From her Compton home on South Australia's Limestone Coast, Cindy Bunt has made a living sharing different cultures' foods at her Post & Rail cooking school.
Despite having never travelled overseas, the 46-year-old has an obsession with exploring flavours different to the ones she experienced growing up in rural Australia.
Getting an early love of rye toast and pickles from her German father, it wasn't until the inception of the internet that Ms Bunt could really venture outside meat and three veg.
"As soon as I could look up recipes and see a gorgeous picture of the food ... I would work backwards and make [the dishes]," Ms Bunt said.
But it wasn't until Cindy and her then husband hosted backpackers through a farm workers program that her world really opened up.
Between 2011 and 2015, Ms Bunt had 150 people from around the world stay and work on the family's farm at Apsley, a small Victorian town with a few hundred people.
Accustomed to feeding large numbers, Ms Bunt was running a nursery and cafe at the time.
At the end of each day, they would often have 10 or so people around the table, sharing a dish cooked with fresh ingredients from the garden.
"We would chat about it during the day, 'Which country should we visit tonight?'"
"It was such a joyful time."
One Japanese visitor was so determined to make Cindy a traditional meal he got his mother to send recipes for udon noodle soup, raw salmon sushi and chicken katsudon.
Then there were the two Taiwanese women who made Cindy a 40 clove of garlic soup, a supposed remedy for menstrual pain.
"Boy, oh boy that came out your pores the next day," Ms Bunt said.
Making it your own
Inspired by all she has learned and seen, Ms Bunt opened her own cooking school in 2018.
Since then, her weekly workshops have taught people to make Lebanese-inspired food, to Korean, Japanese, Moroccan, and beyond — often for the first time.
"Because [a lot of these people] live rurally, the chances of [them] getting this food or trying this food is limited to none," Ms Bunt said.
When it comes to dish selection, Ms Bunt tends to stick with the better-known dishes.
"At the very basic, I'll do the popular things that we think [that culture's] food is," Ms Bunt said.
"[But] then I have to give my twist on it. I'm always a one-less-dish, one-less-step person to get the same result."
Ms Bunt's awareness of offering something slightly different is a good approach according to food anthropologist Trang X Ta.
As well as having no cultural ties to any of the places she cooks from — aside from friends she has made on the farm — Ms Bunt will never be able to fully recreate these dishes.
"The flavour is going to be characterised by the ingredients you have access to," Dr Trang said.
Sharing food in faraway places
Having said that, the Australian National University lecturer believes there is a place for people to "capitalise" on food from outside their culture.
Growing up in Seattle but born in Vietnam to Asian parents, Dr Trang is a self-described "advocate for difference".
She would rather see a white woman sell Chinese food than have no Chinese at all.
"Not everyone has the privilege to have the resources to travel to those regions and taste those distinctive flavours.
The important thing is to avoid any claims to authenticity.
But then again, who has the power to define what is authentic?
"Cuisines around the world have always been a fusion of different ingredients that come from different parts of the world," Dr Trang said.
It's a world with endless opportunities for Cindy Bunt.
