The last ten years have witnessed the resurgence of small-scale domestic chicken-keeping in many cities around the world as part of a broader rise in urban agriculture. This chapter draws on primary research carried out in Sydney in 2015-16 to explore a contemporary “food pedagogy” (Swan and Flowers, 2015)—that of domestic chicken-keeping—asking whether it might signal something more than just “a pervasive nostalgia for earlier modes of living” (Hamilton, 2014: 124). Springboarding off the concept of “practice memory” elaborated by Cecily Maller and Yolande Strengers (2015), it canvasses eight themes arising from the interviews, exploring the learning, sharing and values cultivation involved in this revived practice as a form of cultural pedagogy.

As the Colonial Gastronomer at Sydney Living Museums I research, interpret, write, blog, lecture, broadcast and present interactive programs to engage and educate audiences about Australian colonial food and heritage. But how do you learn about the sensory qualities of foods that were popular two hundred years ago, especially those that have been discarded from the mainstream (particularly Anglo-Celtic) Australian culinary repertoire? How they looked and tasted, their textures and aromas? My answer: make them. This has meant preparing and cooking foods that many Australian people find offensive, distasteful, disgusting and ‘gross’: calves’ feet jelly, boiled calves’ heads, brawned pig’s face, peeled tongues, and collared eels so fresh they twitch and jump on the benchtop when filleted. This auto-ethnographic analysis draws on my experiences of working with articles of culinary disgust, particularly animal heads and tongues, to reflect upon the pedagogical processes involved in my role as the Colonial Gastronomer. It explores the intellectual and emotional effects of sensory engagement with these foods, and my internalised conflict between my personal socio-moral sensibilities and the highly visceral yet positive mimetic experiences, of working with foods that elicit disgust.

According to the National Health and Medical Council (NHMRC, 2013), a leading body in health and medical research in Australia, the rising incidence of obesity and non-communicable chronic diseases is evidence that individuals need to improve their food choices. One prominent yet contested method of intervention is public dietary education (Lindsay, 2010). Framing the Australian Dietary Guidelines as pedagogical—that is, as a social process that attempts to influence a population’s actions, feelings and thoughts—enables us to critically consider the manner in which food pleasures are problematised (Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick, 2011). Food’s capacity to evoke pleasure, the Guidelines assume, is an effect of its physicality; an effect of its qualities like ‘palatability’, which is problematic as it increases the likelihood of ‘increased food intake’ (NHMRC, 2013; 222). Thus, according to this logic, eating can and should be controlled if weight loss is to be achieved (Mol, 2012). Yet when thinking deeper about this normative conceptualisation of food pleasures, the meanings and nuances of enjoyable eating and how they play a role in health and wellbeing are left unattended to. Mol (2010) reminds us that eating is an event, which encompasses times, places, materialities, feelings and bodies. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a Uruguayan Club in Sydney’s suburb Hinchinbrook acquired for a Master’s thesis, I posit that food pleasures are achieved through practices, where bodily perceptions are entangled with social interactions, relations, memories and feelings. In so doing, I argue that we may think of pleasurable eating not as a danger to wellbeing, but rather as an essential part of it.

Children’s books are created with the specific intention not only of entertaining but also of enculturating their audiences, and as such they are a rich resource for understanding how a society fashions itself for the young. Focusing on a corpus of 170 contemporary Australian picture books published 2000–2013, this paper unpicks the ways in which the meanings and values of food and food practices are communicated through an interplay of textual elements—words and pictures on the page—and extratextual elements—in particular, sensory memory and sensory ideation. Food can be understood as a language used by book creators to communicate aspects of characterisation and the social and cultural contexts of the narratives, even though most references are incidental. I argue that while the pedagogical effect of incidental food references in picture books is largely unintentional, recurring representations signal assumed norms. Examples drawn from the corpus show that these texts work pedagogically to express ideas of gender, ethnicity and class, as well as food choice: what foods are good to eat and what foods are good to think about.