this vegetable reinvented itself as the hipper broccolini. Baby spinach and broccolini are part of a babyification movement in vegetables which includes baby carrots, baby peas and baby potatoes.

Not too far from the vegies and leaf sections of the supermarket is fruit. Now fruit's fruit. Surely. Not so. I grew up on Jonathon apples. At some stage in the late 1990s the rosy-cheeked Jonathan mysteriously disappeared. I suspect Jonno was taken out the back and shot. Too easily bruised, so they say. Mind you, I suspect those Pink Ladies were behind it all but I have no proof.

I am happy to report that oranges have remained basically naval and that pears are still mostly bosc or packham. Although I must say I am mightily wary of a new breed of bananas that for some reason need to have their ends dipped in hot, red wax. Why? And why is there no babyification movement in fruit when it applies so broadly in the leaf and vegetable sectors?

And I haven't even started on the proliferation of herbs, condiments or breads. I sometimes wonder whether an Australian from the 1950s visiting us today could in fact eat our food. Does anyone know how to fry chops and boil vegetables any more?

But more to the point, if this is how the Australian diet and cuisine has changed in 20 years, then what might we be eating in the 2020s? I do have some thoughts on this which I will save to another time.

Bernard Salt is a KPMG partner; [e-mail] ; twitter.com/bernardsalt