From Brazilian moqueca to Japanese sushi wrapped in seaweed, coastlines and waterways influence how we eat in many ways. But working out what’s healthy to consume is tricky, as food writer Lee Tran learns when interviewing Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of nutrition and food sciences at the University of South Australia.
The bigger the fish, the more likely it's got higher levels of mercury in it.Dr Evangeline Mantzioris
Fish and seaweed can have many nutritional upsides, but you do have to watch out for the potential downsides as well (listeria, mercury, arsenic levels), particularly if you’re pregnant.
Sustainability is also a huge issue. People might avoid endangered bluefin tuna and farmed Tasmanian salmon for environmental reasons, but it can be hard to always know which species are ethical to eat.
Lee Tran talks to Ben Shewry, from Melbourne’s award-winning Attica restaurant, who admits to initially being confused by the matter.
I actually couldn't work out the sustainability of anything and so I took finned fish off the menu completely for two years.Ben Shewry
Nowadays, as ambassador for the GoodFish sustainable seafood guide, he’s a lot more confident about which species you should eat. In this episode he shares his advice for how to do the right thing at the fish and chip shop, as well as his easy two-course recipe for mussels you can try at home.
Chris Jordan, the Indigenous chef behind Three Little Birds in Brisbane/ Meanjin, also uses seafood to make statements about climate change with dishes such as Oil and Gas and Bleached Coral. He also shapes the future by teaching cooking lessons to disadvantaged and Indigenous kids at a juvenile detention centre. Namas – a Torres Strait Islander seafood dish of much significance to him – has led to memorable and meaningful moments with his young students.
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast is recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation. I’d like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: The bigger the fish, the more likely it's got higher levels of mercury in it.
Ben Shewry: I actually couldn't work out the sustainability of anything and so I took finned fish off the menu completely for two years.
Chris Jordan: So namas is a raw fish dish that's like a household meal through Murri and Torres Strait families. It's something that I really wanted to share and pay homage to.
Lee Tran Lam: Our taste for seafood goes back a long time – we’ve been snacking on shellfish for more than 100,000 years. But today, people might reconsider the catch of the day and what’s netted from coastlines, ’cause of environmental, ethical or health concerns.
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you be consuming more tea, less coffee, should you skip the rice, bread, seafood or cheese? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast!
Today’s episode is on seafood.
(Sound of fish splashing)
From Brazilian moqueca to Vietnamese canh chua, seafood flavours the dishes on many tables worldwide. Lunar New Year banquets feature whole steamed fish for good luck and high rollers splash out on caviar because they can. But the status of seafood is ever-changing: caviar used to be a peasant food and American saloons gave the dish away – like literal peanuts. Today, the fish eggs are so pricey that the Guinness world record for the most expensive caviar is for an Iranian variety that costs $AU38,000 a kilo. Attitudes to seafood have changed, too – we might skip bluefin tuna or Tasmanian farmed salmon for sustainability reasons and if you’re vegan, vegetarian or pregnant, you’re likely limiting your consumption of what’s hauled from the sea, too. So seafood, how much should we actually be eating? Let’s talk to an expert who can help us out.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: I'm Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, currently the program director of nutrition and food sciences, here at the University of South Australia I'm also an accredited practising dietitian. I’ve had almost over 30 years in the area of nutrition.
Seafood, including fish and all the other sorts of shellfish and food that comes from the sea – I guess including seaweed – is really important for our nutritional intake and one of those aspects that is really important is the omega-3 fatty acid.
Having more omega-3 fats in our diet is healthier for us and reduces the risk of a lot of chronic diseases. So what does this all mean for our diet? It means we should try to get in a couple of serves of fish a week.
Lee Tran Lam: I know you need to exercise caution with seafood when pregnant – as illustrated by pregnant friends enthusiastically requesting sushi and sashimi as their number one post-birth celebration meal.
The reason why they’re careful to avoid raw seafood when they’re expecting is to minimise the risk of a listeria infection, which can lead to miscarriage or other serious and unwanted complications.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: When women get pregnant, there's this sudden reduction of the intake of seafood and this is a little bit concerning, because the advantages of eating seafood outweigh the risks.
Lee Tran Lam: Listeria, as mentioned, is one of those risks. Another is mercury. The first time I’d ever heard of someone inadvertently ingesting an alarming amount of mercury was when actor Jeremy Piven had to quit a David Mamet play in New York because he’d tested for six times the normal levels of mercury, which the actor partly blamed on his fish-heavy diet.
