Meet the Solutionists, with Mark Scott

Walk down the cereal aisle. Pick up a box of cereal. The front says "real nourishment" and shows a 4.5-star health rating. Flip it over. It's 25% sugar, packed with emulsifiers, flavours, and protein isolates – it’s full of ingredients you probably can’t even pronounce if you’ve ever heard of them before.

Welcome to Australia's national diet: ultra-processed.

Associate Professor Phillip Baker is the co-lead of a major Lancet series on ultra processed foods, one of the biggest global health challenges of our time. 

He says over half of what Australians eat is now ultra processed, and our diet is linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, and mental health problems.

Phil explains why these foods are why these foods are so ubiquitous now, examines what they’re doing to our health, how policy needs to change to protect real food, and how individuals can fight back with their forks.

Mark Scott  00:01

This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for 10s of 1000s of years. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Phillip Baker  00:32

Here we are at a local supermarket. We're about to walk through the fruit and veggies section into the centre aisles of the supermarket, which is UPF territory. So here we are in the cereal aisle. These are the common breakfast cereals that Australians eat every day. And we will start with rolled oats that you make porridge from which are minimally processed, which are probably the best thing you can put in your bowl. But we move down the cereal aisle to a packet of Nutri-Grain. Claims on the front: it says “real nourishment, protein, iron, fibre, multi-grain and B vitamins, and has a four and a half star rating. And then we flip it over to look at the ingredients, and it's about as ultra-processed as you can possibly get. Flavours, emulsifiers, maltodextrin, pack full of sugar, protein isolates. It's over 25% sugar. So mums and dads, you know, they're thinking these are healthy options, but not really, not at all.

Mark Scott  02:00

What's Australia's national diet?

Phillip Baker  02:02

Now here we are in the bread section, and the breads that you can see right in front of us are mostly ultra-processed.

Mark Scott  02:10

If I ask you what's eaten in Italy or Japan, you probably have a pretty clear picture in your mind. Here in Australia, we've got a few national favourites, but what's our cuisine?

Phillip Baker  02:21

It's got a four and a half star health rating. This contains wheat flour, as you'd expect from bread, but it's also got modified tapioca starch, wheat gluten, canola flour, soy flour, vegetable emulsifiers. 

Mark Scott  02:35

And if you ask Dr Philip Baker, he'll give you the bad news. He says Australia's national diet is ultra-processed. More than half of what Australians eat now is classified as ultra-processed foods, which are linked to a slew of ill health effects, including cancers and other diseases. The companies making these foods are spending billions on marketing and lobbying, and researchers are saying they're putting global health at risk in a similar way to big tobacco. You've probably heard of ultra-processed foods or UPFs, but what exactly are they, and how can you spot them at the supermarket? What do they do to humans when consumed in excess, and if they're so bad for us but so profitable for manufacturers, how do we reverse this trend? Associate Professor Philip Baker is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and a University of Sydney Horizon Fellow. He's one of the co-leads of a major new Lancet Series on ultra-processed foods, a comprehensive look at the science, the politics and the policy responses to what might be one of the biggest global health challenges of our time. This is the Solutionists, I'm Mark Scott. Phil, what exactly is ultra-processed food? What are we looking out for when we're at the grocery store?

Phillip Baker  04:00

So starting point for answering this question is to say that humans have been processing food for 1000s and 1000s of years. So we would grind grains to make a porridge or make bread. We ferment foods to make yogurt, we churn milk to make butter, we dry foods. This is part of who we are, and in fact, processing food has led to the growth development of entire civilisations. It's our ability to store food, to make it more nutritious, to give cultural meaning to food, the creation of all these diverse cuisines that we see all around the world, that all comes from processing food. Now, ultra-processed foods came about just in the last 100 years or so, but especially from the 1950s onwards. And these are industrial formulations, which are very different to other types of processed foods. Now the point of difference is that they contain ingredients that have been extracted from these agricultural commodities Here, I'm talking about commodities like soy, like palm oil, like wheat, sugar cane, for example. These ingredients are combined to create these ultra-processed food products that contain very little whole food. So that's a characteristic of these ultra-processed foods. Now, a rule of thumb is that these foods contain ingredients that you would not use in your own kitchen at home. So if you're in the supermarket and you pick up one of these products, and you turn it over and you look at the ingredients list, you will see the ingredients like protein isolates. You will see colourings, flavourings, emulsifiers, these are industrial ingredients. And the other thing to say about ultra-processed foods is that the purpose is to maximise profitability. So you use these cheap commodity ingredients that I just mentioned, you can bind those with flavourings, the colourings, the emulsifiers, and so on, you get a very profitable food product.

