A food summit for increased food security in the Northern Territory with Ben Pike

Ben talks about the food summit project addressing food security in the Northern Territory and his different roles over the years highlighting both the best moments and biggest challenges along the way. 

Further Food Summit content can be found here http://www.amsant.org.au/food-summit/ 

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CREDITS

Host: Sophie Wright-Pedersen

With thanks to Ben Pike for his time and thoughts

The Foodies in the Field podcast would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast was made, the Turrbal and Yuggera people, as well as the lands from where Ben was speaking and where you may be listening from today. We pay respects to elders both past and present and acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were the first foodies of this nation.

Transcript

Sophie: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Sophie Wright-Pedersen. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Public Health Nutrition from Foodies in the Field. A podcast showcasing stories from passionate foodies about who they are and what they do. On today's show, we have Ben Pike, who is the Food Summit Project Manager at the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance of the Northern Territory, otherwise known as AMSANT.

In this episode, Ben talks about the different roles he's had in the public health nutrition field and gives us a rich insight into the food security project he's been working on for the past two years with remote Northern Territory communities. You'll hear him talking about the best parts, his biggest learnings, and where he sees the potential for the future of the field to grow. Hi Ben. Welcome to the show. 

Ben: Thanks. Thanks for having me. 

Sophie: Before we dive deep into your project, and as a tribute to our internal foodies, I'm going to kick off by asking you what your favourite food experience has been? 

Ben: Probably something really simple that's connected to memories more than necessarily the food itself.

I think it would have to be in Southeast Asia. Just a simple Pad Thai in a little laneway with my partner. Nice weather. There wasn't anything spectacular about the meal at all, but it was just, it's just a really a memorable moment and looked nice. I suppose. It's probably more of a visual eater than a taste.

Sophie: And it kind of sounds like as well, maybe a bit of a social eater with having your partner there. 

Ben: Yeah, I think so. And for me, like, you know, I could just eat the most basic, like a meat pie to me is delicious if it's just, you know, with friends or, you know, fits my mood at the time. It doesn't have to be like a really gourmet, special meal or anything like that.

Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. And then how does that, because you are trained as a Dietitian. Does that go against the way that you practice as a dietitian? 

Ben: I don't know. I think there's sort of like, throughout my time working as dietitians, there's probably two real distinct groups of dieticians that I've sort of identified and there's like one group that's like really health conscious and probably is more concerned about, oh, you know, I shouldn't be eating chips and stuff like that. And then there's just another group which I like to align myself with, which still, as I say, not as I do. Or a good friend of ours, once called me a dietician that smells like cheeseburgers. 

Sophie: Did you actually smell like cheeseburgers? Or was this just like your everyday scent?

Ben: Uh, every day. It's an everyday scent that I emit. No. 

Sophie: You weren't working in Maccas at the time. 

Ben: Yeah, tons. I think it's quite fitting. It was just sort of, kind of a way of saying, yes, you're a dietitian, but you have no shame in that you eat cheeseburgers or you know that you're like, that you enjoy food. Even those foods that some people would be like, oh, dieticians shouldn't be eating those. It's the perfect way of summing up. Just eat food that you enjoy and don't get too caught up in it. 

Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. And then I guess, how do you find that translates into the work that you do? Because you do work quite closely or have worked quite closely with people in the community?

Ben: I think it's making sure you're getting the balance right because it's totally okay for you to go out and have a cheeseburger. But it's all about moderation and thinking about, I can't be doing this every day of the week. I can't be doing this every week, even as well, you know, what sort of physical activity am I doing?

What's the kind of step a little bit further back and look at the whole diet, their whole lifestyle? But that, I don't think you can ever really do that from get go. That takes a long time to be able to be confident with your clients and know what your clients are capable of doing before potentially doing that.

Sophie: Yeah, but like you say, having the flexibility to be able to do that when you have built those skills and the rapport that you have with the community as well. 

Ben: Hmm. 

