Australia Eats: Contemporary Perspectives on Australian Food and Identity

by Jacqui Newling (Editor), Alison Vincent (Editor)

This volume brings together a diverse group of Australian scholars who offer a range of perspectives on Australian identity and “being Australian” through the lens of food. It addresses the complex nature of Australia’s always-evolving culinary landscape where multiculturalism and enduring Indigenous foodways are entangled with settler-colonial legacies. How has Australian food culture been shaped by the way Australians see themselves and by their cultural assumptions and aspirations in an increasingly globalised world? What role do foods from Indigenous and immigrants’ cuisines play in Australian culinary identity - how have they been acclimatized and acculturated, interpreted or adapted, adopted and at times co-opted in Australian and global contexts? And how do Aboriginal Australians and immigrants assert their senses of identity through food?

Through its multidisciplinary approach to these and other contemporary debates around food and identity in Australia from both non-Indigenous and Aboriginal scholars, this book makes a unique contribution to the literature on food and food culture in Australia.

354 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication January 31, 2027