Mark Scott  06:07

So it's food designed in a lab, in a sense, rather than a kitchen. Lots of different products. Someone said that when you look at the ingredients on the back of a product you get on the shelf, the more ingredients that it has is often indicated that it's more highly processed, rather than kind of simple food that's been created for you. 

Phillip Baker  06:29

Exactly. I mean, you go to the supermarket, you pick up an apple. What are the ingredients in the apple? It's an apple, one ingredient. But even if you look at bread, for example, flour, yeast, water, is very simple. If you pick up a can of processed vegetables, like corn or beans, for example, it's typically beans, water and salt. When you pick up an ultra-processed product, it could contain 25 ingredients.

Mark Scott  06:57

So these foods have been designed so they're tasty and they're cheap, that sounds pretty good. So what's the problem? What's the health problem around ultra-processed foods?

Phillip Baker  07:11

So when we look at, and this is what we did with the Lancet Series, we looked at all of the accumulated evidence on how these ultra-processed foods are impacting on human health. And when you take all of that evidence together, it says something that is very, very clear, which is that if you have more of these ultra-processed foods in your diet, so what proportion of your diet is made up of ultra-processed foods, that associates with a number of health problems. The strongest evidence is for Crohn's disease, which is a form of inflammatory bowel disease, so there's something going on there. We also see really strong evidence for obesity and type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, diseases of the liver, cardiovascular disease, and in some forms of cancer, and I should add mental ill health, especially depression, and there's some emerging evidence around things like dementia, Parkinson's disease and so on. So, really clear evidence that there is something going on here.

Mark Scott  08:14

So what's the science telling us about that? Why do we think we've got these rising incidents of the diseases you outline, we've got rising levels of consumption of highly-processed food, but draw the connection to us. What's the science telling us between the connection of consuming these foods at scale in high volume and the incidence of these diseases?

Phillip Baker  08:35

Yeah, so there's a few things to unpack there. One is, what is it about these foods that make us eat more of them compared to minimally processed foods? So why do you eat more Doritos corn chips than you would if it was just a cob of corn or, say, like a corn tortilla. You eat way more of that corn chip, and that is a major contributor to obesity and type 2 diabetes. So we think that has something to do with two things about these foods. One is that for every bite that you're taking of an ultra-processed foods, you are packing in much more energy, so  many more calories, compared to if you're eating those minimally processed foods. And we think that's something to do with when the ultra-processed foods are being manufactured, they are essentially removing the water from these foods and replacing that water with vegetable oils, sugars, these refined starches, and they're very high in energy. So for every bite, you're getting more calories. That's one explanation. Another is that these foods are hyper palatable, they're ultra tasty, they're soft in texture, and the softness means we have to do less chewing to consume them. It also impacts on the way they travel through our gastrointestinal system. They're low in protein. And you spoke to David Raubenheimer and Steve Simpson about this: protein dilution is another major explanation. If your diet contains less protein, you're going to eat more food in order to get enough protein for your body. But they also contain these flavourings, these colourings, these emulsifiers, these gums, which make them ultra tasty. And so, this again comes back to the business model of the industry, they want us to eat more of the food. So that is the food itself and why we eat more of them, and the impact that that has in terms of our calories, but there is much more to that story as well. So when these foods are entering into our gut, we have good evidence now to show that they're impacting on our gastrointestinal system. So emulsifiers, for example, which you will find in many ultra-processed food products, are acting like a detergent in our gut and scrubbing the mucosal lining in our gut, degrading the gut micro flora, and leading to something we call leaky gut syndrome. And so this is an inflammatory condition where essentially the ingredients in these foods is coming into contact with our gastrointestinal lining and causing inflammation. That has other impacts, so for example, our gut microflora produces a lot of things that we need for a healthy brain, for a healthy body. Short chain fatty acids, for example, we need those for a healthy brain. And when we're eating lots of ultra-processed foods, that system is not working well, and we think that may be what's causing the depression as an example of that.

