Dinner CONVERSATIONS SBS’s The Chefs’ Line and Cultural Authenticity in Food Programming
THE CHEFS’ LINE, SONIA NAIR BROACHES THE COMPLEX QUESTIONS SURROUNDING CULINARY EXPERTISE AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE AT THE HEART OF OSTENSIBLY MULTICULTURAL COOKING SHOWS IN AUSTRALIA.
Food has been a key way through which ethnic minorities have established a public platform for themselves, elevated their voices and morphed into household names in Australia and abroad. Chef Poh Ling Yeow, who is of Chinese-Malaysian descent, shot to stardom in 2009 after she finished as runner-up of the first season of MasterChef Australia. Following this achievement, she landed an ABC cooking show, Poh’s Kitchen, and published an eventual bestseller, Poh’s Kitchen: My Cooking Adventures. Chef Adam Liaw, of Chinese-Malaysian and English heritage, went one step further and won MasterChef Australia’s second season in 2010, after which he released several cookbooks and began hosting his own show on SBS, Destination Flavour. Vietnamese-Australian chef and restaurateur Luke Nguyen is well known as the host of TV shows Luke Nguyen’s Vietnam and Luke Nguyen’s France. Peter Kuruvita, an Australian chef of Sri Lankan descent, used his acclaimed Sydney restaurant Flying Fish as a launchpad for TV shows and cookbooks. Chinese-Australian chef Kylie Kwong achieved widespread acclaim when Penguin published her first cookbook, Kylie Kwong: Recipes and Stories, in 2003. And, while Indigenous success stories are few and far between compared to the increasing prominence of their Asian-Australian counterparts, Indigenous chefs such as Mark Olive and Clayton Donovan – the latter of whom presents ABC show Wild Kitchen – are also reaching celebrity status, while also promoting the native ingredients and traditional methods that underpinned Aboriginal cuisines for thousands of years before white settlement.
Ethnicity and the act of eating intersect in oft-problematic ways. Food is a means of
