The food in São Paulo, a sprawling city of 20m in south-east Brazil, initially struck me as a combination of what I had recently eaten in Australia and the US.

Like Australia, Brazil is a vast country, which means that at any one time everything seems to be in season somewhere. The sight in a São Paulo street market of native strawberries – in Europe a sign of spring and summer – next to pumpkins, a harbinger of winter, came as quite a shock. And the inexpensive prices on most menus, allied to the hefty portions, were reminiscent of the US.