When David Mamet was asked for his response to Jeremy Piven exiting his production due to excessive mercury levels, the playwright said: "My understanding is that he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer."
Now, David Mamet is famous for his entertaining quips and punchlines. But for pregnant women, mercury consumption is a serious issue.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: Now mercury is a concern because it can affect the neural system and cause neural development problems.
The bigger the fish, the more likely it's got higher levels of mercury in it.
Women who are pregnant are actually encouraged to keep consuming fish because it's a really valuable source of omega-3 for them and their baby, particularly because that's what is used to form our brains. So the recommendation is to have two serves of fish – preferably choosing smaller fish.
The fish you need to avoid are orange roughy or deepsea perch or catfish. If you do eat them, a 150g serve, which is about the size of someone's hand, only having it once a week and having no other fish in that week.
The other fish that needs to be avoided – and you can see these are all the bigger fish that are going to eat lots and lots of little fish – is shark, which is also served as flake which is what typically fish and chips are from a fish and chip store. And if you have a serve of that, once again, we call a serve 150g, the size of my hand, you can only have it once a fortnight, but if you avoid those fish, you can have fish twice a week.
Two serves of fish or seafood a week is what's needed, particularly for pregnant women. In South Australia, they're actually screening women's omega-3 levels because they've shown that lower omega-3 levels during pregnancy increases the risk of a premature birth.
Lee Tran Lam: So what if you don’t eat fish, perhaps for ethical or environmental reasons?
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: So seaweed has got a valuable source of the omega-3 fatty acids in it. It will be a valuable source for women who may be vegan or vegetarian.
Lee Tran Lam: You might’ve heard about how great seaweed is – it’s been touted as a good weapon against climate-change, because it absorbs carbon, reduces methane emissions and can produce bioplastics. Sea creatures also adorably turn kelp into sun-protective hats for their heads.
Seaweed’s also meant to be good for thyroid function, gut health, your immune system, and heart health. However, I was shocked when I learnt that hijiki, a type of seaweed found in furikake seasoning and other Japanese staples, contains a concerning amount of arsenic.
I’ve encountered this seaweed in many dishes in Japan and Tokyo-born cookbook author Makiko Ito writes on her Just Hungry blog that tests done on hijiki are on the dried variety and you normally soak, rinse, strain and cook the seaweed in liquid, which apparently reduces the ingredient’s arsenic levels.
In 2004, when Food Standards Australia considered banning hijiki, chef Tetsuya Wakuda told The Sydney Morning Herald: "In Japan they are still eating it every day. If it is that dangerous, why are they using it in baby food?"
The ingredient’s beloved in Japan, but food safety bodies around the world, including in Singapore and Hong Kong, have issued warnings about this seaweed. Food Standards Australia considers it a ‘risk food’ and monitors arsenic levels in imported hijiki. By the way, other seaweed varieties, like the nori that sushi’s wrapped in, do not share hijiki’s high arsenic levels.
Now we’ve mentioned how seaweed and seafood are good sources of omega-3 fatty acids. They’re vital not just for our physical health, but mental well-being, too.
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris: So it also lowers the risk of depression and in older populations of people, it seems to improve the cognitive decline that we see. So really important, once again, to look at the intake of fish for those populations.
Fish is incredibly important in our diet for the health benefits that we get from it, but for island populations and small communities that rely on it, it can sometimes be their sole source of protein and it actually supplies protein to about 17 per cent of the population around the world.
And what's concerning is with the global climate change, ocean temperatures are going up and there's concern in the scientific world about how this may affect the growth, the reproductive ability of the fish, and also the nutrients that they contain. So will fish that are in a warmer temperature, will they have as much protein? It may affect their ability to metabolise and produce these fatty acids. Climate change is another topic, but I think the big overall thing is that when we eat fish, to not waste it, because then that further contributes to the climate change problems we're having with greenhouse gases that are emitted from food waste.
Lee Tran Lam: With seafood, it’s vital to talk about sustainability. Let’s chat to someone who strongly cares about this topic.
Ben Shewry: My name is Ben Shewry. I'm the chef and owner of Attica restaurant in Melbourne.
I grew up on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand in a region called Taranaki. Seafood was always such a massive part of our life because, growing up, we didn't have a lot and we lived out on the coast and that was access to food regularly and our family had rituals around the harvesting of what we call kina or sea urchin, paua or abalone, kōura or crayfish. Those are te reo Māori words for different types of seafood that we ate as children with our parents on the beach, a short drive from our home. We would have a feast and we felt like kings. My mum and dad were really good at, like, hiding the lack of money from us [laughs].
