The Jo Rogers Memorial Oration

This year’s nutrition theme is Regional Food for Better Health, and it is appropriate that I should be here honoring Jo Rogers – whom I met only once, and whom I remember as a straight-talking, straight-thinking woman – and in Adelaide.

Why Adelaide? Well, it’s down the road, so to speak, from the Barossa Valley, which is an exemplar of a food region. As everyone knows. The Barossa is probably the only region that is recognisable in European terms.

It is an identifiable geographic area with a defined population and range of foodstuffs that have proved viable. That’s what we mean by a region, isn’t it?

Yes and no. Or do I mean maybe? A region is actually as rubbery a concept as you can wish for. We can define a region in any number of ways. It can be political, it can be geographic, it can be climatic, it can be cultural, it can be administrative. It could be geological, cultural, imaginative, emotional.

Let’s look at some regions and examples: the Middle East is a geographic region. Australia and New Zealand form a political region. The Mediterranean is a climatic region. All the countries on it have a distinctive climate that features winter rain and long hot summers. The Mediterranean is also a geographic region in a way that has had considerable impact on the way people have eaten since their eating has been recorded. More of that later.

There are some other questions to be asked about regionality. In European terms, and in French terms particularly, there is regional food as opposed to Paris food. Paris is the capital, represents the best, and it’s been like that even since members of the royal family established their courts there. Paris has for many centuries been the place where the best of all the regions is available. That’s the theory, anyway.

In Italy, and in Spain, regional food exists independently of the capital city, and in both cases, regional cooking has a higher reputation than the cooking of the capital city. When Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander, both great proponents of Australian food, went off-shore for a joint venture book, they went to Tuscany, not Rome.

Let’s consider France, which invented regional food. If France were a pie, it could be sliced any way at all. When Caesar conquered what was then Gaul, he divided it into three. Napoleon divided it in 83 departements, geographically defined administrative units that are still in existence.

Anne Willan, the noted English-born food writer whose special subject is France, divides France into 12 areas in her book French Regional Cooking. The map I’m showing you comes from that book.

There’s another book called The Taste of France, an equally splendid regional French book which grew out of an English Sunday Times magazine series. The interesting thing is that they are not quite the same 12 areas. French departments of Health divide France slightly differently again.

The people who live in the country have their own sense of region – and it is quite likely to be different again. The French, who I think still have the highest second-home ownership in Europe, have a great sentimental attachment to "home", which is the place where their parents or grandparents grew up, and where that second home is most likely to be. The rural French are much more likely to think in terms of their specific pays , their own bit of turf, as we might say.

So are the Italians, for whom the sense of a national political identity came very much later than it did for the French.

Italian regions in cookbooks are pretty much the same as they are in this map, which comes from Savouring Italy, which is a companion volume to the earlier book on France. Those regions reflect old political boundaries or ancient colonies, and the food in those regions usually reflects their history. An example? Neapolitan cooking includes things napoletana, which means a tomato sauce. That would have been impossible until tomatoes found their way to Naples, via the Spanish. Or there’s Monzu cooking, which is a particular, rather formal style in Naples. The word comes from the French monsieur, and it’s a legacy of the time the French ran society in Naples. Or there are the rice dishes and extravagances of Sicilian cooking, legacies of the long-term Moorish rule of the island.

Piedmont was ruled by the French, and the Spanish before that – in the 16^th century. European history is very complex, compared with Australian poiltical history, and every phase of it has left an edible mark somewhere. The potatoes of Ireland are another example of the edible mark of history.

It is important to recognise that for those who live there, the sense of region may or may not be the same as the map. Piedmont, up here, is divided into 32 smaller regions. When I was there a couple of years ago, I couldn’t find out if those 32 were postal, administrative, or related to older divisions. Come to think of it, I’m not sure if it was Piedmont, or the province of Cuneo that had 32 divisions. Certainly, each of them had its own tourism brochures.

Tourism. This is the one key to regional food. And this is why I began by talking about France. The sense of regional food – as a distinctive, definable, and desirable entity – came from the French. The way food grows well in specific sites has been recognised for ages – the wines of Champagne, for example, although the wines that were drunk by French royalty for centuries of coronations were nothing like the wines we now call Champagne. There’s the distinctive use of millet in Gascony, the fondness for chestnuts in the Cevennes, and the chicken and eggs of Bresse. The eggs and butter were celebrated by the novelist Henry James, not usually thought of as a food writer.

Indeed, French cooking has codified that. All those dishes à la bourguignonne and à la provencale.

