Pick up any mainstream Australian food magazine. Watch any Australian cooking show. Browse the recipe section of any major Australian news website. Notice anything?

The default is still European. French technique, Italian ingredients, maybe some pan-Asian flavours thrown in as a special feature. In a country where more than 30 percent of the population was born overseas, where Cabramatta and Footscray and Inala have some of the most exciting food cultures on the planet, we’re still acting like food writing means another sourdough variation.

I’m part of this problem. I know that. I write about sourdough too. But I’m trying to think more carefully about what I cover and whose cooking traditions I centre when I write.

The numbers tell a story

I went through the contributor lists and recipe archives of five major Australian food publications last month. Across roughly 400 recipes published in the second half of 2025, about 70 percent were based on European cooking traditions. About 15 percent were broadly “Asian” (a category that itself flattens enormous diversity). The remaining 15 percent covered everything else — Middle Eastern, African, Pacific Islander, Indigenous Australian, and South American cuisines combined.

The bylines were even more skewed. Of the regular food columnists across these publications, the vast majority were white Australians writing about cuisines from their own backgrounds. When non-European food appeared, it was often written by the same white columnists interpreting those cuisines through a European lens.

This isn’t unique to Australia. It’s a global food media problem. But we’re particularly bad at it because we genuinely believe we’re multicultural while not reflecting that in our food storytelling.

Why it matters

This isn’t just about representation for its own sake, though that matters too. It’s about food knowledge.

When Vietnamese-Australian home cooks are not writing about Vietnamese cooking in mainstream publications, we lose the depth. We get pho recipes written by people who learned it from a book instead of from their mother. We get “fusion” dishes that strip away context and meaning. We get ingredients treated as exotic novelties instead of pantry staples.

And we miss entire categories of food knowledge. I’ve learned more about fermentation from talking to Korean-Australian home cooks than from any formal food writing. The preserved foods traditions from Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Eastern European migrant communities are extraordinary and barely documented in Australian food media.

What about Indigenous food

This deserves its own essay, honestly. But briefly: the longest continuous food culture on Earth exists in Australia, and it is almost entirely absent from mainstream food media. Bush tucker features occasionally as a novelty ingredient in fine dining — a quandong gel on a dessert, some lemon myrtle in a sauce. That’s tokenism.

The deeper knowledge — seasonal eating calendars, fire management for food cultivation, preparation techniques for toxic species — represents tens of thousands of years of accumulated food wisdom. It should be central to how we think about Australian food, not an occasional garnish.

Some good work is happening. Junda Nguyen is doing incredible things documenting Indigenous food practices. The Orana Foundation in Adelaide has been important. But this needs to be mainstream, not peripheral.

What would better look like

Here’s what I’d want to see:

More food writers from diverse backgrounds getting regular, well-paid columns in mainstream publications. Not as “ethnic food” specialists, but as food writers, full stop.

More recipes published in their original context, with the cultural background that makes them meaningful, not just a list of ingredients and steps.

More investment in documenting food traditions that are disappearing as older generations of migrants pass on their knowledge without it being recorded.

And more honesty about influence. Every time we make a “Thai-inspired” salad dressing, we should acknowledge where that knowledge came from.

My own commitment

I’m going to do better here. This year, I’m making a deliberate effort to feature recipes and food stories from communities I don’t belong to — but doing it by talking to people from those communities, not by interpreting their food through my own lens.

I’ll get things wrong. I already have. But the alternative — continuing to pretend that Australian food culture is primarily European — is worse.

We eat like a multicultural nation. It’s time our food media caught up.