If you want to travel through time, you don't need a futuristic machine – you can just reach for , , and .
That's what I learnt while working on the , with its 'Past, present, future' theme. Like from 2020, it's a project printed by – so it shines the spotlight on people from under-represented backgrounds and their stories about meals and memories.
The original New Voices On Food featured a diverse range of personal accounts. Tyree Barnette explored how the was created from scraps and resilience. Minyungbal activist showcased the shared history between Asian and Indigenous communities in Australia through shaped by 65,000 years of First Nations history (after some COVID-related curveballs, it became a reality for one night at this year's with – it was realised via smoky karkalla, eel dumplings with native ginger, and Walkabout native tea).
If you want to travel through time, you don't need a futuristic machine – you can just reach for Armenian apricots, Asian brews, Jewish desserts and Indigenous curry myrtle.
's first-ever published piece appeared in the inaugural book – it was a funny, vivid and moving account about how her Vietnamese mother became a better cook after surviving two strokes (credit an old iPad, YouTube and Duolingo for this improvement). Tran went on to write for various outlets after that exposure, including . You can find her brief history of the fortune cookie and her mi goreng memories .
SBS Food also generously published some submissions I loved that we, sadly, could not fit into the first New Voices On Food. Visvajit Sriramrajan told how banana leaves resemble the "ears of an elephant" and are "the beating heart of the Tamil culinary ethos", conveyed the storytelling power of cheesy Colombian buñuelos and recapped priceless lessons learnt via the 50c dim sim she sold in her mum's takeaway shop (to name a few stories – you can browse the here).
Two years later, it's a similar situation: we opened submissions to another New Voices On Food anthology and ended up with many more contributions than we could squeeze into our compact paperback. So I'm grateful that SBS Food could give a few of these pieces a good home.
Banana leaves are an excellent delivery system for serving food. Source: Getty Images
Diverse perspectives matter.
The second book has a 'past, present, future' theme, and if you dig through Australian food history, you'll learn it's much more multicultural than you might've first believed: in 1792, from Calcutta (rice, semolina, pulses for making dhal) helped save the British colony from starvation; in 1870, in Adelaide Gaol and was eaten around the same time; and though soy sauce was in 1804, one of our first cookbook authors, Edward Abbott, repeated the questionable claim that it was . It's a reminder that diverse perspectives matter – the Chinese miners who arrived here likely saw soy sauce very differently (and benefitted from well-seasoned meals as a result).
I suspect the dumplings that fights for in her New Voices On Food 2 story might've been dipped in soy (and perhaps splashed with some black vinegar, too). Her contribution is a moving and witty piece about grappling with her Chinese grandfather's death and all the food knowledge that slips away when someone's gone. When we posted an excerpt on the about this, people of not having the adequate language skills to ask a waiter for beloved dishes your more fluent relatives once requested so effortlessly.
It's a thrill to get the chance to feature more work by this promising writer in our second book, especially after she won the we ran with SBS Food earlier this year (see her winning entry ). You can read her contribution to our new book, , on this website, too.
And while you're here, you can explore the past, present and future of food through the other submitted pieces that I hinted at above. Sevana Ohandjanian conveys – the apricot – became a key character in her family's story, from the puckered slices that her grandmother dried in her third-floor Tehran apartment to the 'tsirani' blush her family would feel when consuming home-made apricot liqueur. The fruit is so essential to Armenian life that the duduk is shaped from its trees – the resulting wind instrument generates melodies for pivotal events, like funerals and weddings.
The writer uses the apricot to transport us through Armenian history and to her current-day existence in Sydney, where the fruit lacks the magical, full-flavoured quality it had at her grandmother's home.
This fruit has so many sweet meanings for Armenians. Source: Getty Images
You can travel through time via cups and bottles, with recounting her life through Japanese green tea customs she grew up with ("If a piece of stalk floated vertically in your tea, it was a sign of good luck") to the air mata kucing ('cat's eye drink') she enjoyed at Malaysian night markets and the bubble tea her eldest son now enjoys.
Then there's (from Jewish desserts to the world's greatest vegan junk food), reconnecting to Punjabi cooking after a lifetime of feeling its constraints, and learning from her Lebanese grandparents how desserts have transformative, life-changing power.
A lifetime of drinks, as drawn by Yoko Baxter. Source: Yoko Baxter
And when I look to the future, I think of and from the Indigenous catering company . They end the book talking about how they're teaching cooking lessons to incarcerated First Nations kids and conveying how Indigenous ingredients – like curry myrtles and Davidson plum – can help offer them a better alternative path in life. That's the power of food.
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