Food Availability and Selection

Food availability refers to the range and quantity of foods that people in a place can actually obtain. It is shaped by history, technology, the economy and government decisions. Food selection is a separate idea: it is the choice an individual or group makes from whatever is available. Keep the two terms apart in every answer.

Foods native to Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have sustained themselves on Country for tens of thousands of years, using detailed knowledge of seasons, plants, animals, fire and water. Foods such as bunya nuts, macadamias, finger limes, Kakadu plum, wattleseed and lemon myrtle were part of these food systems.

Colonisation from 1788 brought grain crops, sheep and cattle onto land that Aboriginal peoples had managed for food, such as yam fields and grasslands, which upended Aboriginal food production and reduced access to traditional foods. Native foods are now moving onto restaurant menus and supermarket shelves and into packaged products such as spice mixes and flavoured drinks.

Respectful discussion recognises that this knowledge belongs to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and that ethical sourcing, fair benefit-sharing and Indigenous-led enterprises are current issues in the native food industry.

Migration of cultural groups. Each wave of migration widened the Australian food supply. Chinese migrants came to the goldfields from the 1850s; as mining declined in the late 1860s and 1870s many turned to market gardening, selling vegetables door to door in the towns, and from the 1880s to the 1930s Chinese market gardeners dominated the production and distribution of vegetables in New South Wales.

After World War II, large numbers of southern European migrants brought coffee, olive oil, salami and pasta, and Italian and Greek migrants shaped Australia's espresso café culture. Later migration from Vietnam (after 1975), Lebanon, India, China and many other places added foods such as pho, dumplings, and Indian and Lebanese dishes and groceries. Restaurants, grocers and specialty shops opened by these communities made the foods widely available, and the wider population gradually adopted them.

Technological developments. Production and manufacturing: farmers have raised output by adopting new technologies and management practices (the national agricultural research bureau, ABARES, links strong growth in crop volumes to this), and food manufacturers use processes such as pasteurising, canning, freezing and drying to turn perishable raw materials into products that keep.

Storage and distribution: James Harrison of Geelong invented a mechanical ice-making (refrigeration) machine, for which he lodged a Victorian patent application in 1855, and in 1879–80 the steamer Strathleven carried the first successful shipment of frozen Australian meat to Britain, opening long-distance trade in perishables; refrigerated storage and transport now form a cold chain that keeps chilled food at 5 °C or colder and frozen food frozen hard on its way to shops.

Marketplace practices: self-service grocery stores (first opened in Brisbane in 1923 and widespread by the late 1950s), supermarket chains, house brands, checkout scanning (from 1980) and internet shopping (first trialled by the major chains in 1999) have changed the range on offer and how people shop.