After the Revolution, with the disappearance of the court, and the emergence of the départements, what happened in them was of value. The whole of France was important, on its own terms, not because it provided amusement and food for the royal court. There was actually a gastronomic theme park proposed at the end of the 18^th century. Alexendre Deleyre proposed a "patriotic garden" in which schoolchildren would walk across a garden like a map, each section of the map being a garden planted with the trees and plants of the section. In the area representing the départements of the Var and Gard, in Provence, there would be olive or fig or orange trees.

It’s a lovely idea. We might still think about it.

All of which is to say that we know – and have always known – that food grows better in some places than others. And the people who live in those places cook their food in particular ways, in ways that are different from the people in the next town, or the next valley, or the next province. Those are the bases of regional food.

The notion that these are good enough to be worth a trip has two parts to it. The first trip is commercial: the food trade is very old indeed. One of the earliest records we have is of the Queen of Sheba arriving to see King Solomon. She arrived with camels bearing spices, precious stones and gold.

The spices would have come from far –as they did centuries later, in Byzantine times, when Arab and Jewish traders sailed from Spain to India, Ceylon, Malaysia for pepper, cinnamon and other spices. For as long as we know, there has been food commerce and trade, and crops have been planted in new places to circumvent the difficulties and expense of trade. Tea, coffee, rice, nuts, wheat, fruit and vegetables – they are all examples.

But what we’re interested in right now is the other part of food being worth the journey. This is gastronomic tourism, and it’s very big in Australia. It underpins regional tourism in many areas, and – certainly in Victoria and I think in South Australia – it is driven by the wine industry.

Gastronomic tourism was invented by the French, and really came about because of ready transport. Trains and later, the motor car, were the key. The Guide Michelin was a key force in popularising regional food, and went hand in hand, so to speak, with the growing literature, spearheaded by a man called Curnonsky.

All that was in another country, a century ago. What happens to us, now, in Australia.

What do regions mean here? We could divide Australia into States, which are political regions. We could divide it geologically, but that is of less practical use. We could divide it climatically, which is pretty much what has happened to it in the course of European settlement. We have settled in the cool temperate, warm temperate, and sub-tropical parts of the country, in a fringe that extends from Adelaide around to Brisbane. That’s what we call south-east Australia.

Within that fringe, we have states, and all manner of divisions. Electoral boundaries, and areas such as Geographic Indicators, which are of immense importance to the wine industry, and tourism constructs.

Gastronomic tourism areas include McLaren Vale, the Clare, the Barossa Valley. There are all manner of festivals to promote them, and a sense of regionality.

The Barossa Valley is not a recognised region according to the statistical divisions " defined in the Australian Standard Geographic Classification which of one of more statistical subdivisions and cover, in aggregate, the whole of Australia without gaps or overlaps. Statistical divisions aggregate to form States and Territories, and are used as spatial units for analysis."

You mustn’t groan. Those divisions are used to provide us with the statistical data we have on regional health and mortality. Regional data are hard to come by in Australia. And we’re getting some information from people like Tony Worsley that should make us quite thoughtful.

What is clear – or should be – is that regional health, like all other health, is only partly dependent on nutrition. Or perhaps we should note that nutrition may be dependent on others factors – including financial and economic, and the state of the soil. Eg population of NW Tasmania, which has such high rates of heart disease. Gippsland, in eastern Victoria, produces more than half the milk of the entire country, and has a huge lamb industry. It ought to be prosperous. It isn’t. The climate is good, the soil is rich, people should be healthy. They aren’t. The area has high unemployment, and high illness rates according to Tony Worsley’s figures. And it has regional food trails that are just lovely. So what do they do, these food trails? What use are they?

Gastronomic tourism brings the people from the city, for whom the food is grown. For the most part, they take away a jar of chutney or jam as a souvenir. Is this what we mean by regional food awareness?

I don’t know that it matters much to most people where their food is grown. For the most part – but that’s not quite true. We know certain things, we’re very proud of signature foods. Around Australia, we’ve got WA marrons, Hervey bay scallops, King Island cheese, Sydney rock oysters, and so on

But we don’t do as they do in France and Italy, where supermarkets and markets feature local produce. I think it’s by law in France: if the tomatoes are local, the sign says so. "Pays". Meaning of the country, of this countryside. Otherwise the sign says what departement the produce is grown. If it comes from outside the country, the country of origin is clearly stated. I’ve seen that in France, in Italy (where supermarkets apply the same to meat sold at the meat counter), in Austria.

How does all this relate to health? I’d like you to have a look at a table from figures released last year by the World Health Organisation. WHO came up with a table of healthy life expectancy. It all sounded a bit like fast work on an abacus, but it’s probably as simple or as complicated as any actuarial table. Take life expectancy, and adjust for the years of expected disability. Whatever the shortcomings, it’s an interesting list (and the full table is very sobering when you look at African figures, where healthy life expectancy is so diminished now by AIDS).

