Every Bite

Do you remember the healthy food pyramid? In the 1980s and 90s, the diagram was used to show which foods to eat most and which to eat least. It was replaced in Australia and the United States by a plate in the 2010s, but now — spurred by RFK Jr and the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement — the pyramid is back. Sort of: it's now upside down. For the first time, the guidelines acknowledge the harm caused by ultra-processed foods. So why are some dietitians critical of the new pyramid? And what can Australians expect from our own updated guidelines, due later this year?

As a trained cellist, food writer and cook Gurdeep Loyal relies on music theory to amplify flavour. While he spends more time in the kitchen than in the string section these days, Gurdeep's first two cookbooks lean heavily on musical ideas, such as the flavour chords and triads that underpin all his recipes. Building on those concepts, his new cookbook, Flavour Heroes, takes fifteen underutilised pantry items and builds a repertoire of meals, snacks and sweets around each one.

While tasselled lanterns, weaving dragons, dancing lions and firecrackers are a familiar spectacle in Chinatowns right across Australia during Lunar New Year, the season is celebrated by more than just the Chinese community. In this episode, we explore the roots of Chinese New Year festivities in Australia, give the stove god some time off for Tết, Vietnamese New Year, and become older and wiser with a bowl of tteokguk, an essential dish during Seollal, Korean New Year.

The fresh air, clear waters and rich soil of regional Australia are encouraging some of the world's top chefs to trade in their chef whites for overalls and swap grand banquet halls for intimate dining rooms — including Analiese Gregory. She trained in Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe and now calls southern Tasmania home, where she'll soon be opening a 10-seat eatery on her property. But is her homegrown, hyper-local approach a reaction against her formal training or a product of it?

A chant heard at Sydney's first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras was "out of the bars, into the streets!" But bars were not the community's only gathering places: Even revolutionaries have to eat. We don't hear much about queer restaurants and cafes, but often they pre-date the famous nightspots that are now synonymous with queer pride.