Sophie: Now, since you graduated uni, you've been working in the Public Health Nutrition space for nearly 10 years. But it's been in a variety of roles here in Australia and overseas. Can you tell me a little bit more about some of those roles, what you did and how it led you to what you're doing now with AMSANT? 

Ben: Yeah, I think a lot of the roles sort of did build on themselves. So I started off my career in Community Health in Victoria. That was, you know, it was a really good early learning process just to get those fundamental skills down and probably gave me a really good understanding of the health system. 

We provided a service to the local hospital, which was in Seymour, and then provided HACC services. But it was just a home assisted community care program supporting people to stay within their home. So mainly directed at older people.

Sophie: Like if they're transitioning from hospital or just generally?

Ben: It was long term. So someone who was like, Meals on Wheels is probably the most common thing that HACC [00:05:00] funded. But they also funded like support services like carers to go out and assist with daily living tasks. And then dietitians would come out and do you know, assessments and support around sort of nutrition as well. So it was a bit of a jack of all trades role and gave me a really good fundamentals kind of grounding in Community Health Dietetics.

But I quickly got an itchy feet and wanted a little bit more adventure, my career and in my life. So after being there for two years, I took up an opportunity to go and work in the Solomon Islands. Cause it's always been a real strong interest of mine around sort of aid and development. Worked as a dietitian in the hospital on a malnutrition and sort of diabetes project.

So kind of double burden of disease that we see in developing countries. So a little bit of my time was spent in the paeds unit working with nursing staff around management of malnutrition in children. Which was quite a significant issue over there and quite confronting. And then working with the, there was an outpatient diabetes clinic and some diabetes work on the wards as well.

And again, it was sort of working with the nursing staff. And there was a local Nutritionist, trained Nutritionist. So I was doing some upskilling around that. And my office was actually based in the food service department there. So, I did a little bit of upskilling with the food service ladies who were all beautiful, beautiful ladies. Adopted me and looked after me pretty well.

I came back from Solomon's, kind of hoping to continue to do that style of work. But I wanted to spend a bit of time back in Australia and had previously looked at working in Aboriginal health, sort of, you know, at the end of uni and then, I kind of went back to that and sort of really found that my skills from Solomon Islands fit really nicely with Aboriginal health.

And so I got a job in Catherine in the Northern Territory working for an Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Service (ACCHS). That probably has started my journey of like where I am today in getting an exposure to that world and kind of bringing the skills that I had from Community Health in Victoria and you know, development stuff.

But then learning so much about the NT health system and the issues that around health that we face in the NT.

Sophie: Like looking more at the kind of wider determinant type stuff? 

Ben: Yeah, and I think that was very much apparent in Solomon Islands. Like a lot of those wider determinant stuff was there in the Solomon Islands. And probably, you know, housing issues was an issue over there. Income and lack of job opportunities was a similar thing in the Solomon Islands. And then, kind of attitudes to food as well was probably really similar. Like quantity of food was really valued of in the Solomon Islands. 

And I kind of see that a lot in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Like often, like the size of the meal has a lot of value to it. Whereas, other cultures that might more maybe be the particular meal or what the food is. Like, you know, Chinese culture really value particular things that they want to eat, but it's not so much about the size.

Like it's an interesting topic around like, where do those food values come from? I don't think we put enough weight on you know, spending time in our role thinking about people's food values and tailoring what we're doing to more fit people's food value. 

I mean, my experience after a couple years in Catherine. I did go back overseas and worked a little bit in Tonga. And so you kind of need to make sure that you're tailoring your nutrition education to make sure that you're understanding that and you're not talking about really small portions. Because actually if a Tongan eats like that, that can be viewed as disrespectful to the cook potentially. And you know, it's just socially quite hard for people to do that. So it's talking to people about eating bigger volumes of fruits and vegetables and coming up on those lower calorie foods. So they're still getting that volume. They're still filling their plate up but they're not filling it up with really calorie dense foods.

Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. And it really lends itself like that way of thinking to that contextualized view of nutrition. Like, yes, we have these guidelines, but we also need to understand that they can't just be applied generally. And we really do have to immerse ourselves in communities and understand, you know, what are their values? What are the contexts in which they're living, and how do we adapt what we know into those situations? Or how can we work with communities to get them to help us adapt what we know into their own context that they live in. 

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And dietitians, we're getting better. We're definitely getting better at that. And it's so hard, there's so many competing things that happen in the nutrition space that being able to focus in on all those [00:10:00] things at the same time is often really hard for the profession. But I think that's one thing that we do need to continually work on. 

Sophie: Absolutely. And so you touched on Tonga and then you did a bit of work over there, and then you came back to the Northern Territory.

Ben: Yeah, that was to Alice Springs. I think the NT gets in your blood a little bit and once you've worked in the nutrition space up here it's hard to leave it. Because there's so much work that can be done. It's a really, it's a hard place to work as a dietitian. But it can be a really rewarding and interesting place because you are working across so many things, and it is like, NT, although it's a big state in terms of land, it's a small state in terms of population. 

So you're very directly involved in those kind of decision making processes and you're so close to touching things from research all the way to to practice. Like you have that involvement in that whole spectrum of how things are researched and turned into practical policies. And then implementation of those policies is so tangible here in the NT and it becomes quite an enjoyable experience.

So we came back, and working as a dietician for NT government doing outreach to remote communities, sort of south of Alice Springs for a couple years and it was really enjoyable. Great little team. And I think that's probably one thing I really, really enjoyed about that role actually, is that there's six dietitians that sit in that team.

So there's also, although you're working solo in your communities and in your region. It was a great opportunity to have other dieticians to work with and bounce ideas off. Had a really strong dynamic around it. I loved my time there. So I did two years there and then, yeah, after a couple years did a small stint as a Public Health Manager for a little AMS and then saw this job opportunity to run the Food Summit project that I'm now working in and just had to jump at it. 

It was such a unique opportunity. Something that I think we're all quite passionate about working in the NT around food security. Cause we really do see that it's those social determinant side of things that's going to have a big impact on people's diets and health. 

Sophie: Yeah, definitely. And for anyone who might not have heard of the term food security before, could you just give, I guess a broad overview of what that term means and why we focus on that so heavily? 

Ben: So it's probably one of those words in nutrition dietetics that gets used in different ways throughout Australia, and I think it is important to get that definition really strong.

AMSANT's focus on this, is using that definition that's comes out of the UN's FAO definition of food security. Which looks at both the economic and physical access to healthy food, and then the availability of healthy food where people were living and making sure that it's culturally appropriate.

So it's the actual food that people want, and then the ability to be able to use that food. So having cooking facilities, you know, safe food, storage, access, and so all those different aspects all coming into one, to being. If you have all those things and it's stable and you've got it all the time, then your food's secure.

If you're missing any aspects of that. So be physical access or economic access or you know, the available food is not the food that you want to eat. Then that's where food insecurity comes in. And I always do like to really drum home that it's talking about healthy food. Cause I think probably more so people who aren't working in the nutrition health space often think about food security as just access to any food. 

And so I think that's something we really need to probably maybe work more on and make sure we're raising the awareness around that if it's just access to any food that doesn't make someone food secure. There's still very food insecure because the food that there are accessing may be really unhealthy.

Sophie: Absolutely. And I've come across that a few times before in the work that I've done with food security. And I think the other component of that definition, the UN definition, that I really think is quite strong and necessary is the acknowledgement of food preferences. And you talked about cultural foods in that context.

Ben: Which is really important in the space that we are working in because traditional foods plays such a significant role in people's lives and people's diets. And even when we were in the early stages of this project and we were doing community consultation. One thing that was coming back really strongly is that when community members had access to traditional foods, they felt like they were more food [00:15:00] secure.

