In late January, Newtown’s pulse became thready after the permanent closure of its lifeblood, Lentil as Anything. The pay-what-you-can restaurant was a microcosm of mutual aid, and highlighted how community-oriented not-for-profits could operate on a larger scale. Following financial struggles and rent-related disputes, the landlord decided to lock the manager out of the building due to a stalemate regarding rent payments.

Jinghua Qian and Maddee Clark use a visit to the Footscray Coles ‘ethnic food aisle’ to discuss how ethnicity is imagined, managed and remade in Australia.

Palestinian Economic Week is an opportunity for allies to shift from performance politics to genuine economic and political support for Palestinians. People are finally talking and questioning where their food is coming from.

The Australian anti-halal campaign, like the French one, aims at criminalising and further excluding the already marginalised Muslim minority. While racists pretend to act in the name of national unity, their words and deeds show us how food becomes a means to distinguish a superior ‘us’ from an inferior ‘them’ – the unwanted and unwelcome Arab and Muslim Other.

The success of Kellogg's breakfast cereal led an Adventist baker who had trained under Kellogg at Battle Creek to move to Australia and begin production of the first Sanitarium products in a bakery in Northcote. This would go on to spawn the country’s most iconic, sports-star beloved, wheat-based national hero: the Weet-Bix.

I see Nigella as a sort of role model for all those women for whom eating is a hard-won skill. For me, her real talent lies not in cooking or even her recipes per se, but in her confidently taking a creamy, loaded forkful of carbonara as joyfully as she wields the tools of language.

Somehow over the last decade, food has become supreme arbiter – moving around the cultural landscape and absorbing our biggest fears and desires, before transforming everything into a café-ready salve. What’s strange about food culture’s claim to authenticity is not so much the baroque propositions – slow food, local food, homemade food – only that the stuff we eat has taken on such a potent, transformative quality in the first place.

That initial enthusiasm gave way to apprehension and dismay as the video played. Styled on the Buzzfeed genre of Hip and Young Staff Trying New Things (think Guys Experience Periods For the First Time or Regular People Get Tricked Into Olympic High Diving), ABC RN’s video showcases a group of people trying chicken feet for the first time. The presenter, a young white man, tells the viewer that since it’s the year of the rooster and it’s traditional to celebrate the Lunar New Year with food, ‘we thought we’d get some CHICKEN FEET!’ That witty segue also marks the end of the informational part of the video, which lasted all of ten seconds.