What does your 'past, present and future' of food look like?

From grieving with kueh to using bush foods to create a better world, the New Voices On Food books support diverse views on eating and the true power of food.

Source: Diem Tran

If you want to travel through time, you don't need a futuristic machine – you can just reach for Armenian apricots, Asian brews, Jewish desserts and Indigenous curry myrtle.

That's what I learnt while working on the second New Voices On Food book, with its 'Past, present, future' theme. Like the first edition from 2020, it's a Diversity In Food Media project printed by Somekind Press – so it shines the spotlight on people from under-represented backgrounds and their stories about meals and memories.

The original New Voices On Food featured a diverse range of personal accounts. Tyree Barnette explored how the soul food of his African-American ancestors was created from scraps and resilience. Minyungbal activist Arabella Douglas showcased the shared history between Asian and Indigenous communities in Australia through her proposed creation of a Chinese restaurant shaped by 65,000 years of First Nations history (after some COVID-related curveballs, it became a reality for one night at this year's Melbourne Food & Wine Festival with chef Christine Manfield– it was realised via smoky karkalla, eel dumplings with native ginger, and Walkabout native tea).

If you want to travel through time, you don't need a futuristic machine – you can just reach for Armenian apricots, Asian brews, Jewish desserts and Indigenous curry myrtle.

Diem Tran's first-ever published piece appeared in the inaugural book – it was a funny, vivid and moving account about how her Vietnamese mother became a better cook after surviving two strokes (credit an old iPad, YouTube and Duolingo for this improvement). Tran went on to write for various outlets after that exposure, including SBS Food. You can find her brief history of the fortune cookie here and her mi goreng memories here.

SBS Food also generously published some submissions I loved that we, sadly, could not fit into the first New Voices On Food. Visvajit Sriramrajan told us how banana leaves resemble the "ears of an elephant" and are "the beating heart of the Tamil culinary ethos", Sara Giraldo Maestre conveyed the storytelling power of cheesy Colombian buñuelos and Diana Tung recapped priceless lessons learnt via the 50c dim sim she sold in her mum's takeaway shop (to name a few stories – you can browse the online collection here).

Banana leaves are an excellent delivery system for serving food. Source: Getty Images

Two years later, it's a similar situation: we opened submissions to another New Voices On Food anthology and ended up with many more contributions than we could squeeze into our compact paperback. So I'm grateful that SBS Food could give a few of these pieces a good home.

Diverse perspectives matter.

The second book has a 'past, present, future' theme, and if you dig through Australian food history, you'll learn it's much more multicultural than you might've first believed: in 1792, Indian food from Calcutta (rice, semolina, pulses for making dhal) helped save the British colony from starvation; in 1870, prisoners were making "first-class olive oil" in Adelaide Gaol and halal emu was eaten around the same time; and though soy sauce was first sold here in 1804, one of our first cookbook authors, Edward Abbott, repeated the questionable claim that it was flavoured with pounded cockroaches. It's a reminder that diverse perspectives matter – the Chinese miners who arrived here during the gold rush likely saw soy sauce very differently (and benefitted from well-seasoned meals as a result).

I suspect the dumplings that Ange Seen Yang fights for in her New Voices On Food 2 story might've been dipped in soy (and perhaps splashed with some black vinegar, too). Her contribution is a moving and witty piece about grappling with her Chinese grandfather's death and all the food knowledge that slips away when someone's gone. When we posted an excerpt on the Diversity In Food Media's Instagram about this, people connected with the experience of not having the adequate language skills to ask a waiter for beloved dishes your more fluent relatives once requested so effortlessly.

It's a thrill to get the chance to feature more work by this promising writer in our second book, especially after she won the Diversity In Food Media competition we ran with SBS Food earlier this year (see her winning entry here). You can read her contribution to our new book, Grieving with kueh (and other lessons you won't find in cookbooks), on this website, too.

And while you're here, you can explore the past, present and future of food through the other submitted pieces that I hinted at above. Sevana Ohandjanian conveys how Armenia's national fruit – the apricot – became a key character in her family's story, from the puckered slices that her grandmother dried in her third-floor Tehran apartment to the 'tsirani' blush her family would feel when consuming home-made apricot liqueur. The fruit is so essential to Armenian life that the duduk is shaped from its trees – the resulting wind instrument generates melodies for pivotal events, like funerals and weddings.

This fruit has so many sweet meanings for Armenians. Source: Getty Images

The writer uses the apricot to transport us through Armenian history and to her current-day existence in Sydney, where the fruit lacks the magical, full-flavoured quality it had at her grandmother's home.

You can travel through time via cups and bottles, with Yoko Baxter recounting her life through Japanese green tea customs she grew up with ("If a piece of stalk floated vertically in your tea, it was a sign of good luck") to the air mata kucing ('cat's eye drink') she enjoyed at Malaysian night markets and the bubble tea her eldest son now enjoys.

A lifetime of drinks, as drawn by Yoko Baxter. Source: Yoko Baxter

Then there's Elissa Goldstein's ever-evolving relationship with margarine (from Jewish desserts to the world's greatest vegan junk food), Hardeep Dhanoa reconnecting to Punjabi cooking after a lifetime of feeling its constraints, and Rayann Bekdache learning from her Lebanese grandparents how desserts have transformative, life-changing power. 

And when I look to the future, I think of Chris Jordan and Otis Carmichael from the Indigenous catering company Three Little Birds. They end the book talking about how they're teaching cooking lessons to incarcerated First Nations kids and conveying how Indigenous ingredients – like curry myrtles and Davidson plum – can help offer them a better alternative path in life. That's the power of food. 

New Voices On Food 2 (Somekind, $25) is available now.

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