What's the food like out there? Do you eat any type of meat that most of the world doesn't? (Like kangaroo?) What's the default "topping" for stuff like french fries?
The food in Australia is a bit lacklustre if you’re not in a big city. But in the city it’s pretty damn good.
They’re trying to get us to eat things like kangaroo and crocodile because it’s easier to farm and produce but Australia’s whole economy was basically raised up on cattle and sheep. We eat a lot of beef and lamb, a fair bit of pork more recently because sheep keep dying out due to droughts.
We also get plenty of access to sea-food like fish, prawns, oysters and scallops. We tend to just fry that stuff up, not chuck it in a chowder or whatever.
Sausages are a staple, unfortunately they’re not the continental european kind, they’re the British kind - so they’re not my thing. We have a traditional sausage sizzle, where we cook up some sausages on the barbeque (our term for a type of outdoor gas or charcoal stove you fry stuff on) and serve up sausage sandwiches. We use it all the time as a fundraiser sort of like a bake sale sort of thing, or as a get together for times like elections.
We’ve got a lot of ethnic communities in the more urban areas, particularly in Sydney (where I’m from) you’ll find Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Italian. You don’t even have to look too far for a good kebab or some sushi even in the suburbs.
But if you ever visit and you’re homesick we have McDonalds (we call it Maccas), Burger King, KFC, all the big ones. We’ve got a few Krispy Kremes and Taco Bells around as well. The best fast food though is Australian, there are two particularly big chains, Oporto (they sell “Portuguese” chicken) and Red Rooster (a barbeque [more like your term] or charcoal chicken franchise).
We’re fairly big on supporting local franchises over American ones. Particularly coffee, which we’ve got two big chains for - Gloria Jeans and Coffee Club (they’re both shit coffee, but amazing compared to Starbucks, which was short lived over here). If you want a sugar drink fix with a hint of coffee, hit up Maccas who sells that stuff now.
The quality of the food as well is amazing compared to other countries. We’ve got pretty strict food regulation, so we were using 100% beef (or claiming it) in our Macca’s burgers a decade or two ago. So we’ve got kind of higher standards I guess.
As for toppings, the most popular I’d say is tomato sauce which’d be the default (you guys call it ketchup) or, we also have as a very popular condiment, barbeque sauce (I don’t know if you guys have it, it’s a brown sauce made with fermented tomatoes and mixed up with molasses so it’s got a bit of a sweet and sour taste).
As for food no-one else eats, we’ve got some seafood that is rare elsewhere like abalone, strange river fish and emus which some upscale places serve up as an exotic thing.
Weirdest thing are these things called “bugs” as in Balmain Bug and Moreton Bay Bugs. They’re like crabs or lobsters but squashed. I don’t think anywhere else in the world has a whole lot of them, but they’re somewhat of a delicacy in Australia. Unlike most other seafood. There is A LOT of seafood in Australia.
Oh, and we’ve got the infamous vegemite - this black tar stuff made from fermented vegetables which we only eat now because someone decided to spread it on some toast instead of chuck it in the bin. (I believe the Brits have marmite though, which is similar).
Australia is a pretty big place though, so we’ve got most of everything. If you can catch it in the oceans off our shores, we’ll eat it. We have plenty of livestock, we grow shitloads of bananas, sugarcane, wheat and rice. We’ve got a mix of different cultures in all our big cities (except Adelaide, so white) and really we’re producers of most agricultural goods, alcohols and pretty much anything that can be grown.
We’ve got everything. I hope that was interesting.
