Bright spots for foodies in 2020

What else can we salvage from a year with so little to recommend it?

Melbourne restaurateur Shane Delia. Picture: Paul Jeffers

My latest obsession is a plastic tub with holes drilled in the lid.

Inside is an active combination of flour, water, and airborne yeasts, a living thing. Yes, my pet rock is a sourdough starter. And that probably makes me person No 5,079,321 worldwide who started a sourdough culture during 2020, the year we all want to forget.

Making bread from it? Well, I’d just love to tell you one of the great things that came of this horrible year was excellent home-baked bread, and for people all over the world it possibly has been. Sourdough and banana bread went viral in 2020.

Personally, however, my respect for the people who do it really, well, just grew exponentially. My sourdough winneth no prizes, but being able to bake bread at home, without commercial yeast, has for millions of people been one of the very good things that came out of this year.

And I will keep trying.

What else can we salvage from a year with so little to recommend it?

Well the whole “I can actually cook” thing, I reckon. The world over, people have had to mine a certain resourcefulness they may not have known was in them. Being robbed of our restaurants — grand and modest, but especially modest — forced so many of us to shop and prepare food in a manner many urban singles had either forgotten, or maybe never even learnt.

It was part of a general return to meaningful stuff thrust upon us: home, family, community … and cooking.

Nostalgia food. Do it from scratch food. Food we may not have hitherto attempted, because it was easier to go out (and yes, my first pho was a labour of love, but a labour nonetheless). Food we grew.

Yes, another excellent thing to come out of this year of isolation, for many, was the commitment to nourish some soil so as to nourish ourselves.

From balcony planters to backyard vegie boxes, the early stages of COVID-19 caused an unprecedented rush on Bunnings edible seedling shelves. And, having stuck things in the ground that ended up on our plates, a lot of us decided it was worth pursuing.

Personally, I went from a reasonable collection of herbs, a curry bush and a lemon tree to a veritable market garden of edible leaves, cucumbers, zucchini, chillies, tomatoes and plenty else, besides having built three hardwood vegetable-growing boxes by hand.

They are a direct, slipshod and very tangible legacy of the official Year of Shit.

And maybe a little effort, and appreciation of that process, led to a general shift in thinking about the importance of supporting local growers and producers? It’s just a thought.

As veteran of the high-end food retailing scene Sally Gosper, of Sydney’s Two Providores, told The Australian before Christmas, that the “support local” message had been very strong this year.

“Supporting the farmers committed to innovation and sustainability, buying from the bush-style operations or thankful4farmers — the public have really been behind these type of initiatives,” Gosper said.

“Both chefs and the public now put a lot of store in the story behind the brand. They want the backstory.

And naturally people also going back to basics and making their own Christmas sweets and baked goods as gifts —
labours of love and skills learnt during lockdown.”

I’ve been inspired by the resourcefulness of many in the hospitality/restaurant industry: chefs, to give just one example, like Shane Delia, in Melbourne, who grasped victory from the hungry jaws of defeat by creating new businesses like Providoor, now national, that’s not only helped keep his own team afloat but provided a conduit to business for hundreds of chefs.

So many in the food and beverage scene shined bright when adversity slapped them around.

And that’s a positive to take forward into 2021.