Out of the Garden and onto the Streets: The limits of Epicureanism in achieving gastronomic justice.

3 July 2026

In her review of my book True to the Land. A History of Food in Australia, Gay Bilson wrote:

Gloriously social and educative though the Symposium [of Australian Gastronomy] has been, and continues to be, it is a world unto itself, furthering academic studies rather than influencing Australian eating habits’.[i]

Her review was published in December 2021. It was serendipitous that the month before I had been considering what I could offer in response to one of the questions posed in the Call for Papers for this 24th Symposium: ‘How can we create greater gastronomic justice (meaning happiness and pleasure for all members of society), today and in the future?’

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Paul van Reyk
My first essay on food was in Year 10 - people seemed to like it. It took me 56 years to come back to it, so I have a lot of catching up to do. My focus is on Anglo-Saxon settler culinary ways in Australia, roughly from the first days of colonisation to the 1960s - 1970s. I particularly write about stuff that has not been written about before but is very much a part of the Anglo-Saxon Australian table. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing.