My Year Without Meat

by Richard Cornish

  2

  Who Let the Pigs In?

  It was Christmas Eve about forty years ago and Mum and her best friend were plucking chickens. I was a kid, playing in the garden; the sweet smell of virgilia blossom hung in the warm summer air. Mum and Aunty Sue were perched on kitchen chairs in the shade of the trees. (I called her Aunty Sue although we were no relation, because that was a time when kids didn’t call adults by their first names. It was less a compromise than a mark of respect and emotional closeness. I still call her Aunty Sue). The women were hunched over buckets of steaming hot water. Pulling small fistfuls of feathers away from the skin in the direction of the chickens’ still intact heads without damaging the skin was a skill. The freshly killed chicken had a sweet smell intensified by the hot water and the steam coming off the skin.

  We were farmers. We had a dairy; Aunty Sue and Uncle John had recently given up theirs to raise sheep. We all kept chickens for eggs. On special occasions we would kill a few. The ladies would watch their flock and look out for the one with the fullest breast, the widest gait and the fullest crop. They wanted a nice plump bird that was towards the top of the pecking order. A hen-pecked bird would be stressed and tough, and a tough bird wouldn’t cut the mustard on the Christmas dinner table. A quick twist of the neck with a deft flick of the wrist and the bird’s lights were out. The ladies didn’t go in for the dramatic bloodletting of the hatchet and the cutting block. The killing was traumatic enough for these animal-loving ladies without adding blades and blood.

  Roast chook was something special. Discussions were had as to the best way to cook them and phone calls were put in to mothers and fathers for advice. Back then chook for us was as commonplace as turkey or pheasant is for today’s cook—a rarely attempted dish, saved for the most special of occasions.

  Then came the change. We noticed the trucks first. Great feed trucks. Huge, shiny white trucks full of chicken feed that roared around our country roads. While the milk tankers, laden with tons of liquid, crawled at a snail’s pace up the winding hills, this new breed of heavy movers travelled at speed on our roads, their drivers not afraid or not aware that they were crossing the white line. The term ‘being taken out by a feed truck’ entered the local lexicon. Our friends who had been dairy farmers sold their old herds and erected chicken sheds. These were long squat sheds fabricated from cement sheeting and, despite the green rolling hills and lush pastures on which they were built, were painted a nature-defiling shade of undercoat pink. They sprung up around the countryside in clusters. On a still summer’s day the fetid funk of ammonia emanating from the sheds filled the once-sweet air. It was fun visiting a friend’s chicken sheds when the newly hatched chicks were delivered, thousands at a time, corralled together for warmth by a low solid fence of cardboard. We picked them up by the armful, fluffy yellow cheeping balls. As the weeks went on and the birds lost their down and grew feathers they were no longer cute but ugly adolescents, standing on caked beds of rice husks, wet with their own faeces, fallen birds flattened and mummified in the corners. A heatwave could wipe out the population of an entire poorly ventilated shed. Then we were called in to help with the morbid task of throwing thousands of birds into a hastily dug pit. We quickly discovered that factory farming wasn’t nice. It wasn’t pretty. It was a stinking affair. However, we couldn’t help but notice the farmers who got out of cows and sheep and into raising poultry for meat were the ones driving new cars.

  Only a few years earlier, too early for me to remember, our family had got out of pig farming. We had been dairy farmers selling cream to the factory. The skim milk was mixed with grain and fed to the pigs. When we started selling whole milk we got rid of the pigs. Across the countryside little pig growers like us were closing down. Pigs were no longer being raised outdoors but in sheds just as the chickens were. A lyrical version of this exodus from ‘outside in’ is told in the lives of the Nehill brothers, who lived in the rolling hills at South Purrumbete near the Otway Ranges in Victoria’s green south-west. Three bachelor brothers—Alex, Joe and Peter Nehill—were raising pigs throughout the first part of the twentieth century. They farmed with draught horses until 1978. They had a herd of dairy cows that they milked by hand, selling the cream—as we did—and feeding the skim milk to the pigs.

