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There are two words that ABC News Breakfast food correspondent Alice Zaslavsky will never use when talking about her expert subject: “healthy” and “naughty”. So committed is she to changing the language around what we eat, when she cooks a pumpkin lasagne for fellow ABC broadcaster Sammy J on her “chop and chat” series, A Bite To Eat with Alice, she simply calls the dish a “lasagne”, and doesn’t even mention the fact that her guest is vegetarian.
“Australian tastes are changing,” says Zaslavsky, aka “Alice in Frames” to her online followers, and to MasterChef Australia fans the bespectacled young woman who, in 2012’s season four, famously relinquished her immunity pin to save a fellow contestant.
Alice Zaslavsky, with her A Bite To Eat With Alice guest Sammy J, says “Australian tastes are changing”.
“It’s reflective of the more fluid way in which we’re seeing each other and respecting each other’s diets,” she says. “Gone are the days when people turned their noses up at vegans. There’s a more inclusive way to talk about food. I never say something is ‘healthy’ because then our expectation of flavour goes down. There are no ‘guilty pleasures’, no ‘treats’, because that language sets up negative connotations, and, thankfully, diet culture is well and truly on the way out.”
The 50-episode series follows a familiar format: celebrities (including Pia Miranda, Colin Lane, Anthony Callea, Josh Thomas, Dilruk Jayasinha and Stephanie Alexander) enter a studio kitchen with one favourite ingredient. They also bring a mild food hang-up for Zaslavsky to address. The mood is light. Mistakes and mess are celebrated.
“I will forget to put an ingredient in, or maybe something won’t quite turn out right,” she says. “There was a moment in Donna Hay’s episode, which I hope they keep in. She’s so precise and such a perfectionist, and she said to me, ‘I thought we’d have to redo that!’, and I said, ‘No, Donna Hay, it’s not that kind of show’. Cooking is improvisation. There are always solutions.”
Growing up in Melbourne after her family migrated from Georgia in Eastern Europe when she was five, Zaslavsky recalls her fellow athletes on the satellite squad for the national gymnastics team nibbling carrot sticks for lunch.
Alice Zaslavsky with Donna Hay, who was suprised that Zaslavsky likes to wing it on her new cooking show. Credit: ABC
“[Dieting] was never a conversation my mother or grandmother had,” she says. “In my household, I would walk in, and the first question would be, ‘Have you eaten?’”
In the Soviet Union, their Ashkenazi Jewish culture was hidden. Her mother bought matzah for Passover in secret, concealing it on the journey home. There were whispers of a jeweller who would melt jewellery to create Star of David pendants.