Tatyana Leonov tastes the best of the NT’s healthy fast food on a guided bush-tucker walk.

The heat of the day has reached its peak and the first thing that grabs my attention as I step into Kakadu’s Warradjan Cultural Centre is the ice-cream stand. Our guide and local chef, Ben Tyler, notices where I’m heading and rushes over. “I’m Ben and I’ve prepared Warradjan Cultural Centre is the ice-cream stand. Our guide and local chef, Ben Tyler, notices where I’m heading and rushes over. “I’m Ben and I’ve prepared something else for you,” he says smiling, veering us away from the ice-cream and into the great outdoors.

A few minutes later, my husband and I are sipping chilled waterlily tea, which Ben discloses is a first attempt for him. “I boiled the flowers and then cooled it down. This is my first time making it… a world-first, maybe,” he laughs.

In Kakadu Indigenous culture, waterlilies are used in a variety of ways. They can be eaten fresh, roasted over a fire or cooked in the ground wrapped in paperbark, and the seeds can be crushed to make bread. “We’ve been making bread for a long time,” Ben says. “Long before the Europeans, probably before the Egyptians, too.”

Ben has long been interested in sharing his knowledge about bush tucker with the wider community, and joined forces with fellow cook Kylie-Lee Bradford to launch Kakadu Kitchen in 2017. “Our food is a good way for visitors to connect to the area,” he explains. The pair have run bush-tucker tours at A Taste of Kakadu (an annual Indigenous food festival) for the past two years.

After our refreshing waterlily tea, we’re ready to walk and talk, and the amount of food we pass is astounding. We see Kakadu plum trees, which Ben tells us have the highest recorded levels of vitamin C of any fruit in the world. There are also red ants, which are great for digestive health when made into a drink, lumps protruding from paperbark trees hiding water, and sand palms, which have fleshy hearts that can be eaten raw or roasted.

As we near the Yellow Water wetlands, there’s more. “Our culture is in the water as well as on the land,” Ben explains.

“We swim for file snakes that live among the cool mud, and there are plenty of fish here. We hunt for goose and duck, and the yams are coming up now, too.”

After an hour, I’ve long forgotten about the ice-cream back at the cultural centre. “Come back next year and we might even have Kakadu bush-tucker ice-cream!” Ben says with a smile.