To Feed A Nation

Book excerpt: To Feed a Nation takes the reader on a journey over the centuries, describing the slow and arduous development of Australian food technology and science from before European settlement to the latter half of the twentieth century. The first part of the book gives a fascinating glimpse into Aboriginal food and culture, outlines the primitive state of European food technology at the time of the First Fleet, and shows how the colonists tried to transfer to Australia the village technologies they knew in England. The second part describes how, for most of the nineteenth century, technology preceded science – the processing and storage of food relied on methods which, by trial and error, had been shown to work – and food science was slow to emerge. The final part of the book highlights the twentieth century watershed — how a growing understanding of the nature of food, the principles of nutrition, and the role of micro-organisms, was able to propel food technology to where it is today. The publication of To Feed a Nation has been sponsored by the Food Technology Association of Victoria.