MasterChef Australia judge Melissa Leong is using her ‘cool superpower’ – spreading love of food through words – to guide children through the culinary universe
- Australian TV personality and food critic Melissa Leong grew up a voracious reader, and credits her Singaporean heritage for her passion for eating ‘everything’
- She’s now fusing her love of food and the written word in A Taste Adventure, which aims to inspire children to try diverse dishes and become ‘food nerds’
“The most valuable lesson I have learned [from children] is that cheese goes with pretty much everything,” seasoned food writer Melissa Leong tells me. She is only half-joking.
“Dairy is never a bad idea. Cheese and pasta – no matter where you come from, it’s pretty special if it’s the right combination of squidgy textures and pungent flavours.”
“Like Kraft instant macaroni and cheese?” I ask.
“Long live the blue boxes,” she replies, with a grin.
Leong – one of Australia’s most prominent culinary experts – takes the world of food incredibly seriously, and treats it indiscriminately. As a first-generation Singaporean-Australian, Leong grew up rarely questioning the virtues of food.
“We ate everything growing up. It was just, ‘food is joy, you should just enjoy it.’ I very much believed that I should eat whatever is in front of me, that I should explore things that are unfamiliar to me,” she says.
She had the privilege of spending plenty of time in the kitchen with her family, learning about food early on, she says. “Being Singaporean, it’s a given. We love food and it’s the way we communicate.”
As a child, Leong was a voracious reader, devouring books by Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter and Paul Jennings, and she would be drawn to the eloquent descriptions of food in stories.
She lights up when describing passages from Potter’s Peter Rabbit, where the bunny and his friends crunch through freshly picked carrots, crisp lettuce and sweet peas, stolen from grumpy Farmer McGregor’s garden.
“Food adjectives and the way you can make someone hungry through words is a pretty cool superpower,” she laughs. “So that’s what I grew up being attracted to. It’s not at all a surprise I ended up doing what I’m doing.”
That passion for eating, as well as the written word, naturally carved out her trajectory in food media; Leong wears many hats, working as a food and travel writer, television presenter, hospitality consultant and in many more culinary-adjacent roles.
For international viewers, she is best known for her role as the articulate, empathetic judge on the Australian MasterChef series of cooking competitions, which includes the delightful spin-off, MasterChef Junior – a contest for children aged nine to 14.
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“I really enjoy any opportunity to find some levity, and just be a little bit silly and a little bit childish. I think we could all afford just to take ourselves a little less seriously and maybe we might find a bit more joy,” she says, remembering her time on the show.
She describes the young contestants as incredibly mature, and says she loved how the show created a space for little “food nerds” to meet others who also love cooking.
“When you see kids excited about something and if you can encourage them to explore it, and to learn and grow through it, I think that’s always a good thing,” she says.
That’s why she recently added another feather to her cap, debuting as an author of a children’s book that opens up a world to those who didn’t grow up around the vernacular of food.
A Taste Adventure, released in September, is dedicated to helping young readers navigate the complex and wonderful world of flavour.
Chapters explore, in lilting rhyme, the six tastes – sweet, salty, sour, bitter, spicy and umami – in a colourfully illustrated world of food, from chilli sauces:
On all sorts of foods, hot sauce is a winner
A few dabs of fire make one delicious dinner
On Taiwanese fried chicken or on Turkish shawarma
A little hot sauce makes snacks a LOT warmer
– to sweet desserts:
On sunny hot days, gelato is great
From Sicily to Venice, all flavours we rate.
“Even though I’ve been in the food industry for such a long time and it’s my job to articulate food at a certain level, there’s something you can always learn from children,” she says.
“So being in this space, learning how to explain what ‘sweet’ is to a kid, has sort of humbled me.”
Unlike her MasterChef Junior role, in which she is communicating to like-minded food lovers, writing the book challenged her to find the right language to connect with a new imagined reader.
That isn’t to say that the book talks down to children. “We tend to, in general, dumb things down for kids, and there is a reason for that – they’re still learning and we can’t expect them to keep up with the fast pace of adult brain processing.
“But I do think we underestimate kids. They are a lot more perceptive and a lot more open than we give them credit for.”
She hopes the book will give readers who are cautious, more conservative eaters the courage to try new things.
“If you always leave the door slightly ajar to that possibility, then I think kids are really able to surprise us in terms of what they can pick up.
“That’s the wonderful thing about food. And as long as you can talk about it in a way that’s a bit more open and a bit more neutral, then you’re always going to learn something.”