Mark Scott  11:31

So if I summarise that, I hear you say that, you know, if you start at the mouth right, every mouthful is more calorie dense, which might have weight impact. It's designed so we eat more of it, so we're eating more of this, but the quality of the food kind of denuded, particularly of protein. We're eating more, it's designed to be tasty, but the quality of the food is not anywhere near as good. But then once you get to the gut, and the gut biome and all the impact that has on health as well. It's not just a volume game, but the quality of that food and emulsifiers could be having a profoundly negative effect on our gut, which is so important to all of our health, including our mental health.

Phillip Baker  12:15

Exactly, exactly. And when you look at the evidence on how ultra-processed foods impacts human health, you see that these impacts are affecting almost every major body organ system. So there is something going on here with ultra-processed foods that indicates that we are not biologically adapted to eating these types of foods. We've evolved to eat minimally processed foods: fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, meat, dairy, for example. But these ingredients and the way that these ultra-processed foods are structured are very new to our biology, and so that's another way of thinking about it.

Mark Scott  12:54

How did we get here? I mean, I can understand businesses, you know, want to make profits, and I can understand that there is a, you know, almost like an equity question about making food widely available that is cheap and accessible, but you're talking about significant health consequences of that. Just talk about how this industry has dramatically evolved in the recent decades.

Phillip Baker  13:19

Yeah, so we actually go back in the in the Lancet Series that we just published, we actually go back in history to sort of look at the origins of this industry, how did it begin, and how did it begin to take over food systems all around the world? And it really begins with industrial agriculture, and it really began to take off after World War 2, and we had this green revolution, this explosion in food production using these industrial agricultural technologies. A lot of that came out of the United States, using fertilizer, using mechanisation and pesticides and so on. We could all of a sudden start producing these huge volumes of these agri-commodities, the soy, the palm, the sugar cane, the wheat, the rice, for example. Now what that did was it had a big impact on global food security. It increased the amount of food we're producing, and food security started to go down very quickly, and that was a good thing. However, it also created this glut of agri-commodities that the ultra-processed food industry could use to make these ultra-processed food products, and that's exactly what we saw. So from the 1950s and 60s onwards, we started to see this industry developing these new ultra-processed food products. And the industry began in the United States and in Western Europe. So these are companies like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, for example. But then in the 1980s something really interesting and remarkable happened. This industry started to globalise very rapidly, and through two main reasons behind that. One is that markets in the United States and Western Europe started to stagnate for these products. In order to continue to grow, the industry had to globalise. So they started to move much more into low income and middle income.

Mark Scott  15:09

This is the story of the tobacco industry. 

Phillip Baker  15:14

It's the same story, yeah. And the other element behind that is financialisation. So in the 1980s we saw these big financial players starting to put a lot more pressure on these corporations to generate more profit, and that was a major driver behind the explosion of ultra-processed foods from the 1980s onwards, in particular. So at that moment we started to see this industry started to really push much more marketing. They started to really globalise much more extensively all around the world. But probably the most crucial thing to understand here is that producing ultra-processed foods is by far the most profitable way of producing food. So there is a lot more profit in a Dorito corn chip than there is in a can of corn than there is in a cob of corn. And this is well known right, value add, valorisation. That has major implications though in our food system, because in a capitalist world economy, especially one that is highly financialised, the most profitable firms and industries will start to attract the most investment. More profit also means that you can spend much more on marketing the products. You have way more resources to spend on marketing than other types of food producers. You also have more resources to build more factories to spread your products around the world, and you also have more resources to spend on political lobbying as well to influence and block the governments from regulating.

Mark Scott  16:45

And we have, you know, classic and famous examples of that, I suppose. Coca Cola, you know, the cost of the drink in the can of Coke probably a matter of cents, you're probably spending several dollars for it. Where's that money going? A lot of it will be going in marketing and in promotion, and in a sense, the distribution of this product to all corners of the world, but the food cost itself, of negligible cost to the company.

