Rebecca Barnes calls it the Noma effect.
When the world’s best chef, Rene Redzepi relocated his acclaimed restaurant Noma to Sydney earlier this year for a 10-week pop up, and based his menu entirely on Australian native foods, it had an immediate impact.
Demand suddenly soared, leaving growers in Australia’s still relatively small native foods industry struggling to keep up with supply.
“The world’s gone berserk, everyone wants it, we’re getting enquiries from everywhere,” said Rebecca, who has been part of the native food industry for more than a decade and runs native food stall, Playing With Fire, at the Mullumbimby Farmers Market.
Redzepi incorporated foods like Kakadu plum, pepper berries, lilly pilly, wattle seed, magpie goose and tree ants into his menu, foods that until this point, have been largely ignored by white Australia (with a few notable exceptions). It was as if Redzepi somehow opened our eyes to these ingredients, giving us a new appreciation of what has always been in our backyard, and what sustained Indigenous Australia for tens of thousands of years.
Rebecca – who as a result of the Noma effect is now mentoring Aboriginal farmers to start their own native food farms – says the diversity of Australian native foods is incredible.
“The East Coast Aboriginals had the world’s richest traditional diet. They had seafood, they had land meats, they had fruit and veg – they had it all,” she said.
By ignoring (or deliberately avoiding) these foods for so long, Australians have missed out on the array of delicious flavours that native foods offer. We’ve also missed out on their incredible nutritional and medicinal goodness. Science is starting to reveal that native foods were the original superfoods – rich in antioxidants, minerals and anti-inflammatory. Davidson Plum, for example, a rainforest fruit native to the Northern Rivers, is packed with potassium as well as zinc and Vitamin E, and has antioxidant levels greater than blueberries.
From a farmer’s perspective, growing native foods is about as low maintenance as it gets, and low impact farming practices equal a big win for the environment and sustainability: “At out farm we mow the grass – that’s about as much maintenance as we do,” said Rebecca.
“We don’t fertilise, there’s no pest control. We don’t to do these things because the soil is right, and the conditions are right.”
“We don’t have to do anything because it all belongs here and grows here.”
Find Rebecca’s stall, Playing With Fire, at the Mullumbimby Farmers Market every Friday.
HEALING WITH FOOD
In his book, The Oldest Foods on Earth, author John Newton suggests that as a step toward reconciliation, we start a new Australia Day tradition of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians sitting down to share a meal of native ingredients.
Rebecca Barnes fully supports the idea, but says we shouldn’t stop there: “There’s Reconciliation Week, Sorry Day, NAIDOC Week.”
“Unfortunately we have lost much of our knowledge about native foods, but they’re foods just like the rest of the world has, ” she said.
“There’s nothing so different about them. The fruits, the herbs, the spices, are all just the same as you find elsewhere in the world. We really should have been eating them all this time, but like other parts of Aboriginal culture, we’ve either squashed it or ignored it.”
Story and pics by Kate O’Neill