Because those foods are, they're sharing foods like you were saying before. It's a real strong culture of sharing food in Aboriginal culture. So having access to those traditional foods, which meant you could share that food more widely meant that the community, the household, we're more food secure. So we need to make sure that those culturally appropriate foods are really readily available for people.

Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. 

Okay, so let's get into the project itself now. Can you just give me a bit of an overview as to what the project is and what it's aiming to do?

Ben: So the project is trying to develop some community led solutions to food insecurity or food security issues. So barriers and factors that are preventing people from having all those four domains of food security.

And so that was kind of the real focus of the project. Was getting some community led ideas and then turning those community led ideas into practical policies and programs that we could advocate to the government and work with governments to implement. 

Sophie: When you got given this project with, you know, its aims and objectives, how did you know where to start and how to go about doing what you've done over the past two years?

Ben: Uh, it was shamelessly boring from others. It was boring from yourself actually, in the work that you had done in Alice Springs around food security and you being very generous and saying, yep, go ahead. And using networks as well, like I think in particular the nutrition world in the NT, we all know each other pretty well, or we're only a couple of degrees of separation between us. 

So I was pretty lucky in kind of being able to reach out to either people that I knew really well, or people that I did know well, helping to connect me with other people to get out to some of these different diverse communities and to help facilitate some of that consultation work and kind of pointing me in the direction of, go and talk to this person. 

So that was probably how it kind of happened. It was just sort of trying to get people's attention in what we were trying to do here at AMSANT and then using those opportunities to then sort of snowball from there.

In the end we managed to consult with over 150 people in the project. And then we had 122 come to the Food Summit forum, which we held in Alice Springs. And that was sort of a two day workshop where we used the consultation work as sort of like, these are the priority areas that the consultations brought up.

And then used the workshops to kind of say, okay, well, let's talk about some solutions now and use some of the ideas that came through the consultation around solutions and bring that into it. And it's probably a pretty organic process because it was changing quite often, you know, with sort of situations in, around covid changing. We had to change the date for the Summit a couple of times.

We originally had not planned to do so much community consultation. We were kind of hoping that the Food Summit in itself would be a little bit more of that consultation and workshop rolled into one. And so it probably means that our recommendations are much, much richer because of the level of consultation we were able to do.

But it definitely had changed a lot throughout the process over the two years. 

Sophie: So, as an outcome of that two years of work, you've produced a couple of reports and they're available on the AMSANT website, and we'll put a link to those in the show notes. But what are the, I guess, main recommendations that you have as an outcome of all this work?

Ben: The recommendations that we have put forward. The first one, you know, the real big focus that we kind of feel like needs to be addressed first is around strengthening the governance of Aboriginal community controlled organizations that work in the food system. So probably primarily at the moment, that's remote stores. But there's opportunities in the future for there to be more, horticulture and agriculture run by communities as well.

So we think strengthening those governance around boards and the community engagement and control of the food system that they're engaged in is probably the first thing that needs to really happen. And then we've just, you know, there's a series of recommendations around housing and the need for improvement in housing, and particularly around food preparation and food storage facilities.

And then there's a need for improvements and more support for stores and the infrastructure in remote communities. These are stores that are often really on the sort of, you know, line of whether they're viable, not viable. So their ability to generate an income to then fund or improvements is really [00:20:00] limited.

So we need a little bit more government involvement to kind of support infrastructure improvements. And that's, you know, even sort of road access and things like that as well to get food out there. And then we've got some recommendations, sort of more focused in, around the health system, around the development of an Aboriginal nutrition workforce.

And this is probably an area that listeners of this podcast might be the most interested in. Is we're really keen to see an Aboriginal nutrition workforce be developed to work alongside the current public health dieticians, nutritionists that work in the Northern Territory. Because one, what really came strongly through the work that we did is that there's a need for more community led resource development. 

You know, education done more in language and more culture involved in that education, and that will need to come from Aboriginal community members themselves and Aboriginal community members want to have more of an involvement in that side of things.

