I belong to the MasterChef generation. I was a young adult when MasterChef first aired in Australia and I was swept up in the excitement which, for me, has never waned. Though I stopped watching live free-to-air tv a long time ago, I rely heavily on catch-up tv so I can watch the previous night’s episode, or sometimes binge a week’s worth over the weekend while I potter around the kitchen myself.

So when Season 12 launched this year in the midst of my son’s four month sleep regression, I was more than a little anxious about how I would manage to keep up. At the time, we would put bub to bed at 8.30pm and I followed suit within 15 minutes, to maximise my chances of getting a solid two hour stretch of sleep at least once a night. He is also a ‘low sleep needs’ baby so his daytime naps are few and far between. And they are short. So finding time to catch up on 1.5 hours’ worth of tv every day (and also finding time to, you know, fulfil basic physiological needs such as eating, showering, and going to the toilet) was no mean feat. But my commitment to MasterChef is such that I made it happen. I was often two weeks behind and I had to unfollow all MasterChef and MasterChef-adjacent social media accounts to avoid spoilers, but I made it work.

I was particularly keen this year to watch the show with the new cast of judges. I adored Gary, Matt and George. A good friend of mine described them as being like your favourite uncles. I was sympathetic for George and felt he was a little unfairly maligned by the media during the wage avoidance scandal, regardless of how poorly he may have behaved. (Which I appreciate is a problematic mindset and likely a result of my subconsciously ingrained patriarchal thinking. But I would also encourage you to read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which will give you fresh perspective on joining the internet pile on.) But to the point, Gary, Matt and George are, well, they’re three old, white men. And, like your favourite uncle, sometimes they do things that make you cringe, and realise they hail from a different time with different ways of thinking.

To see Melissa Leong on screen, a female and a person of colour, intelligent and articulate and a fashion icon taking Matt’s cravats on head on… it was not just refreshing, it was inspiring. It was empowering. It was real. I know I’m not alone in feeling this, and certainly not the first to express these feelings. With new judges came a new era of MasterChef, moving forward in a beautiful new direction.

So in what direction, then, is Channel 7’s new show Plate of Origin (aka POO) taking us?

For those who aren’t familiar with it, in Plate of Origin, Matt Preston (English born), Gary Mehigan (English born) and Manu Feildel (French born) will preside over ten teams representing different countries and their cuisines, so the judges can decide which country has the ‘best food on the planet’. It’s dubbed as a ‘World Cup of cooking’ and sees representation from Australia, Cameroon, China, France, Greece, India, Italy, Lebanon, Venezuela, and Vietnam.

My first thought on hearing the show’s premise was that these old white men have shrugged off their controversial costars in order to band together in a form of kitchen-based sexist neo-colonialism.

I wish I could be more articulate than that.

But I honestly can’t. I’m genuinely uncomfortable with the entire premise of pitting one country’s food against another. And every time I see an ad, proclaiming ‘it’s time to see which country’s food is the best’, I cannot for the life of me understand how Gary, Matt and Manu can claim to do this. Hailing from two of the most aggressive colonising countries, and they’re going to ‘judge’ the food of Australia, Cameroon, India and Vietnam? These men may be ‘culinary superstars’, with decades of experience in kitchens around the world, but the nuances that come with cooking and appreciating different cuisines seem to be missed. The claim is that it’s all fun, joy and silliness, but I think we, as Australians, are well beyond buying into that.

I still remember, like it were yesterday, MasterChef season two and the episode that saw the elimination of my favourite contestant, Marion Grasby. Marion is Thai-Australian and well-versed in Thai cooking, and yet was eliminated in a satay challenge. At the time I remember being thoroughly confused by the judge’s remarks on, essentially, which satay sauce they personally preferred. The whole affair epitomised the extreme subjectivity that is food reviewing. But, more than that, at its most basic, it demonstrated a lack of appreciation of difference.

It is no secret that palates and food preferences around the world are different. While humans are not born with any predetermined tastes (least of all those based on genetics or where you’re born), the foods you’re exposed to and those you do eat — and their cultural resonance — become part of the fibre of your being. With my South African Indian background, a particular rose-flavoured iced drink was the highlight of summers growing up. When Ramadhan, the Islamic month of fasting, fell in summer, we all looked forward to iftar (breaking fast) and seeing the table set with mum’s tall glass jug coloured vibrant magenta, beads of condensation collecting in mesmerising drips outside. Though I was growing up 100% Australian, my entire childhood was filled with food and drinks that spoke to our Islamic and Indian culture. It was years before I connected our ubiquitous ‘elachi’ with this exotic-sounding cardamom thing I’d heard of. My parents rarely drank masala chai, but everything we ate had spices in it — even our ‘plain’ white rice. So when chai lattes became a standard cafe menu item, I was thrilled. I would order giant bowls of the stuff, served with a tiny jug of honey alongside.

But I also recall the time one of my best friends tried her first chai. It was one of the powdered, sugary milky drinks that are so common these days (and that I honestly, embarrassingly prefer to the real thing). My friend said she felt like she was ‘drinking a day spa foot cream’. She said a delicious foot cream, I should add, but a foot cream nonetheless. They are now one of her favourite drinks. This same friend loves all things pink and floral, which was the only reason she was open to tasting rose-flavoured anything. With her pale skin, ginger hair and Irish heritage, she once thought roses belonged in the garden not the kitchen. She has since eaten any edible floral treat I can throw her way (rose, lavender, orange blossom) and happily devoured them all. But will rosewater ever speak to her nostalgic heart the same way it does to mine?

Food writer Bee Wilson captures this most eloquently in her book First Bite: How We Learn To Eat (2015, HarperCollins), in her chapter on how memory affects what we eat, how we eat, and more importantly how we feel about it. She talks about the significance of mint tea to the North African population settled in France, due to the way the tea is served and the traditions that surround it. She then outlines a 2009 study which examined brain activity in a group of French test subjects, half of whom were ‘Algerian-French’ and half of whom were ‘European French’, when they were asked to smell mint. Though all subjects identified the scent as mint and found the smell pleasant, the Algerians displayed stronger neural activity in response to the mint. Bee Wilson goes on to say that “If mint were a sound instead of a taste, you could say that the French heard the notes, but only the Algerian[-French] appreciated the music of it.” (First Bite, pp92-93).

I don’t believe that Gary, Matt and Manu have ability to appreciate the music of all the cuisines they’ll be claiming to ‘judge’, nor should we expect them to.