Phillip Baker  17:11

Exactly, exactly. And Coca Cola is a great example of that. You know, listening to Warren Buffett and other investors say how great Coca Cola is. It's so profitable as a company because basically, it can take water, which governments often give to the company for free, or very little cost. You combine that with sugar, another cheap ingredient, you add some flavourings and colourings. There's almost nothing in the production costs. Put it in a plastic bottle. That doesn't cost much either. There is just a huge amount of resources that you can then spend on marketing the product, and the marketing has a really important goal, which is to drive more consumption of that product. Here we are in the soft drink section, Coca Cola classic 0.5 stars. Once you go to Coca Cola zero sugar, three and a half stars. So you're replacing the sugar with an artificial sweetener, and somehow that makes it better for you. I'm not buying that. But one thing that ties all of these ultra-processed foods together is the fact that they are wrapped in plastic. These foods also have a really long shelf life, which means that the food is in contact with the packaging for a very long time. Now we know that one of the reasons why ultra-processed foods are harmful to health is because some of the chemicals that are in plastics are leaching into the foods. The phthalates, the bisphenols, and these are known endocrine disruptors. And obesity, type two diabetes, these endocrine diseases, so we think there may be some link here to obesity as well.

Mark Scott  19:00

Tell us about Australia's story. How do we stack up against other countries when it comes to ultra-processed foods?

Phillip Baker  19:07

So Australia was one of the first countries in the world to have an ultra-processed national diet, along with the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand. The latest data we have is from 2011 and 12. Back then, we were consuming about 42% of our diet was coming from ultra-processed foods. At best guess, sometime in the 1990s our national diet became an ultra-processed diet. I think the best guess is that we're now consuming about 50% of our calories from ultra-processed foods. But when you look at teenagers, that goes up to 60%, when you look at the highest consuming groups in Australia, so the top quartile that's somewhere around 70, 80% of the diet from ultra-processed foods. In the US and the UK, it's up around 60%. If you compare it to countries like France and Italy, it's around 30 to 40%. If you compare it to China, it's only around countries like China, it's only around 10 to 15%.

Mark Scott  20:11

So what do you attribute those differences to? 

Phillip Baker  20:15

First of all, the companies that I mentioned earlier, they really started to grow in the United States, Western Europe, countries like Australia, from the very beginning. So we started to see these foods grow in our diet from the 1950s and 60s onwards. So that's one reason. The other is, if you look at our food system and what our food system produces, Australia has a agri-commodity system. We produce a lot of wheat, we produce a lot of sugar cane, we produce a lot of canola oil, and these are base substrate ingredients for the manufacture of ultra-processed foods. But these financial logics, these capitalist logics that I mentioned earlier, these have played out much more and much more earlier in countries like Australia than these other countries that I just mentioned.

Mark Scott  21:08

So who's doing the management of ultra-processed foods well? And, are there countries we can look to and say they are lowering the dependence of their population on these foods over time? 

Phillip Baker  21:19

Yeah, so one thing to say is that, countries like China for example, where only 10 to 15% of the diet is ultra-processed, have this great opportunity right now to protect their traditional diets and stop their diet from becoming ultra-processed. So that is a set of policies, and you see countries like Japan and South Korea, for example, implementing these policies to protect those traditional diets.

Mark Scott  21:44

So what are they doing? Is that, through taxation or other forms of disincentives?

Phillip Baker  21:48

It's supporting their traditional food producers and promoting those traditional diets to maintain them and essentially keep the ultra-processed food manufacturers out. But when I'm saying, what's an inspiration for Australia? Because our diet is already ultra-processed, right? And so we need to actually draw down the share of ultra-processed foods in our diets. Here we can look to countries like Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, South Africa, and even the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is far ahead of us in terms of implementing policies that we need and that we know reduce ultra-processed food consumption, and this includes things like taxing the products. And we know if you tax the product, consumption tends to go down. But then if you also add marketing restrictions, if you also have warning labels on the front of the packets, big stop signs that you see in Latin America, which say, “reconsider purchasing this food.” If you also combine that with school food programs which limit the availability of these foods in schools, then consumption starts to drop, and drop quite dramatically.