And also, we know that the current nutrition workforce is just stretched. There's not enough roles for the need in communities. They're already, you know, very stretched from the clinical in the health centres all the way up to kind of working in that kind of whole environment space as well. Working on the community health environment with stores, with childcare settings. 

So that position that's often covering four or five remote Aboriginal communities is very stretched in itself. So we do need to develop another workforce to help take on some of that nutrition program stuff that, I don't think it's just dietitians and nutritionists that are talking about the importance of nutrition. If you look at any federal or state or territory strategy around chronic disease, child health, even mental health strategies, they're talking about the importance of nutrition for those strategies to be enacted, we need a workforce. 

Sophie: And in terms of how we get that workforce, is that training people through university based courses or are there some other mechanisms as to how that workforce would come to fruition?

Ben: Good question cause I think, yes, we've kind of recognized that the role, probably there isn't the workforce in that university trained dietitian, very sadly, very few Aboriginal university trained dieticians. So what we kind of see this role being is a community based nutrition worker hopefully with an aboriginal health practitioner background. 

So it's a really well respected, educated role that is out in communities already. Aboriginal practitioners play a really important role in the health clinic doing similar work to nurses out in remote clinics. But they do have lots of skills and training around Community Health and Public Health and nutrition as well.

So some core nutrition units in their studies and they work a lot in that space when they're working in clinics. So we think that that could be a good workforce to tap into, to use in this average nutrition workforce. It's a very early idea, and I think there's still a lot of stakeholder engagement and consultation that needs to happen to get a bit of a sense of what it would look like.

But we've got some early ideas at least, and I kind of would like to see there's a little bit of almost a pathway into further education in the dietetics nutrition field as well. So it might be that some of these roles, you know, people who are working it, yeah, they might go on to do further study and yeah, do their Masters in Public Health or do their masters in Dietetics and increase the, you know, aboriginal people in that workforce as well.

Sophie: I mean, that would be fantastic to see that space and anyone that's worked in this space, or even if they haven't worked in this space, I'm sure can see the value in having that type of workforce. How long did you take to do the community consultation for this project to get to those recommendations in the end? 

Ben: It was probably 12 months. We did get to the point where we were sort of like, oh, we're happy with the level of consultation that we'd done. But then we still had people reaching out to us, being interested in being involved and wanting to kind of have the opportunity to have a say in that.

So we probably would've done more in depth analysis of the consultation if we had a bit more time. But we had to be a little bit quick cause we wanted to get this consultation work out before the Food Summit. And so we were still doing a little bit of consultation while we were already doing some analysis and [00:25:00] starting some of the write up as well.

But yeah, it was probably around 12 months from first to last, which is quite a long time. We're hoping over next year we'll continue this project and the plan is we'll probably lean heavily on AMSANT member services. So AMSANT's made up of Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services and has a board and you know, each health services community members on their board.

So we'll probably use those people quite a bit to consult and kind of make sure we are constantly getting community feedback on where we're going with some of those recommendations. But then we're also hoping we can set up a little bit of a reference group of just key Aboriginal community members that are interested in this space and work in this area and have a lot of knowledge in this area. And set that up and use that as a another way of making sure we're constantly getting feedback into where we're going with these recommendations, and making sure that we're not getting drawn off down into different paths or, you know, the recommendation being shaped in the wrong way.

So there's a few different mechanisms that are going to play out over the next, we're hoping kind of the next two years we'll have to kind of really do some advocacy and develop some policy proposals.

Sophie: Yeah, I think it'll be really interesting to see where this goes in the future. Especially having that community member input as well which we haven't seen in many projects I guess in this space and in this context. And I also wanted to ask, where did this project, how did this project come about initially? Where did it come from? Why did it come at this time? 

Ben: It came about, I mean, it's been a very long process for AMSANT. We first ran a Food Summit back in 2010, and this was just after federal inquiry into food insecurity at that time in 2009, and kind of whether it was divine intervention or, you know, fate that had happened to be that we got some funding for this project back in 2019.