But it's funny because those things were free and now they're some of the most valuable ingredients in the world.
Lee Tran Lam: So what was his first professional encounter with seafood life?
Ben Shewry: Well, probably my first encounter with seafood as a chef was not a particularly good one. We have the famous green lip mussel in New Zealand and it would have probably been green lip mussels frozen on the half shell, coming out of a box in a plastic bag being laid onto a bain-marie tray, perhaps topped with bacon and mornay sauce and grilled and then put on a buffet.
Actually no, no, my very first professional experience with seafood was a fisherman's basket when I was 10 years old when I was doing work experience in a place called The Mill which was the restaurant of the town, New Plymouth, where I sort of spent my childhood.
Lee Tran Lam: When did he become aware of why sustainability in seafood mattered so much?
Ben Shewry: It was something that I was aware of from my childhood. My father had this view of only taking enough for you to eat and not taking more than that. If you're allowed 10 paua a day, which I think was the number when I was a child, but we only needed four to feed us, then that's what dad would take.
It probably wasn't until I was in my early twenties that sustainability started to become a bigger factor because I began to learn that the more sustainable ingredients are, the better quality they are generally and then when I had my first child Kobe at 27, I really started to examine what I was doing as a chef and my impacts and started to see that the supply of certain things from the ocean was drying up as well, they were harder to get, certain types of fish species were becoming less abundantly available through the market or through our seafood purveyor and and it just led me down this kind of rabbit hole of research.
Lee Tran Lam: Seafood’s sustainability matters deeply, as many people rely on this protein to feed themselves and maintain their livelihoods. But in just 50 years, we’ve seen the number of overfished stocks triple internationally, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations states that a third “of the world's assessed fisheries are currently pushed beyond their biological limits”.
Bluefin tuna is famously under threat. In The Third Plate, chef Dan Barber writes about the remorse he felt after offering it to diners. “If we continued plundering the ocean for bluefin tuna, there would be nothing left within a generation. I knew all of that or at least enough to know better and yet I had gone ahead and served it in my kitchen.”
It still happens today – in a review of a Melbourne sushi temple, The Age’s critic Besha Rodell expressed disappointment that the restaurant relied “so heavily on fish that’s endangered, although it’s hardly alone in this”.
In January 2019, restaurateur Kiyoshi Kimura paid a record-breaking $AU4.4 million for one bluefin tuna at the Tokyo fish market. It’s a sign of how much in demand this endangered species is. Only decades ago, bluefin tuna was seen as inferior, considered only good enough for pet food. In the LA Times recently, Jean Trinh wrote, “there are three species of bluefin tuna – Atlantic, Pacific and Southern – and they’ve all been historically overfished. In 2010, the population of adult Pacific bluefin tuna dropped to as low as 1.5 per cent of pre-fishing levels, before rising to 10 per cent in 2020 … ‘So 10 per cent is much better than 1.5 per cent, but we’re still not out of the woods.’”
In 2021, southern bluefin tuna – the kind found in Australia – was reclassified on The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. It was no longer considered critically endangered. It’s now just plain endangered.
For some, this relative rise in bluefin tuna stocks means the fish is acceptable to consume, while others reckon it must be avoided altogether. Now if you’ve ever been confused about which species are OK to eat and what’s off limits, well – you’re not the only one.
Ben Shewry: This is probably a decade ago or longer when I actually couldn't work out the sustainability of anything and so I took finned fish off the menu completely for two years, which for a chef, you know, in an ambitious restaurant is a really difficult thing.
So I decided that I would work with things that I absolutely knew were sustainable like mussels and oysters, until I could kind of reconcile what was up.
Lee Tran Lam: Nowadays, Ben has a better idea of what’s ethical to serve, especially since he’s an ambassador for The Good Fish project.
So The Good Fish project is the Australian Marine Conservation Society's guide to sustainable seafood in Australia, which you can visit by going to goodfish.org.au.
Good Fish breaks down sustainability in seafood into three very simple colours. It's a traffic light system: red being say no, so things that you should most definitely never eat for a variety of reasons outlined in the guide. Yellow or orange, which is eat less; and better choice, which is green.
