Salad Days

BACKGROUND This book of creative nonfiction asks, if Australian culture both pillories and idolises fine food, what role does dining culture play in contemporary understandings of the self? Referring to current and historical literature exploring food and culture, including 'You Aren't What You Eat' (Steven Poole) and the essays of M.F.K. Fisher, it situates itself as a rigorous commentary on an aspect of Australian life, viewing fine dining as a lens through which desires are expressed and perhaps altered. CONTRIBUTION This work of creative non-fiction aims to survey contemporary attitudes towards fine dining and to explore them in relation to experiences of fine food by consumers and producers, based on interviews with restaurant owners, food writers and chefs. It advances a comparative analysis of perspectives on food, focusing especially on how these perspectives have changed in Australia over time. In addition to advancing public debate, it contributes to the field of creative writing through combining formal techniques of memoir, essay, literary criticism and reportage into an innovative work of creative nonfiction. SIGNIFICANCE The work was commissioned by Penguin Books Australia in 2013 and published for national distribution in 2014, both in print and online. It was presented to local audiences in mid-2014 in a public panel at the Melbourne Writers' Festival, to local and interstate audiences through interviews on numerous ABC Radio National programmes, and through interview on the ReReaders, a literary podcast with international reach. It was reviewed in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and in a range of respected online publications. As a major single-authored creative work, it has contributed to the researcher's professional profile and ability to secure competitive research funding (Australia Council for the Arts ArtStart Grant in 2014). This research statement includes evidence of editorial correspondence.