Grubs with gusto: imagining recipes for change

Abstract

It is hardly a matter of contention that the cultural processes informing eating habits and food choices have always had ethical, economic and environmental implications; eating is both political and personal. Australian culinary thought and practice over the past 50 years has been widely influenced by ‘celebrity chefs’ who, through challenging and effecting their audience, can be seen to have broad social impact and profound modifying influence upon individual, community, and national eating habits. One of the most important Australian culinary figures is Margaret Fulton whose 1968 Cookbook has gone on to sell almost 2 million copies. This paper imagines that The Margaret Fulton Cookbook included a selection of recipes that used Indigenous Australian insects as their main ingredients and that Fulton’s intention in providing these recipes was to promote not only cultural understanding but also some wider ethical considerations of nature and Australian eating habits. That this scenario is almost unimaginable is both important and interesting enough for it to be ‘played with’, albeit in a critical manner. This paper therefore constructs a new Cookbook and deconstructs the socio-cultural meaning and the new culinary history it might make possible. Imagining one particular recipe to be especially influential in this ‘history’ allows us to think critically about food norms and the ‘otherness’ of insects which, for most Australians, are a part of nature that should not be eaten or be ‘made’ part of the self. This paper asserts not only that food is a window on the political, but that we embody our ethics through our food choices and practices, and that what we don’t eat may be even more telling than what we do. Among the disciplinary perspectives used here is Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’, which can be seen to provide ways for individuals to rationalise and justify their beliefs, understandings and practices. In using imagination to help understand the complex ways in which social norms, cultural meanings and economic realities underlie food habits, this paper is posited as an ethical intervention in, and of, itself.