A balance of sweet personal reflections and salty truths about the foods many adore, Should You Really Eat That? gets to the bottom of how we should eat.

Join food writer Lee Tran Lam on a culinary podcast adventure starting Thursday 12 October in a show that explores changing attitudes to rice, bread, cheese and other staples across the world – and how confusing it is keeping up with what’s ‘good’ for you.

Should you actually put olive oil or salt in your coffee, as recent food trends suggest? And which seafoods are actually sustainable? The subject is so confusing that award-winning chef at Attica restaurant, Ben Shewry, took finned fish off the menu for two years, being unsure what to ethically serve.

Host and food writer Lee Tran Lam uncovers why some foods get a bad rap in Australia yet are enthusiastically consumed in other parts of the world.

“The idea for the podcast started when I read a dietician’s advice that they’d never put white rice in their shopping trolley, yet the grain feeds millions around the world and so many national dishes are built around white rice,” Lam said. 

“Similarly, humans have also been eating bread for thousands of years, but there’s now so much anti-bread sentiment. So, in the podcast we try to make sense of that: what’s happening to shift our perceptions and palates?”

Should You Really Eat That? explores the cultural, social, and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet, like rice, bread, tea, coffee, cheese, and seafood. Lam seeks to find out where these assumptions come from, how they differ between cultures, and to sift out the grains of truth.

First on the podcast menu is rice, where the co-owner of Sydney’s Chat Thai restaurants and host of SBS’s Water Heart Food, Palisa Anderson, describes eating a Thai sticky rice that literally translates as 'this rice is so good, I've forgotten about my husband'.

Anderson also discusses the importance of rice in Japan, where she lived for several years. From being physically embodied in people’s homes via traditional Japanese tatami floor mats to being the star of kaiseki haute cuisine which has inspired fine-dining tasting menus around the world.

“Consuming rice is so ingrained in Asian countries that the main greeting in places like the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam is, ‘have you eaten rice yet?’ said Lam. “In Japan, the names of meals translate as morning rice, noon rice, and evening rice.” 

In episode one, Adetokunboh Adeniyi of Sydney’s Little Lagos and Brisbane’s Lekki By Little Lagos, shares memories of eating West African jollof rice at significant events in his Nigerian homeland. Adeniyi confesses that while many were panic-buying toilet paper during the early days of the pandemic, he was stocking up on rice.

But rice's reputation has suffered in the west, due to its high glycaemic index and fears of food poisoning. In extreme cases, you can die from consuming cooked rice that hasn’t been properly refrigerated.

However, rice also gets a nutritional boost from being left out to cool. “So, we have a bit of a complex story there with rice, don't we? You can cook it and cool it and it's good for you. But cool it really quickly and put it back in the fridge, so it doesn't do any harm,” says Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, program director of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of South Australia.

Should You Really Eat That? is available to listen on SBS Audio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other streaming platforms. The first episode on rice drops on Thursday 12 October and episodes will be available weekly.