These are the sort of questions that plague me. Of course, calling bread or rice a staple without elaborating ignores variations within those staples, which do become specific to certain region and even towns. It's a little ludicrous to compare the long slender strands of basmati rice with the starchy stubbiness of arborio rice; or the foamy pancakes of injera to a leaden pumpernickel. I also think that it is fair to rule out essential commodities like salt.

The first thing that came to mind was ground meat as a direct result of pondering the place of borek in hip hop over the past week. Find a meat-bearing animal and grind up the less palatable parts to make them delicious. Every culture that eats meat and owns a knife does it.

Since my student days of Centrelink survivalism, I've grown a fondness for mince, a carnivore's equivalent of Stockholm syndrome. It is the last stop on the meatwagon before Vegetarian City. So it is no great surprise to me that consumption levels of ground beef act as a marker of relative poverty, at least, in the US . In the US, low income earners eat more beef per capita than middle and high income consumers - 72 pounds per person each year; about 85 grams of beef every day to round it off to a nonsensical daily average. There is something very wrong with a food system where the poorest can afford to eat the most meat. Of this 72 pounds, 31 pounds were mince, a full 3 pounds per person more than middle- and high- income earners. 72 pounds of ground beef is a lot of hamburger.

The hazards associated with industrially ground beef are well documented - as Eric Schlosser excoriates in his book Fast Food Nation: "Anyone who brings raw ground beef into his or her kitchen today must regard it as a potential biohazard", but this does not make it any less delicious.

To verify mince's claim to low cultural specificity, SBS lists at least thirty recipes from multitude Food Safaris that include the word "mince" and some type of meat. The recipes represent practically every continent.

My favorite picks from the back catalogue:

Polpettone con uova sode - It's a gigantic scotch egg log but made classy by virtue of Italian authenticity. Eggs placed in the centre of a meatloaf always make me laugh and remind me of the oversaturated photos of food from 1950s Women's Weekly magazines.

Kafta - This simple barbecued meatball comes from anywhere from the Balkans to India. This particular recipe comes from the midpoint between these two cuisines in Lebanon. They're as easy to make as a hamburger.

Mantu - There is a temptation to assume that dumplings are solely associated with Asian food, but mantu provide a dumpling bridge through Pakistan to the Middle East; a dish originally spread outwards from the Mongolian empire.