This is ground Karrajong seed here and that makes a beautiful nutritional flour.
We use Lemon Aspen which is a native berry.
We had some pickled Youlk, some roasted Youlk, finishing off with
some damper and smoked butter.
At the University of Queensland we've been working on bush foods for the past
12 years and then whenever we talk about foods like Wattleseeds or Kakadu plums
people are like, what is that?
It's a huge amount of plants that actually have
food and botanical properties but we have a very small amount that are
actually in production.
We're very excited to be part of an initiative that is trying to train a
cohort of people that can take a new industry forward. The consumer wants
foods that are healthy, they want less processed food. So they want foods
that are wholesome so this Centre can deliver to that need. All the research
that we've done is about the health benefits and nutritional benefits of
Australian native food. Fruits, oils, leaves and tubers and what we found is
that basically Australian native food is very, very high in nutritional value, it's
very, very high in antioxidants. All the main priority species are at least equal
to or higher than the blueberry.
They got a big seed in them too, so we try and keep those seeds.
I think for Australia native foods this is the first. We work with Indigenous
communities converting that ethnobotanical knowledge to products of
commercial value. When the Australian Research Council supported this grant
this really opens a lot of doors for us.
Universities are playing and have played
a really important part around research. So we have a great appreciation for the
need for traditional ecological knowledge or traditional knowledge to be
married with science and develop something from that marriage that is
beneficial for community as well as the science community and then of course
becomes something that's promoting how unique Australia is to the rest of the world.
So the Australian native foods have potent bioactive and nutritional
properties. So for example if you take the Kakadu plum it is very high in
vitamin C and antioxidants. If you look at the Green plums the folate levels are
very high and folate is something that is in high demand now for health. When
you look at Wattleseed it has high zinc and iron content and dietary fiber and
proteins. So if you can incorporate that into your diet
then you get those nutrients in.
The first Australians have been using these foods, traditional uses for
thousands of years and we haven't been that good at understanding those
traditional uses and how we can most sensitively respectfully integrate those
into the sort of global cuisine that we all enjoy now in the in the cities
around Australia. So a lot of what we're trying to do here is to find the
right routes by which we can integrate some of the knowledge that's come
from traditional uses of plants, respecting the wishes of the communities
that are growing and looking after and managing these plants, but in a way that
generates economic benefits for those communities and also creates something
which is different to what's currently available.
It's very important to have
the intellectual property and the relationship around who's doing what and
what we're gaining, what each is expecting from that relationship
developed right up front. It would be awesome to be able to then have that
knowledge and that partnership result in branded products because ultimately the
outcome is so that community whether its individual family groups, whether its
whole of community or regional communities can actually have some
benefit financially and economically from this growing industry in Australia.
We've got the food scientists and the chemists who will be working on the food
composition toxicity safety and then we also have the UQ law who is looking at
benefit sharing, intellectual property, marketing and branding and what that
implies and then we also have social scientists who will look at you know the
social impact that we will have when we work with communities.
Australian native food plants and botanical plants, we do know of 6,400 at the
moment but the actual industry is probably dealing with about 35 of those
of which about 18 are what we call priority species in other words in
commercial production. The challenges are actually getting these plants into a
commercial production system that can supply mainstream Australian
agricultural produce. It makes a lot of sense to grow Australian plants in Australia.
We have the health and nutritional benefits and then we have the unique
flavours of Australian natives which I know chefs from France, chefs from
Germany, chefs in England, The States all rave over. Why aren't we using these more
in our actual cuisine?