Home kitchens hold the keys to our food culture

Recent news articles lamenting the future ofMelbourne's food culture and the loss of soul in our restaurant industry plays out a bleak picture. The issues of dine out, not order in, pay staff properly or pay the price, consolidate or close are all taking their toll.  Convincing consumers to dine out not order in is a great step to making food social again.

Encouraging people to dine out to save Melbourne's food culture is admirable.  However, thinking that restaurants and chefs hold the keys to our collective food culture is egotistical. When you ask most chefs who inspired them to cook it’s their parents or Gran or Nonna or Aunties who top the list.

Our restaurant culture is a reflection of our domestic kitchens and our cultural history.  What we cook in our homes eventually makes its way to the restaurant and hotel kitchens across Australia and the world.  Given Australia's multicultural origins, our restaurant culture is as diverse as the brave, fearless and innovative migrants who have populated Australia and the Indigenous Australians who farmed Australia for the 65,000 years before them.

We all want to see a vibrant, sustainable and resilient food culture in Melbourne and Victoria (I’m from regional Victoria and we would like this too).  For too long we have been outsourcing our domestic food requirements.  We have been using the industrialized food system to promote our personal wealth and free us from the domestic chattels of sourcing, growing, preserving, preparing and presenting food in the domestic kitchens around Australia. 

I acknowledge that the availability of prepackaged food has enabled women to spend less time at home and more time in paid employment. Selling convenience was the biggest con by the food industry and the government has been duplicitous in this.  Governments just weren’t equipped back in the 1950’s and 60’s to understand the connection between a society's health, its environmental sustainability and it’s food culture.

Now we know better.  People are reskilling in the traditional art of home economics, prepping, homesteading, permaculture or Retro suburbia.  They all have ethics and principles around caring for the earth and others and only taking your fare share. The challenge is building food literacy in a generation of people that hasn’t been exposed to the trials and tribulations of wars, oil shocks, shortages or high unemployment. 

For people in power (local, state and federal governments or large institutions - TAFE, schools and hospitals) to make the shifts necessary to help people build food literacy and life skills is going to be hard for them. They must stop being the barriers and blockers in this new climate.  Shifting their mindsets from Jobs and Growth to less work, more life skills and sustainability is their challenge.  Ours is to be patient with them.  They are doing their best.

Restaurants, and chefs in particular are not the solution to the deepening soulless food culture, food literacy decline and health crisis Australia is finding itself in.  Chef's, you are not the priests residing over Melbourne's food, its culture or its culinary soul.  Rest easy guys and girls.  You do not have to be the martyrs leading the charge of social change.

Schools have become the second home for many young people.  School canteens could be the ideal place to inspire young people to produce healthy nutritious food from locally grown produce. School garden numbers are increasing. We know building a healthy eating program requires a top down, whole school approach to make it work.  And an army of passionate volunteers.  All worth it because healthy kids learn better and active healthy teachers are more productive and engaged. 

Our collective food culture is held in the home kitchens and backyard gardens across our nation.  Our restaurant industry, and it is an industry, make no mistake, is reflective of our local, indigenous and international multicultural food heritage.  Our passionate home cooks and gardeners transform the food from growers, aggregators, farmers markets into our collective food culture.  Our future is in our domestic hands.  We must inspire and lead our children in order to create our vision of foodtopia.  To know how to grow, preserve, and prepare local sessional nutritious food for yourself and your family is the single most important thing you can do to reduce your impact on the earth, improve your health and build resilience for your future.  How we eat and socialize at home defines us.

Yes dining out is better than ordering in, but cooking at home is a skill and a way of life.  And who knows, we may be forced to grow our own (food) just like Churchill encouraged Britons to do during WW2.

Start small.  One meal a week. One or two veggies from your garden. One shop a month from the local farmers markets, visit an organic shop or join a veggie box subscription.  You’ll be hooked soon enough. Saving the Restaurant Industry and developing its food culture starts at home.  Growing passionate, food literate young people will provide an educated, intelligent and loyal consumer based for the Restaurant Industry in the years to come.