For the past year, I’ve been eating my way through the supermarket aisles of Australia. I’ve had 17 different yoghurts, more than 40 varieties of potato chips, 17 different ginger beers and almost every can of baked bean you can get. All up, I’ve tasted more than 290 goods and spent more than 200 hours eating, discussing and thinking about supermarket aisle foods. It has left me with a more investigative style of shopping, a moratorium on hot chocolate purchases, and the most wishy-washy take on subjectivity versus objectivity in food criticism.
And in response, I have been met with a colossal weight of opinion. I have been writing about food for more than a decade but the last year of my life has brought more comments, congratulations and insults than the rest of my career combined. So, it feels timely and relevant that now, at the end of the year, I share some of mine.