And then in 2020 another federal inquiry occurred around food insecurity and remote Aboriginal communities. So, seems to be both time to run this program, this project, the inquiries happen. 

Sophie: I think that's a really important thing to note as well. That even though things can take up to 10 years to come to fruition, you know, you've been working on these things and all of a sudden it all just happens at once.

That seems to happen too often in this space and, you know, we get frustrated and overwhelmed by the fact that nothing's happening but sometimes it's just about timing and possibly political will as well. 

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I think you've nailed it. What the issue often is, it's about the political climate and it can be that there is an election coming up, or it can be that there's a particular, you know, event that happens that kind of raises the profile of the issue. But I think people who are working in this space or interested in working in this space. Just be aware of that. And that, you know, you might not get anywhere in the first instance when you're doing some advocacy work or you're looking for funding for a particular project. But, don't give up on it because those opportunities do, it can take up to, yeah, 10 years for you to get that funding, but often changes in political climate or issues that arise can sort of help push your case a little bit. 

Definitely. What happened with AMSANT around this project. And so yeah, we've just spent the last two years working on these consulting with community and then working on developing the recommendations around community led solutions to food insecurity.

And we're pretty happy with what we've ended up with and really hoping now that governments will continue to engage in it and continue to, you know, to see the value in these recommendations and work with us to implement them. 

There's nothing revolutionary. What the recommendations are really just saying is that these things that we've been talking about for a long time are still the things that need to happen and without them happening, we're not going to see improvement in some of these areas around access and availability of healthy food.

Sophie: Yeah, definitely. I think though the like, biggest asset I see, or addition I see in this project is that really embedded community voice within these recommendations. It's not just, you know, you or me banging on about it as [00:30:00] professionals.

It's a bottom up approach that actually comes from the community themselves who experience these things possibly on a daily basis or witness people around them experiencing it on a daily basis. And they're also coming up with the solutions of what they think will actually make a difference within their communities.

Ben: And the community's been pretty consistent in what they have been saying. I think that's the other thing that it really highlights. Cause like a lot of recommendations, they're not in the health and nutrition space, you know, they are focused in on infrastructure and governance and housing and community stores. And kind of recognizing that we need a whole of systems approach and the food system needs to be strengthened to support healthy eating.

And in fact health play only a really, really small role in that. And probably the biggest role we play in it is kind of just the advocacy and raising awareness side of thing. But across that whole food system, communities have been pretty consistent in what they've been calling for.

And you know, some of the consultation work that we did throughout this project. There were community members who were quite frustrated that sort of had to go through this process again. And that they do find that they have been consistent about this for over 20 years probably, even longer. And there hasn't been some of the change that they've been hoping.

I think there has been improvements. And we've definitely seen there's sort of good data out there that we have seen some improvements, but there's some areas where, you know, there's been no improvement, if anything, it's been going backwards. 

Sophie: So, what are some of those areas? What has improved and I guess what still needs to improve?

Ben: So, for the Northern Territory, there's regular collection of data around remote stores through the Market Basket Survey and that shown that over at least the last 10 years there's been improvements in the availability and the quality of fresh fruits and vegetables. Where we haven't seen improvements is around the price. And if anything, we've seen the gap grow between urban areas and very remote Aboriginal communities. That price gap has grown over the last 10 to 20 years, but the quality of food has improved. 

And that's probably just through improvements in technology around fridge technology, food storage, better freight system. I think the introduction of sort of stores groups. So things like ALPA, as ALPA's grown and become a stronger organization and has been able to employ specialists in logistics and freight and buying their produce has improved as a result of that. So that's where we've seen some good changes. But yeah, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done.

Sophie: Yeah, and I mean there was that federal inquiry, you mentioned it before, but the federal inquiry into pricing in remote, uh, Northern Australia, I guess you'd say. What have their recommendations been? And is there anything that can be done from there? Or are they going to be doing anything as a result of that inquiry?