  English Large Black pigs have black skin and hair that protects them from the sun, and their generous covering of fat keeps them warm in winter. The Nehill brothers’ big old boar was called Paddy and he lived in a sty made of hand-hewn hardwood and half a corrugated-iron water tank. When he wasn’t fathering piglets he spent his time lying in the shade of an old apple tree. But there was to be no future for Paddy and the Nehill Brothers. Pig sheds replaced green paddocks and lean, white pigs superseded the fat black ones. The brothers were already elderly when Paddy died in 2002. With Paddy gone it was the end of an era. He was one of the last pigs of his breed in the nation. To continue the pig farming business, Alex, the last surviving brother, would have to interbreed brother pigs with their sisters, and fathers with their daughters. Interbred animals don’t have vigour and are prone to both congenital deformities and chronic illness. An old man himself, Alex chose to end 130 years of family pig farming and allow the last of his sows to live out their lives on the farm.

  The way the Nehills farmed, in close contact with a small herd, allowed them to assess their animals’ health, behaviour and readiness for slaughter. This deep cultural understanding of animal husbandry and commerciality was lost when the animals we eat moved en masse from the outdoors to indoors, from small herds and flocks to large-scale commercial enterprises. Our relationship with the animals we eat changed forever. At the same time it meant forcing animals to change the way they lived to provide us with meat. It also meant the way we consume meat changed significantly.

  The big pink chicken sheds were always called chicken sheds. Never chook sheds. That diminutive and familiar word, chook, was left to the household egg flock. After they were built and the feed trucks came down our roads, Mum would buy frozen chickens in bags from the supermarket. She and Aunty Sue were glad they never had to pluck a chicken again. With the responsibility for taking an animal’s life out of her hands, Mum was more willing and more able to cook chicken. If it was discounted at the supermarket we would be even more likely to see it on the table. From being the dense, flavoursome, almost dark meat with strong sweet poultry aromas we knew and ate a few times a year, chicken changed to being cheap, white and mealy, with bones you could bend with your bare hands. In what seemed the blink of an eye, chicken went from being a food reserved for the annual ritual feast of Christmas, to being a body shrink-wrapped in a bag with a big red sticker on it. Chicken went from something special to being on special. In Mum’s lifetime, chicken consumption has increased tenfold, from under 5 kilograms per person per annum to close to 50 kilograms. In that same time, lamb and mutton consumption has decreased threefold to just over 10 kilograms per person a year. Chicken is cheap. Lamb is dear.

  It wasn’t until I decided to stop eating meat that I realised just how ubiquitous chicken, bacon, ham, preserved and fresh meat had become in the Australian diet and other Western nations. It forced me to confront how narrow meat-free food choices are for those living in the everyday world. We are drowning in a sea of animal products and it takes good navigation to chart a course for a healthy diet without them. It threw me the challenge of creating a new way of eating. It revealed that we live in a society almost devoid of animal compassion, and contempt for those who make the choice not to put meat into their mouths.

  I knew this couldn’t be a hunter-gatherer affair. I prefer not to use the term ‘Paleo’ as it has lost its meaning. (The modern diet would have been as familiar to our lithic forebears as Foxtel iQ or anything in the Innovations catalogue. In his book Dark Emu, Indigenous Australian author Bruce Pascoe points out that grinding tools were used to grind grain into meal 30 000 years before the Egyptians and that fermented bread was being made by inland tribes at the time of t
he first contact with Europeans.) I do not have time to kill my own prey. I am a freelance writer and therefore any spare moment not spent typing is spent looking after my family or drinking. Or both. I have killed animals in the past. I have wrung the necks of chickens and rabbits and killed other farm animals for food. That is something that was not going to be part of this journey.

  I wanted to see what the changes were in raising animals for food from when I was a lad and to see if there were any morally and ethically acceptable farming practices for those who do eat meat. So much had changed in my life since roast chicken was something that was celebrated. That brought people together to watch as the oldest person in the family, often the grandfather, was called upon to carve. At Christmas this was left to my maternal grandfather. He would roll up his sleeves and do with the knife and carving fork what I thought were religious gestures over the bird. He was in fact, I was to learn later, doing a bit of air carving, rehearsing his moves without making a mark. Carving a chook wasn’t commonplace. It was an annual event, so he had to take time to recall the muscle memory. When the chicken was served it would arrive at the table of seated diners and be presented like a special guest artist—with a flourish and an introduction. And at that point we would bow our heads and say grace. For what we are about to receive/May the Lord make us truly thankful/Amen.

