For many, the word ‘bushfoods’ conjures up small wriggly things which are best left where they are. A walk through bushlands or scrub can be no more enlightening - lots of plants, but where’s the food?

I have often been amazed at the ability of the original inhabitants to live - and live well - in arid lands and rainforest, wallum scrub and alpine valley. Part of the secret of their success lay in the incredibly wide range of plants they utilised as food. Some of these plants gave very little in the way of nutrient, some required extensive processing to remove toxins - taken as a whole, this ‘menu from nature’ gave them a more rounded diet than most of us enjoy today.

I have an abiding fascination with the tide and time of our culinary preferences and the way in which what we eat says something about the way we are.

Take the humble pizza. Here is an odd but handy dish which was unknown here in the late sixties but crept in and took hold with a vengeance as soon as an entrepreneurial Italian thought to add pineapple to the pepperoni-tomato topping.

I attended a bushfoods workshop not so long ago in which a very wise man in the new crops sector challenged the attendees to be honest about whether bushfoods were a ‘serious business’ to them or simply a hobby.

Despite the fact that I publish a magazine on bushfoods, I had to admit that I was a hobby farmer – and not even a very skilled one at that!

The headline reads well but it’s rather misleading. At the moment, bushfoods hardly have a ‘tag’ at all. If you were to do a quick street survey, you’d probably find many people would think of bushfoods as some sort of Des Hiddens’ invention, wriggly things found under rocks and beneath bark. A few might class them with Billy Tea and other staples enjoyed by those living ‘in the bush’. Some may have enjoyed bushfood cuisine at an upmarket restaurant or roo-burgers at an outback barbie. Even fewer would be familiar with more than a handful of our native foods and you’d be pressing your luck to find anyone who knew that bushfoods are ‘those native foods eaten by the indigenous people prior to white settlement.’