Lessons from a Kangaroo

Abstract

The lessons from the kangaroo remain seared into my memory, not as a triumphant meal but as a troubling protagonist who taught me that acknowledging my own complicity in settler-colonial institutions means abandoning the possibility of gastronomic redemption. Our violent encounter provoked me to ask different questions about the lives touched through farming and eating, how these lives are lived and taken, and the ways in which they might be made to matter differently. These questions have highlighted for me the urgent need for a more relational gastronomy than that offered by settler-colonial gastronomy and its quest for innocence. Eating and living well on, from, and with Country requires Indigenous modes of gustatory governance that are better equipped, both conceptually and practically, to respond to the hunger of others and care for the life-worlds of those eaten. It is possible, though by no means certain, that a gastronomy guided by the laws of Country, rather than by laws of the stomach, might be an important first step in resetting the terms of engagement by which settlers live, farm, and eat as uninvited guests on stolen land.