"Everyone has a relationship with food," David Craddock, manager of heritage and engagement at the State Library of Western Australia, says.

In A Recipe for Life: The Food That Shapes Us, the library has delved into its archives of photography, films and even old menus and advertisements to tell the story of how we eat, from pre-colonial times to the present day.

"We all need to eat, and we've found food has enabled us to explore all kinds of things — migration, gender, economics, commerce," Mr Craddock says.

It is all there on the walls of the ground floor, the maps and early photographs, the oral history, the menus of once-fashionable, long-forgotten restaurants that the librarians of the time were savvy enough to add to their collection.

And on one panel, the story of WA's part in a

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