Eat, drink - and make money

The world is discovering the freshness and quality of Australian foods. British Airways serves its First Class passengers healthy, tasty meat on flights across the Atlantic - ostrich meat from Australia.

Restaurants in Paris include Australian labels on their wine lists, and live Tasmanian salmon are airfreighted to Tokyo to be turned into sushi.

Sophisticated Australian food products, fresh or processed, are a very good export business. Imagine how good they taste at their source. From Margaret River's superb wines to the creamy cheeses of King Island and the world-famous Sydney Rock Oysters, Australia has it all.

A Japanese company brews sake in Sydney because Australian rice and clear water make for a brilliant drink. Penfolds Grange, an almost legendary Australian red wine, is admitted to the ranks of the world's great wines by international judges.

Eating out for pleasure and health
The combination of a clean environment and growing sophistication in cooking and presentation has given Australia great food, presented superbly. Every Australian city has haute cuisine restaurants which rival the world's best, and a number of unique Australian cuisines have emerged. Australians and visitors can largely thank the successive waves of immigrants for this quality and choice. First came Chinese restaurants, brought by the gold miners and soon established in every town and city of Australia. Indeed, Sydney has the reputation of offering the best Cantonese food outside China. But apart from Chinese cooking, for many years the excellent quality of Australian ingredients seemed to make it unnecessary to put much effort into preparing food. A simple steak or grilled snapper were so good that Australians did not bother with sophisticated preparation. Now the heartiness of Mediterranean cuisine, the delicacy of Japanese presentation and the intense flavours of Thai cooking - as well as many others - have been added. The result is outstanding.

While the country has its great restaurants, with prices to match, there is also a huge range of smaller, innovative and specialised but less expensive eateries. You may enjoy fresh trout in a resort cafe in the Snowy Mountains, order a dozen rock oysters by the harbour in Sydney or sample crumbly local cheddar in a winery restaurant on the Murray River - just for starters. Wherever you are, you will have a choice of Australia's great wines and world-famous beers.

Closer to home
Australia's food products are not only healthy and fresh, grown far from pollution and free of pesticides and herbicides. They are also available in great variety. It is quite likely that neighbourhood greengrocers will stock crisp bok choy next to four varieties of lettuce; just-picked nashi pears with the bananas; lemon grass alongside the garlic; and star fruit with the dewy blueberries. Best of all, fruit and vegetables as well as meat and fish are relatively cheap in Australia. And there are many more opportunities to introduce international cuisine and food products into Australia, and to export the local produce. After all, British Airways is not the only airline around!