It's the only independent seafood guide in Australia. It's not backed by government or by big industry or it doesn't have any vested interests other than care for the planet – that's what I love about it. It's science-based and a vast amount of time and energy is put into this guide and these decisions in the guide are not made lightly. So this is just an incredible tool for Australians who eat seafood.
Lee Tran Lam: Has it inspired what’s at his restaurant?
Ben Shewry: Absolutely, it’s had a huge influence on me. For a start, Attica is pledged to only serve seafood from the green list in the guide. It's very important to us.
We've gone actually beyond that even, to even research every product on our menu that contains seafood – things like fish sauce.
I know for a lot of people who discover this guide, it's really helpful because you could be at the fish and chip shop and you're not sure what you should eat and I really do believe in the goodness of humans and we don't want to hurt the environment but a lot of what we do is just through not knowing.
You know, it's as easy as pulling your phone out at the fish and chip shop and looking at the species of fish that are available and seeing if any of them are in the green list and whether or not you can actually ethically eat them and if I can't, I'll have a hamburger. [Laughs]
Lee Tran Lam: Remember how Dr Evangeline flagged flake as something to avoid, because it’s shark – a predator fish likely to contain higher levels of mercury than smaller species? Here’s another reason for saying no to flake.
Ben Shewry: Because of Australia's poor labelling laws, when you order flake in a fish chip shop, you could be eating one of different endangered types of sharks and I just can't believe that any Australian would want to eat flake if they knew that.
But there are alternatives – here in Victoria, King George Whiting particularly from the Corner Inlet fishery is a wonderful choice. It is, in my mind, the most delicious Australian fish and it is completely sustainable and it's harvested using amazing methods by some of the most environmentally minded fisher people that you’ll ever meet. And they represent the best and the future of fishing.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't eat fish, but all issues of climate change, environment sustainability, they all stem from a reduction in the use of things whether that be the reduction in the eating of certain species of fish which are under pressure and in some cases a complete and total reduction so that we actually don't eat them until that precious resource can recover.
Lee Tran Lam: Seafood eaters should consider mussels – which, like oysters, have been called ‘ecological superheroes’ by the University of Adelaide. These shellfish are filter feeders, so they help clean the environment and have been named the ‘kidneys’ of waterways because of this.
Ben Shewry: Mussels are a wonderful example of a shellfish that I always point to for people wanting an affordable, delicious source of seafood. Here in Victoria, we're really fortunate because we have several mussel farms in Port Phillip Bay, so really close to the city. Their practice is exemplary. There are little to no negative impacts on the environment. Mussels are filter feeders, so they're good for the bay. They're also native to the bay, the blue mussel. So they're supposed to be there and that's actually a really important consideration with a lot of aquaculture and farmed fish, sometimes those species are from a different part of the world and aren't actually supposed to be in that environment and that in turn puts a lot of pressure on the environment.
Lee Tran Lam: Like the farming of Atlantic salmon in Tasmania, says Ben. Richard Flanagan’s powerful writing has put this environmentally devastating practice in the spotlight. “A Tasmanian Atlantic salmon is the battery hen of the sea,” the acclaimed author writes in Toxic: the Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry.
The Good Fish guide has also highlighted concerns around pollution levels and other negative environmental impacts from farming salmon in Tasmania.
Ben Shewry: In particular Macquarie Harbour, where there's a critically endangered skate, one of the world's rarest and there's several impacts on that skate, but effectively salmon farming is one of them. In effect, what I'm saying is that salmon don't belong in that environment.
Lee Tran Lam: Mussels are a sustainable alternative and you can get a lot out of them, according to Ben. Here, he shares an easy way to maximise a haul of mussels.
Ben Shewry: One of the ways that I like to cook mussels is by heating up a large saucepan until it's quite hot, nothing in it, popping the mussels into the pot, maybe with a half cup of water or the classic is white wine, putting a lid on, steaming them until they're just open. And then I like to pick the mussels out of the shells and you can use them in a salad and a risotto and a pasta, you can have them just at a bowl full, but all of the juice that's in the bottom of that saucepan I like to use that to make a soup from, so you can add things like leeks, onions and potatoes, celery and carrots and you can make a really delicious like a light chowder kind of by sweating the onions and garlic off and then adding the mussel juice to it and that's like a delicious, delicious stock and far better than any cubes that you might buy that’s for sure.
And then you've got kind of a 2-for-1 deal with those mussels, you've got the first course, the steamed mussels and then you've got a second course of a soup, and I also add those shells to my compost as well. They would take a very long time to break down, no doubt, but there's sort of like no wastage there.
