Join us for a hearty conversation about Griffith Review’s flavour-packed food-themed edition, A Matter of Taste.

Paul Barclay, host of ABC RN Big Ideas, will be tucking into a smorgasbord of culinary subjects with talented contributors Matthew Evans, Sam George-Allen and Yves Rees, from the slippery connections between witchcraft and brewing to the surprising origins of the milk wars to the profound human ritual of coming together around a meal. 

Griffith Review 78: A Matter of Taste serves up a delectable array of essays, fiction and reportage about what we eat and how we talk about it. It explores food as spectacle and status symbol, as fad and fantasy, as capital and cultural currency. If we are what we eat, then who are we in the twenty-first century?  

This event will be recorded for broadcast on ABC Radio National Big Ideas.

Matthew Evans is a farmer, chef, writer, broadcaster and consumer advocate living on Melukerdee land at Fat Pig Farm, his seventy-acre mixed holding in southern Tasmania. He is the author of more than a dozen books on food, as well as Soil: The Incredible Story of What Keeps the Earth, and Us, Healthy. His latest publication is The Real Food Companion. 

Sam George-Allen is an award-winning author living in southern Tasmania. Her first book, Witches: What Women Do Together, was published by Penguin Random House in 2019 and by Melville House (US/UK) in January 2020.  

Yves Rees is a lecturer in history at La Trobe University, the co-host of the Archive Fever podcast, author of All About Yves: Notes from a Transition (Allen & Unwin, 2021) and co-editor of Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2022).   

Paul Barclay is a Walkley Award-winning journalist and broadcaster with an appetite for ideas and in-depth analysis and discussion. Paul has produced countless stories over more than 20 years for an array of programs on virtually all ABC radio networks.