First things first. Japan is ahead of everyone else. A child born in 1999 in Japan might reasonably expect to live a healthy life for 74.5 years. Just over a year behind comes Australia, and the other countries in the top 10 are all pretty close. There’s Japan a year and a bit ahead, and the other nine are fall within a year of one another.

June 2000

These are Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy figures, calculating healthy life expectancy for babies born in 1999.

Take a look at the list, and tell me what strikes you. What strikes me is that Australia is the only English-speaking country in there. WHO attributes Australia’s high ranking to lower smoking rates, which in turn has led to lower rates of cancer and heart disease. I’m a bit puzzled by that, because if lower smoking rates have improved Australia’s chances, why haven’t the high rates of smoking diminished the chances in Spain, Japan, Greece, France, and Italy?

What might the other factors be? There is nothing all these countries have in common. Some of them – Japan, Spain, Greece and Sweden – eat lots of fish. Some of them are Mediterranean, but not all. Most of France is not Mediterranean, and in the south-west, which has the lowest heart disease rates in all of France, they don’t even think about olive oil. The traditional cooking medium was goose fat, or duck fat. Andorra is not Mediterranean. Sweden and Japan certainly aren’t.

But what other factors might there be? Are there nutritional factors? In particular, since Australia is the only English-speaking country in the line-up, are there nutritional factors for Australia?

I think there are. And I think one of the key factors is related to a sense of region. A century ago, even 50 years ago, Australia was an outpost of empire. A large and far-away bit of Britain. We spoke English, we saw ourselves as English. Federation was about ensuring we stayed English. No foreigners please, we’re British. The lively immigrational rough and tumble of the gold rushes was gone for good, until the 1950s, when we decided we needed a bigger labor force.

Since then, Australia has changed quite remarkably, and I’d say the major changes came from the early 1970s onwards.

What region are we in now, world-wide? We fit into South Asia.

That’s how we’re eating, anyway. Our eating habits incorporate Asian eating habits. I’m not relying on tables and research here, although I’m sure there’s lots of it. My information comes from supermarkets shelves. In the 25 years and more that I have been writing about food, the Asian section of supermarkets has grown from a half-shelf in the more progressive ones to half an aisle or more. If it doesn’t sell in supermarkets, it doesn’t stay on the shelves. Clearly, all kinds of Asian food are selling. In almost any suburb of Melbourne I can buy mirin now, and a selection of chillis, and boy choy, and other number of other things that used to be sold in the Chinese section of Victoria Market under the name "like Chinese cabbage".

This change has meant something vital in nutritional terms. It means variety. I think it’s very likely that Australians eat more variously than their English-speaking counterparts in the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada.

We can grow pretty well everything. But there’s a real challenge for the future, and that is to encourage a sense of place in every way.

We can grow everything from cool temperate to tropical crops. We can grow tea and coffee and rice. The question we should be asking is whether we ought to be. We have to start thinking about resources and sustainability.

Sustainability means more than environmental. It must include social and economic sustainability. What’s the point of growing things if growers live too close to the poverty line? Maybe they shouldn’t be growing what they are growing where they are growing it. Maybe – and this is true for many crops world-wide – we have to stop treating food as commodity and be prepared to pay for it. I remember Merrill Fernando, head of Dilmah Tea, saying to me when I first met him that if the world were prepared to pay reasonable prices for Ceylon tea, Sri Lanka would not be considered a third world country. If you doubt it is, track down the WHO figures on child health in Sri Lanka. Not good.

If this sounds as if I’m anti-global, I’m not. The food trade is part of human history. People have always brought their favored crops with them, whether they took over territory through immigration or conquest. The Romans took the olive to Spain, the Arabs brought rice, oranges, and irrigation to Spain. The Romans brought vines to France. The food trade is probably why the Mediterranean is such a vibrant food culture: food went backwards and forwards the length and breadth of a sea that is much less hazardous to navigate than the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean.

But I think we must look careful, now in Australia, at crops like rice, which uses large amounts of a very precious commodity called water. You in Adelaide know all about water usage, because you feel the effects of anything that happens upstream.

The challenge for the future is to create a sense of place that works nationally, internationally, locally. And privately. We mustn’t forget the private sphere when it comes to health. There are some interesting figures on health and ageing. Apparently those who garden are likelier to be healthier than those who don’t. It makes sense: gardening is often quite vigorous exercise. And I think those who garden in old age were probably like those who grew up with backyard food, which was a feature of Australian life. Home grown tomatoes, apricots, plums, lemons, parsley – whatever it is – that’s regional food, too.

So we need to remember and built on a sense of place.