Mouthful

What in the world are you eating?

The perfect Australian burrito

17 March 2010 | 13:39 - By Phil Lees

 Is making an authentic burrito possible in Australia?

The essence of modern food in Australia is the ability to eat food from a culture with whom you have never had any contact, but can still buy their ingredients from any local supermarket. It is amazing that Mexican food even exists in any form in Australia, let alone that elements of it are available at any of your duopoly marts.

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The perfect Australian burrito

17 March 2010 | 13:39 - By Phil Lees

 Is making an authentic burrito possible in Australia?

The essence of modern food in Australia is the ability to eat food from a culture with whom you have never had any contact, but can still buy their ingredients from any local supermarket. It is amazing that Mexican food even exists in any form in Australia, let alone that elements of it are available at any of your duopoly marts.

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What happened to the future of food?

10 March 2010 | 1:01 - By Phil Lees

Last week, American magazine Popular Science released its entire 137-year back catalogue onto the Internet, for free . Since discovering this, I've been obsessed about mining the back catalogue for bad (and at times, oddly prescient) predictions about the future of food.

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The Tabouleh War

04 March 2010 | 17:54 - By Phil Lees

small bowl of cracked wheat salad, tabouleh, on a wooden table

Tabouleh is one of the more recent foods to have been caught in the culinary-rights war between Israel and Lebanon, a war adjudicated by the Guinness Book of Records wherein proponents in each country attempt to make the largest, record-breaking dish to stake their claim on ownership. It’s also happened with the chickpea dip, hummus, and the ellipsoid balls of cracked wheat and meat, kebbe.

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Decoding use-by dates

25 February 2010 | 0:02 - By Phil Lees

I'm an inveterate eater of suspicious foods and am suspicious of most food that I eat. The first action that I take when I pull anything from the refrigerator is to sniff it. I'm still not sure whether to attribute this to rank curiousity or a well-honed survival instinct. It is a knee-jerk rational behaviour to overcome my primal urge to eat weird things.

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The Australian Chow Mein Survey: Results

17 February 2010 | 1:50 - By Phil Lees

 The results are in: stodgy, Australian chow mein more popular than expected.

Thanks for your responses to the chow mein survey. As a broad disclaimer, they're hardly a representative sample of Australian eating habits. You can't get much more selection bias than asking people who read your blog and presumably, share your common interests to fill out a survey regarding one of those common interests. Anyhow, why let bad data fall in the way of making beautiful graphs?

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Rice cakes for Tết

11 February 2010 | 1:37 - By Phil Lees

Along with being Valentine's Day, this year Lunar New Year falls on the 14th of February. If you're Vietnamese or in Vietnam, this means Tết. If you mashed together any combination of the secular and religious holidays that you happen to celebrate into a three day mix of piety and party, it would be a little similar to the chaos that goes on over the Vietnamese celebration of Lunar New Year.

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Let's get fizzy milk.

03 February 2010 | 0:19 - By Phil Lees

Carbonated milk: is it such a terrible idea?

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About this Blog

A blog about what the world eats, when and where it eats it, and why it matters to us all. Only much less ambitious than that sounds and with more excruciating puns.

Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter their own meat.

In 2005 he moved to Cambodia and started the nation’s first food blog, Phnomenon.com, named after the best pun that he has ever made. It turns out that Cambodian food is delicious and unlike the warnings in most guidebooks, is not likely to kill you with any immediacy. Gridskipper called him a “national treasure”. Lonely Planet’s Greater Mekong guide called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine”. The New York Times laughed at a funny hotdog he saw.

Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth.

 
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