Lee Tran Lam: So that’s a handy no-waste recipe from one of Australia’s most internationally recognised chefs. Attica has, after all, been named restaurant of the Year by multiple food titles, from Gourmet Traveller to the Good Food Guide, and its first appearance on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants long list led to a nine-month-long queue for reservations. Mussels are no stranger to Attica’s menu – you might recall Ben’s episode on Netflix’s first season of Chef’s Table, which features a striking dish dedicated to Lance Wiffen, his mussel supplier.
Ben Shewry: Lance Wiffen, he's been farming mussels for over 30 years in Port Phillip Bay, he is an absolute legend of a guy. We loved him so much and loved his mussels, they were the best we'd ever had in the world, that we had an artist paint his face on mussel shell, on a half shell, and we’d serve this mussel, painted mussel shell, this portrait of Lance Wiffen, alongside this dish of mussels, which is effectively a fried mussel, in honour of him and I think the commitment to environment and to his community that he makes, he's a real unsung hero.
Lee Tran Lam: So what happened to all those decorated mussel shells?
Ben Shewry: They're in a storage locker somewhere or maybe even in my garage. I saw it on the other day funnily enough. They might end up at the Powerhouse [Museum in Sydney], they have asked us to collect things from Attica over the years that maybe we no longer need but might be valuable to some sort of future generation that's interested in what we did, you know, when we don't do it anymore.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s an inspired example of how you can use seafood to tell a story about sustainability. Let’s talk to another chef who uses his dishes to address climate change via his cooking.
Chris Jordan: Hi my name is Chris Jordan. I'm a First Nations chef, I run Three Little Birds, an Indigenous catering company. We work in Meanjin, Brisbane, down in Yugambeh Country on the Gold Coast and Gubbi Gubbi Country on the Sunshine Coast and we've also collaborated with Catbird at Fairhill Native Botanic Gardens.
Some of my earliest memories stem from stories of my dad. So my dad passed away when I was two. He was a really good fisherman. He would do the mullet run and he'd go and get oysters off the rocks and eat them. So we were living on Quandamooka Country and his ashes were actually spread around Peel Island. So I'd spend afternoons down at the beach with my aunty eating fish and chips. And they're the kind of first memories of seafood, sharing with my aunties, hearing stories about my dad and learning who he was.
Lee Tran Lam: Chris has strong memories of prepping seafood at one of his earliest jobs – at Sydney’s Flying Fish restaurant with chef Peter Kuruvita.
Chris Jordan: I'm actually allergic to iodine which is in shellfish shells and my first job as an apprentice with Peter at Flying Fish, it was peeling prawns for the prawn curry. I knew I was allergic to prawns, but I was just like so eager to like impress and I’d just moved to Sydney from the country. I just wanted to do a good job so I would like triple-glove up my hands and start peeling these prawns and obviously they’d spiked me through these little plastic gloves and I'd get like this reaction under the gloves, but I would just keep going [laughs] and like doing it every day.
Lee Tran Lam: Chris points out that he was allergic to iodine, not the actual shellfish itself. Of course, it’s worth taking care with any food you could have an extremely adverse reaction to.
When did Chris realise that it was important to serve sustainable seafood?
Chris Jordan: I've been sober for over four years now and during that process, there's a lot of reflection – so, like, looking at my core values. So I've been vegetarian for six years now and I only eat seafood that I catch myself. I will like taste things at events and stuff. But I think it's really important to consider the life that we take, when we eat meat and seafood and its impact and role within an ecosystem. And what's really helped me stay sober is being on Country with Aunty Dale Chapman, Aunty Arabella Douglas and brother Kieron Anderson and gathering food and seeing how we interact with the environment, as we nourish ourselves and also nourish Country by only taking what we need. It's a part of who I am. I want to express that through the food and the work that I do.
Lee Tran Lam: Chris has used seafood to comment on climate change – with dishes named Oil and Gas and Bleached Coral, for instance, at events at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art.
Chris Jordan: So they were Oil and Gas, which was a squid ink xanthan batter with anise myrtle mountain pepper and wattleseed oil and it was a pandanus vinegar that I'd made with vinegar powder and sea water. So this was like a monochromatic black and then the course that followed it was Bleached Coral, so it was reef fish, a smoked roe taramasalata. And then we'd made the bones into a stock which went into a tapioca crisp, some local pickles and crystal bread. So using every part of the fish and really honouring its life and this was monochromatic white. These were to signify the destruction of the reef and coral bleaching, oil and gas projects that threaten our marine biology.