Mark Scott  23:01

As you've said, there are big businesses behind this, and so marketing and lobbying has been important in the growth of the ultra-processed food industry. How do you see marketing and lobbying from firms really having an impact here?

Phillip Baker  23:18

So the marketing is a big one. And, as I said before, these companies can greatly outspend other types of food producers on marketing. They greatly outspend governments as well, by the way. So governments are not spending these billions of dollars on healthy food promotion. We show that in these papers, that just three companies, Coca Cola, PepsiCo and Mondelez, three of the major transnationals, spending about 13 or 14 billion US dollars a year on advertising alone, which is just one form of marketing. And that's a figure that is four times the operating budget of the World Health Organization. So this is an immense amount of power in our food system to shape, you know, what we desire, and to reshape food culture all around the world. And if you take Coca Cola, for example, they're not selling health in their marketing, although they do say, you know, they will make some health claims on their products. What they're selling is happiness, what they're selling is youth, what they're selling is popular culture, sexiness. Marketing by these companies appeals to these social values and these aspirations, and especially those of young consumers. We also see this marketing as appropriating culture all around the world. So the red and white of Santa Claus, for example. You know, Santa Claus used to be green and white, the colours are now red and white of Coca Cola.

Mark Scott  24:56

Attributed to marketing campaigns of Coca Cola, bringing in Santa Claus.

Phillip Baker  25:00

Exactly. And we see the sponsorship of events like the Olympic Games, the World Cup soccer, the cricket and the AFL here in Australia, again, appealing to young people. So marketing and promotion is a very, very powerful way in which these companies drive consumption. Uncle Toby's Roll-Ups. Now this is a product that mimics real fruit. So this is a strawberry flavour fruit roll up. This is absolutely targeting kids, because it comes with tongue prints. These are like a tattoo that goes on the kid's tongue. It's got a cute looking cartoon character, it's got three and a half star health rating, vegan friendly, no artificial colours or flavours. When you flip it over, I mean, this barely contains any fruit whatsoever. Yeah the main ingredient is maltodextrin, which is something that is extracted from corn. Here we are with probably what is my favourite UPF products in the entire supermarket, which is Sanitarium Up&Go, marketed as a liquid breakfast, often finds its way into kid's lunch boxes. It is a really quick way for families just to give their kids a product and think they're doing the right thing. It's got a four and a half star, half star rating. That's crazy, because this is as ultra-processed as you can possibly get. Skim milk powder, maltodextrin, cane sugar, plant fibre, soy protein, vegetable oils, fructose, flavours, gums, stabiliser, yeah, this is terrible stuff. I would not give this to my kids. Now this is another thing to say about ultra-processed foods, is a lot of them come in really interesting packaging, and a lot of Aussie kids are getting these pouches, these plastic pouches, and this is contributing to a couple of things. One is children can't actually see the food or smell the food they're eating. It's shutting down the sensory experience of eating food. Second, is a very soft texture. Kids are going to eat them very quickly. Third, they're seething the food through their teeth as they're sucking on the end of the pouch, and this is a big problem for dental caries. So yeah, these pouches are bad news. Well, I understand why parents use them, because they're convenient. You don't need a bowl, you don't need a spoon, and also, children can feed themselves using these. They can squeeze on them, but the best thing parents can do is to make these kinds of foods at home by just mashing up or blending some fruits or veggies themselves. Or if they don't have time, there are products, commercially available products, which you can find in jars for example, which contain basically the same thing.

Mark Scott  27:59

You were a co-author of The Big Lancet series that came out at the end of 2025 and that's viewed as a crucial step towards a healthier global food system. What's been the response to that series and what's next in that work?

