What's on the menu this week? For many Australians, food is an adventure with limitless potential. A lamb roast on Sunday, a meat pie at the football, and perhaps a toastie with warrigal greens, kimchi and burrata at the local café. Our palate embraces everything from meat-and-three-veg simplicity to unique flavour combinations incorporating foods from all corners of the globe. How did we get here?

What would a birthday or a wedding be without cake? Celebration cakes are a signifier of occasion, sometimes requiring superhuman effort to bake and decorate. We explore the surprisingly recent history of the celebration cake, uncovering the role of the British royal family, The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book, and our evolving relationship with time itself.

You say tomato, I say… bleurgh. How is it that we can have such different experiences of the same foods? Taste and flavour: What are they and how do they work? We meet some of the top flavour scientists working today, including the researcher who discovered that there are 'supertasters' among us.

What characterises Australian food? We're a nation adept at making first-rate versions of food drawn from all corners of the globe, but our palates are less familiar with the foods of our own backyard. For millennia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have cultivated and enjoyed uniquely Australian foods. So, why are these ingredients still so hard to find on supermarket shelves?

Many of us imagine that an athlete's diet consists of sports supplements providing carefully calibrated doses of carbohydrates, protein and electrolytes, but for ancient Olympians, a diet of cheese or figs was seemingly enough. In truth, whole foods are still the most important part of an athlete's diet today, as we discover on our culinary tour of the sporting world.

The egg is an extraordinary thing. In the pantheon of miraculous food chemistry, it takes on a range of essential roles. From helping cakes and soufflés to rise, to bringing disparate ingredients and flavours into a unified whole. They can also take on a starring role, whether fried, scrambled or poached. Eggs frequently appear in art, literature, design, and philosophy, too, and they are at the heart of the age-old paradox: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Australians don't always see eye to eye on election day, but there is one unprepossessing foodstuff that seems to straddle divides of age, geography, ideology and class: the sausage. How did the humble sausage come to be the food that fuels election days in Australia, with its name now synonymous with the democratic act?

What is appetite? Many happily succumb to it, while others struggle against it through willpower or even pharmaceuticals. But what are the biological, cultural and psychological mechanisms that make us want to eat? These questions are increasingly complicated in this era of unprecedented abundance and ubiquitous food.

In times of war, food and nourishment can determine victory or defeat. Welcome to the world of military food. Armies once lived off the land, but now they can live off a sealed, freeze-dried pouch. Imagining, making and storing combat-ready food leads global food science, which means that each and every one of us eats a little like a soldier.

In many religions, the key moments of ritual centre around food. Whether it's Eid al-Fitr, Passover or Easter Sunday, these feasts mark the passing of time and have bounty and renewal at their heart. In this episode, we pull up a chair at Easter and Passover celebrations around Australia and abroad, and en route we learn about some of the more ancient rituals that underpin these feasts of faith.