  And we were truly thankful.

  3

  Country Pasty Nazi

  Working as a freelancer covering food trends takes me across the country. My first day as a newly minted meat-free food writer saw me on an assignment interviewing and photographing a farmer raising a rare breed of cattle. The interview was a little odd. I did the interview and took the photographs, but the conversation around the way those amazing white cattle with black noses would taste on the BBQ fell flat. The grower was more interested in the aesthetics of his animals on his bijou property than the way they would taste. Even though they had contacted the paper, promoting their cattle as an old English beef breed, the owners seemed more interested in the way they would photograph.

  As I headed out to the location that day for my appointment with the farmer, I reached the main street of a small central Victorian town just as I was starting to think about lunch. The smell of baking pastry wafting from the bakery made me hit the brakes. It was a stock-standard, old-fashioned country bakery. The walls and high ceiling of the old goldfields building had once been painted an inoffensive shade of cream that had darkened to gold over the years with the heat from the ovens. A fluorescent tube on the roof cast cold green light at the back of the bakery. A lone, pasty-faced baker watched me with obvious impatience as I scanned the chalkboard menu for choices. The baker had seen too many early starts, not enough sun and, going by the slight tremor in his hands, the interior of too many depressing country pubs. There were steak pies;steak and bacon pies; steak and kidney pies; steak, bacon and cheese pies;chicken pies; curried chicken pies; chicken and bacon pies; and, thankfully, a vegetarian pie.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘What’s in the vegetarian pie?’

  ‘Cauliflower and broccoli in cheese sauce,’ answered the baker.

  ‘I’ll have one of those, please,’ I answered.

  ‘Don’t make them anymore,’ he said. ‘Not very popular.’

  ‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘What do you have for vegetarians?’

  ‘Pasties,’ was the answer.

  I bought one, with a sachet of sauce, and sat on a bench in the small park opposite the shop. I pulled out the pasty from the white paper bag. It was a traditional Cornish pasty with thick short pastry and a seam running down the centre on top. I waited a while, to let it cool down a little, squirted sauce parallel to the seam and took a bite. The reason why it looked so much like a traditional Cornish pasty was because it was a traditional Cornish pasty, made with swede, potato and beef. Beef! Gristly beef. Beef with great chunks of ground tendon. I was indignant. Not about the meat but that I had, perhaps, been lied to. I spat the mouthful of pastry, root vegetables and meat onto the ground, attracting a small flock of pushy pigeons. With them squawking over their gristly meal I returned to the baker, assuming there had been an error.

  The baker was reading the paper and looked up, impatient. I asked him if there had been a mistake. Perhaps he had meant to give me a vegetarian pasty instead of one with meat in it.

  ‘Well, it’s got mostly vegetables in it,’ came the reply. It wasn’t just ignorant or rude. It was contemptuous. I looked him in the eye then looked up to the menu board for other meat-free lunch options. The sandwiches were all premade, wrapped tightly in cling film, the filling between the slices of white bread identified by an alphabetic code written in blue permanent marker. HCT—ham, cheese and tomato. CAM—chicken, avocado and mayonnaise. Every sandwich and pie was made with meat. The egg filling in the egg and lettuce sandwiches was made with egg, lettuce, mayo and bacon. Even the bread rolls had bacon on them. This place was a temple to flesh. I asked for a bread and butter roll. The baker wouldn’t cut and butter it for me as all the sandwiches were premade in the morning and the ‘girl’ had already gone home for the day.

  I sat in the park with a dry bread roll in a brown paper bag, surrounded by a few expectant pigeons.

