Margaret Fulton: A study of a 1960s Australian food writer as an activist

Today, food writing makes up a significant proportion of the texts written, published, sold and read each year in Australia. While the food writing published in magazines and cookbooks has often been thought of as providing useful, but relatively banal, practical skills-based information to its readers, relatively recent reassessments suggest that food writing is much more interesting and important than this. In the contemporary context, when the mere mention of food engenders considerable anxiety, food writers play a number of roles beyond providing information on how to buy, store, prepare and serve various provisions. Instead, contemporary food writers engage with a range of important issues around food production and consumption including sustainable and ethical agriculture, biodiversity and genetic modification, food miles and fair trade, food safety and security, and obesity, diabetes and other health issues. In this, Australian food writers not only provide comment on any important issues in progress, they are also, I suggest, forward-thinking activists, advocating and campaigning for change. This paper focuses on prominent Australian food writer Margaret Fulton’s career in the 1960s to begin to investigate her work as an activist: that is, one who advocates and campaigns to bring about change