Phillip Baker  28:13

Yeah, so I had the honour of co-leading that series with Carlos Monteiro. Professor Carlos Monteiro, who invented the ultra-processed food concept, which comes from the Nova food classification. The Lancet series has three articles. Those articles cover the science of ultra-processed foods, the policy, what can governments do about it, and the politics of ultra-processed foods, which is what I was talking about, the lobbying, the stuff that these companies do. We also had responses from UNICEF and the World Health Organization. As part of the series, they publish articles outlining what they are committed to doing about this problem. There's podcasts, there's videos., listeners can go on to the Lancet website and read the papers and listen to that content. The Lancet series, in the past, have been really impactful in setting the global health agenda. So what they tend to do, because the Lancet is the world's top medical and public health journal, what these series do is they generate a huge amount of media attention. This series generated 1500 news articles all around the world. Front Page of BBC, New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, you know, huge number of news outlets reported on it. So that helps shape the global discourse and tell people, hey look, we need to pay attention to this problem. But these Lancet series also start to generate political attention from governments all around the world, and this is what we anticipate. This year, we've already seen the government of Spain, for example, initiating a response to the Lancet series. We've seen the government of San Francisco initiating a lawsuit against the companies citing the Lancet series, for example. We've also seen the World Health Organization and UNICEF started to mobilise their responses to this problem, and I think we're going to see lots more of this over the year ahead. Now coming to the question of what's next, we want to organise an even bigger global collaboration of research leaders covering the science, the policy, the political dimensions of ultra-processed foods. But we also now want to get into the economics of it. We want to get into the legal aspects of it. How do we fight back against these lawsuits and supercharge the evidence base behind them? We want to get into the environmental impacts of these products, the plastic waste that they generate, the impacts on biodiversity and land use, for example. And we also want to look at the equity implications. So ultra-processed foods and moving away from them, has big impacts for food security. It has big impacts for gender and gender equity. We can't just, you know, say we need to go back to home cooking without acknowledging that that cooking largely falls on the shoulders of women all around the world. That's something we need to, you know, understand, how do we move towards healthy foods in an equitable way?

Mark Scott  31:20

So talked about, you know, global corporations and the reactions of government around the world. Finally Phil, when it comes to the decisions we need to make as individuals around the food that we are consuming, give us some tips. What do we need to do to be able to eat well, in this ultra-processed food saturated world?

Phillip Baker  31:43

First of all, become a label gazer. When you're walking through that - 

Mark Scott  31:47

Not navel gazing, label gazing. 

Phillip Baker  31:49

That's exactly right. Flip the products over before you buy them. Have a look at the ingredients list. If they contain those ingredients that we were talking about earlier, that you would never use, that you don't recognise, that your grandparents would never use -

Mark Scott  32:03

I remember that Michael Pollan line, you know, if your grandparents wouldn't recognise the ingredients, it's probably not real food.

Phillip Baker  32:11

Exactly, exactly. Follow that guidance. If it claims to be healthy, be deeply sceptical about it. And the other recommendation would be to try and keep these foods out of your household. If they're in your household, they're almost irresistible. I find them irresistible. If they're in my household, chocolate or corn chips or whatever are in the pantry, I'm going to eat them. And most people are the same. So if you keep them out of your house, that's a good way to try and make your diet based on minimally processed foods. Cook at home. Don't be afraid of processed foods. You can still use canned goods for example. A lot of the foods that we use at home for cooking are processed. And finally, is to get political about it. Question these corporations and what role they're playing in our food system. What is our government doing about this? Vote with your fork. Try and buy foods that are not supporting these companies, and try and support foods that are being produced by healthy local food producers. But also vote with your vote, you know, get in behind parties and political leaders that call on your MP and tell them you think this is important. It's important for your family, it's important for our children, it's important for our country. Let's do something about it.

Mark Scott  33:42

That's Associate Professor Philip Baker. He's an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and a Horizon Fellow at the University of Sydney's School of Public Health. If you want to dive deeper into the science of what we eat, you'll enjoy our episode with professors Steve Simpson and David Raubenheimer.

David Raubenheimer  34:01

If we can minimise the amount of processed foods that come into the house and leave it up to our appetites to do as they've done for the past many 1000 years and continue to do in other species, we will balance our diets using the biology that evolved for that purpose.

Mark Scott  34:20

You can listen to that episode of the Solutionists right now. If you want to hear how the best minds in the world are tackling our biggest challenges, make sure you follow the show in your favourite podcast app, so you don't miss an episode. The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. 

The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Facebook and Instagram, and @sydney.edu.au on Bluesky.

This episode was produced by Liam Riordan with sound design by Jeremy Wilmot. Supervising producer is Sarah Dabro. Executive editors are Kellie Riordan, Jen Peterson-Ward, and Mark Scott. Strategist is Ann Chesterman.

This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.