  Timing is everything. It was only later that I realised I may have put myself in a difficult position. I had agreed with Jane Willson that I was no longer eating meat. In doing so, I had overlooked the fact that I had also agreed to take on a role as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, which involved three weeks of celebrations around the city. The main event was to be a day-long BBQ masterclass, with famed Tuscan butcher Dario Cecchini cutting up a beast before an audience of more than a hundred key people, the heavy hitters of the food industry from around Australasia. Cecchini was joined by Ed Mitchell, a pit master from North Carolina, rockabilly Argentine grill boys Ben Milgate and Elvis Abrahanowicz from Sydney’s Porteno, and perhaps the hottest chef in the world that year, US-born Korean chef from New York City David Chang. And I was to emcee. It was a coveted gig and I was lucky enough to have landed it, taking the audience, each paying over $400, on a journey through meat, from butchery to lip-smackingly sticky slices of charcoal-roasted lamb, beef, chicken and pork. But now I had a dirty secret.

  The Fire Masterclass was held in a paddock on a bend in the Yarra River embraced by an escarpment that formed a natural amphitheatre. Flood prone, it had never been built on and served for many years as pasture for the milking herd of the nuns living in the Convent of the Good Shepherd just up the hill. Just a few kilometres from the heart of the city, the site was now used by the Collingwood Children’s Farm. A safe, protected open space perfect for the slow cooking of scores of animals over fire. The start of the event was delayed due to a few problems with the audiovisual system, and the crowd was growing hot and bothered in the early autumn sun. Eventually the gates swung open and the crowd covered their impatient surge with a meaningful saunter and headed down through the garden and into the paddock, where Ed Mitchell and his son were tending to kilograms of pork slowly roasting in a BBQ as big as a small caravan.

  Ushered into the shade of a barn, the crowd was met with great pieces of beef suspended from the rafters by heavy steel chains. A particularly long forequarter was beginning to move ever so slightly in the intermittent breeze.

  Dario Cecchini appeared with Melbourne Italian chef Guy Grossi who was to act as translator. Cecchini sorted his knives, the butchery equivalent of clearing one’s throat, and then launched into what was a well-honed manifesto of meat.

  ‘Your preoccupation with the tender cuts of meat such as eye fillet coupled with the attitude that “the rest of the carcass is not my problem”needs to be addressed,’ he said, chastising the crowd for the Anglosphere’s influence of making beef all about steak.

  Tuscany’s most famous butcher and restaurateur also proved to be a master raconteur. He went on to defend the lesser-loved cuts such as the tail, the shin, the brisket and the head, proclaimed his r
evulsion at wasting any part of the animal and extolled the beauty of broth—the essence of the beast drawn into a flavoursome liquid that nourishes and consoles. At that point the deputy editor of Australian Gourmet Traveller, Pat Nourse, cheekily asked if Cecchini still quoted Dante as he butchered. Taking this as a cue, the butcher, boning knife in hand, approached the forequarter shank, paused, lowered his head and then passionately recited most of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio. For eleven minutes and thirty-four seconds. I was running the event, keeping time and watching the amused audience become bemused. They were happy. Then they went from content to uncomfortable. As he made scant and shallow knife marks in the flesh, he bellowed out his journey into near hell. It was a superb moment of surrealism—what festivals should be—challenging, audacious and out of the ordinary. With the meat now gently swaying in the breeze like a flesh pendulum, he was reaching a climax—trilling his ‘r’s theatrically as he threw the word amore to his beautiful wife. When it comes to awkward public situations, Australians prove to be about as adept as the English—but with suntans. The recital ended and the audience erupted into relieved applause. He quickly boned the shank, spread the marrow inside the meat, seasoned it with salt and a vast quantity of herbs, trussed it with string and baptised it in inordinate amounts of olive oil. More applause. He sent it off to be cooked for three hours.

  As the event was running late it was all hands on deck to remove the set for the next chef, Lennox Hastie. He is a Sydney-based chef who was born in the United Kingdom and trained in Michelin-starred restaurants before working with Victor Arguinzoniz at Asador Etxebarri, a charcoalgrill restaurant in the green hills at Atxondo in Spain’s Basque Country. There was a quick turnaround from the Italian butcher-cum-raconteur. It fell on me to carry almost my own bodyweight in raw meat onto my shoulders and take it to the coolroom. The thing about properly aged beef is that it smells sweet. The blood has gone and the fresh aromas of slaughter have long dissipated, and what’s left is the butteryness of the fat and the stone-like smell of bone. At that moment, in that paddock, on that day I understood I wasn’t a vegetarian. I was simply a meat lover who had given up meat. A meat-freegan.