Ben: I thought they got a little bit too caught up in the words price gouging. But I think the majority of people were saying it's not that it's price gouging, it's just that it's unaffordable. The issue is, is that there's this huge discrepancy between income for households. Either through income or through social security payments, and the cost of living and the cost of food.

That's extremely hard for people in remote communities cause it puts so much pressure on those households just to be able to get the basics. Something that we were trying through AMSANT submission to the inquiries is really drive home. And so, that was, a lot of energy got put into that where we could have probably said very early on, there's not price gouging that's, you know, don't spend your time focusing on that.

What we want you to focus on is the discrepancy between household income and the cost of food and how do we address that? And so unfortunately, recommendations haven't really addressed that issue. 

Sophie: So then thinking across your career, Ben, and all the roles that you've had and all the different things that you've done, what have been some of the greatest moments that you've experienced over that time in this space? And I guess also some of your biggest learnings as well. 

Ben: Greatest moments. I mean, that's a really, that's a tough one. Like I must admit, I just still have an incredible soft spot in my heart for the Solomon Islands and my experience there and the people, the friends that I made over there will just always live with me.

And I know there's some other dietitians that I know that have worked over there and feel the exact same way. And we all, you know, [00:35:00] yeah, if you speak to them, they're always like, oh, I'd love to go back. And I think that's the same with me. I'd love to go back and work there or just go back and see some friends.

And then learnings and sort of, you know, things that I've learned over the years is that the next generation is always infinitely more intelligent. I think they're getting better and better. And you know, I think the one thing that we have up on them is that kind of, you know, lived experience and institution knowledge. But they don't take long to catch up to you. 

And that's really enjoyable cause I think, you know, the better we get at kind of making sure that we utilize that skill. Because they're better at technology than us, they're better at, you know, engaging with community than us because they can use that technology that is so entrenched in people's lives now to engage people. Cause people don't use pamphlets to get their information anymore. 

And so as a profession, we need to catch up very quickly cause we're still using, we're still very reliant on printing information sheets, but we need to adapt really quickly because that's been left behind. Society is moving at such a fast pace. So now, so reliant on the use of internet. 

Sophie: Absolutely. And then I guess just thinking of those remote communities that you've worked with. Do they have internet access out there? And are they using technology in the way that, I guess in urban areas we tend to? 

Ben: In the younger generation. Absolutely. It's complete saturation. There's some communities that still don't have internet access or phone reception, but that's not stopping young people from having phones and finding ways of connecting with each other. But in other communities the internet and the phone reception is better than Alice Springs.

Sophie: Yeah. Right. 

And then my final question for you, Ben, is thinking about this field, Public Health Nutrition and Dietetics. Where would you like to see it go in the future? 

Ben: Oh, well, I mean, I'd love to see more Aboriginal people working in this space and having a much, much broader involvement, particularly in the Aboriginal community controlled health sector around nutrition.

So that's probably just from kind of my small world of the nutrition learning nutrition world that I'd love to see change over the next five, you know, two to five years, hopefully.

Sort of more broadly, I think there's probably a real need to be a little bit more adaptable and getting control of some of the nutrition narrative. Because I think we are slowly losing that a little bit as a profession and we're in sort of in danger of losing control of that and not being appropriately listened to or respected about our knowledge in this space. And that's strictly just because the power of the internet and the, you know, the loss of sort of expert opinion probably losing its value in society.

So I think we need to adapt to that change as well and make sure we are positioning ourselves so that we are respected and are listened to. And you know, the advice that we're putting forward is understood by the community. Cause yeah, there's lots of other vested interests that are also competing for that space.

Sophie: Absolutely. And I think a lot of people would agree with you on both of those points as to where we'd like to see the field of Public Health Nutrition go. 

We're gonna finish there, Ben. But thank you so much for coming on this show and so wonderful to hear about your project and all the wonderful work and really impactful work that you've done and AMSANT has done and I guess the community members and the NT have contributed to as well. It's been really interesting to listen to. 

Ben: Thanks for having me along.