IN CONVERSATION WITH Alice Zaslavsky

Alice Zaslavsky is a broadcaster, award-winning author, teacher and the passionate food educator behind Phenomenom, a free digital food educational program for schools.

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Tell us about your journey into the food world. Where did it begin and how?

I come from a long line of "food people"; my great grandfather chose to be a cook in the Bolshevik army rather than fight, my great uncle wrote a cookbook in the Soviet Union and, of course, all of the women in my family are the kind who knew how to make something from whatever they could find. Some of my fondest childhood memories are in the vegetable patch of my grandpa's dacha (weekender), picking tomatoes off the vine or pinching persimmons off the trees. He recreated what he could when we moved here too, planting fruit trees and making his own wine (which Georgians are especially good at, might I add). My own entry into that world professionally was a little more convoluted - I was a teacher and always looking for excuses to get food into lessons, until I realised I was talking about food more than I was history or English. So, I upskilled in order to teach a full unit about food and culture at a trade college in Melbourne and that's where the MasterChef auditions were taking place. I auditioned to have the chance to continue building my skillset and meet likeminded people. That was a decade ago! The rest, as they say, is history.