It's time to go native.

We are in a time where people are constantly looking for the next new angle or selling point for their restaurants and food. New niche markets are opening up so quickly and old trends are quickly becoming yesterdays news. So why in this ever changing Asuatralian restaurant scene, have we never really given native ingredients a go. Certainly a few restaurants have made it their speciality, but it is yet to become a real food trend or for the ingredients to even be utilised in regular cooking and recipes. Last week, we had native food expert and renowned chef Andrew Fielke lead a group of us around the Central Markets in Adelaide. He talked about native ingredients, sustainability and the diversity of uses that the ingredients have. One thing that became incresingly clear was that despite the ingredients that we were looking for being native, they were very hard to find and often expensive. Buzz words like organic and local adorn every label in sight but as for native... no where to be seen. Only two ingredients were readily commercially available, Kangaroo meat and Macadamias. In the search for native produce, two stalls stood out as having a reasonable range of native produce, here they are including some things that they had in stock: Something Wild crocodile meat Karkalla (a native coastal succulent) Saltbush Warrigal Greens Jaggers Native Pate's (emu, kangaroo, crocodile) native pepper berries lemon myrtle paperbark wattle seeds Quandong jam Rosella flowers Putting more native foods on our menus will slowly bring the prices down and will give our food an identity that is uniquely Australian.