Lee Tran Lam: He’s cooked deadly feasts with fellow First Nations chef Kieron Anderson, where they’ve served oysters with winter aspen and charred prawns with crocodile fat. And he’s aware of how seafood can play a social, cultural and environmental role in Indigenous communities.
Chris Jordan: So I think the role that it plays and what I've experienced it firsthand is connecting to Country. In this menu, we started off with this dish that I created for Aunty Rose Elu and it was a namas with smoked young coconut curry myrtle sorbet and we did this Kakadu plum sourdough with barbed wire grass and lemon myrtle desert lime. So it was inspired by listening to Aunty Rose Elu speak about the rising seas and the loss of Country throughout the Torres Strait. She spoke about the germination of the coconut and how it mirrors the umbilical cord and roots her to Country. I think the social and cultural role that it plays is something that's beyond me explaining, but the way that I interpreted her story and how much it means to mob is my way of honouring that connection.
So namas is a raw fish dish that's like a household meal through Murri and Torres Strait families. It's something that I really wanted to to share and pay homage to, and especially that story of you know the roots of the tree connecting her deeply into that Island, especially like as the Torres Strait islanders, they're on the front lines of this climate crisis and you know, it's threatening homes, damaging fresh water, crops, burial grounds and sacred cultural sites. So I think the way that we eat and the way that we look at how our eating affects the whole system – I truly think that the only way that we can combat this climate change is to sit and listen to First Nations people and their knowledge and experience.
Lee Tran Lam: As traditional custodians of the land, Indigenous Australians have ensured the sustainability of this continent for over 65,000 years. There are many examples of this, like the world-heritage listed Budj Bim eel traps in Victoria that are over 6000 years and enabled the Gunditjmara people to ingeniously and sustainably fish eel all year round. Or the middens First Nations people adorned with shellfish, so they could note which species they’d consumed and not overeat them.
Chris Jordan: Around the world, yeah, we're definitely at this tipping point and I think it's First Nations people who need to be called upon to guide policy and action.
Lee Tran Lam: Chris also uses seafood to shape the future by teaching cooking lessons at a juvenile detention centre.
Chris Jordan: What inspired me to start working with young, Indigenous and disadvantaged youth – you know, leaving home at 15, we didn't really have much food. Sometimes we'd go fishing and catch something for us to eat. But then also losing my dad, you then eating fish became a real treat for the family. There's a lot of young kids out there who you know might not have access – you know seafood really isn't that cheap.
The way I started working with incarcerated youth is with Kara Pulou, she's a chef and a teacher. She started a catering business actually in a school in Redbank. I walked into this classroom and it was a running catering business. The kid's curriculum was filling orders, so they would make things that needed to set ahead of time and things would be boxed up or things would be taken out and served and I just saw for the first time in a school, a working catering business that actually exposed kids to what the industry is like. It was beautiful and she's been working in juvie for about four or five years now.
Lee Tran Lam: It’s now been a few years since Chris started teaching kids at Brisbane Youth Education and Training Centre, located at Brisbane Youth Detention Centre.
Chris Jordan: I've taught kids as young as 12 in there. Well, I definitely see myself in these young kids and I got caught up in some bad and terrible things. There’s hope to turn your life around and – and I was gonna teach the kids how to make namas, this dish that I was talking about before that about Aunty Rose Elu and the kids were like, “oh, so what catering event is this for like, who's going to get to eat this?” And I remember saying to them, I was like, “oh, this is for you guys, I just bought this in for you guys” – it was just a really special moment. So I showed them how to fillet it, and then we cut it up. Some of the kids were like, “oh, like raw fish”, were a bit put off by it. But when they tasted it, they're like, “oh wow, this is really good” and I just remember like them shaking my hands and saying “thank you” at the end.
A lot of these kids haven't been told they're doing a good job. A little bit of kindness and love and respect you know goes a long way and if you treat these kids in a loving caring way, it comes straight back to you.
Lee Tran Lam: You’ve just heard the final episode of this season of Should You Really Eat That? You can catch up on the previous episodes – which cover rice, bread, tea, coffee and cheese – on your favourite podcast app and feel free to spread the word and tell people about the show.
Should You Really Eat That? is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford, Joel Supple and Caroline Gates, for their contributions and guidance. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
