The white colonisers of Australia suffered from Alliumphobia, a fear of garlic. Local cooks didn't touch the stuff and it took 200 years for that fear to lift. This exciting food history of Australia shows we stubbornly held onto British Anglo-Celtic assumptions about produce and conking for a long time, and these fed our views on racial hierarchies and our place in the world. Before Garlic we had meat and potatoes; After Garlic what we ate got much more interesting. But has a national cuisine emerged? What is Australian food culture? Renowned food writer John Newton visits fine dining establishments and more everyday restaurants and cafes, before heading home to the dinner table to sample what everyday people have cooked and eaten for the last two hundred years. His insights and observations are full of flavour and supported by recipes old and new. Our produce and ingredients are more diverse than ever before, our chefs are acclaimed as some of the best in the world and unlike many of our great-grandparents, we are garlic eaters. But has what we eat changed as much as we think? Book jacket.