My Year Without Meat

by Richard Cornish

  I thought I would learn something by giving up meat. I didn’t realise it would re-educate me. The unintended consequence was that I was learning something really important every single time I went to talk to someone about what I was doing. Those with good brains and the ability to think outside the dominant paradigm were downloading all this invaluable information and experience. Something clicked: I realised I was on the gastronomic equivalent of the Camino de Santiago. A slow-paced period of reflection, abstinence, penance, perhaps, and unexpected commitment, with the possibility of an epiphany. I knew this was no longer just research for a newspaper article. So hungry, no—greedy for knowledge I redoubled my efforts, extended the period of abstinence twelvefold and embarked on this book you hold in your hands.

  5

  Loaded Language against Lentils

  ‘So, Richard. Where are you getting your protein from,’ quizzed Stephanie. The doyenne of Australian cookery, Stephanie Alexander, like Kylie, Bert and other great Australians, is now known only by her first name. She eyed me up and down. ‘If you’re not eating meat, you have to be getting your protein from somewhere else,’ she said, challenging my openly meat-free lifestyle. Here was a woman whom I respect greatly grilling me in front of a small audience at a function at the State Library Victoria. Stern, and maintaining her authorial tone, I felt that she was not only questioning the very premise on which I was basing my experiment, but also my knowledge of human nutrition that would give me the authority to talk publicly on this matter. I patted my belly—I am in no way a small man—and assured her that I was surviving quite well on my new-found repertoire of dishes based on different coloured vegetables, grains, legumes and fungus. Not only had I been trawling the streets for dishes I could learn from the local Vietnamese, Lebanese and Sudanese restaurants, I had also dusted off cookbooks in the Cornish library. I worked up recipes from books on my shelves that I had bought but never opened. I returned to the classics: English writer Elizabeth David, who championed the food of France and the Mediterranean; Madhur Jaffrey and her recipes from the Subcontinent; Marcella Hazan, who wrote beautifully of the food of Italy. I even referred to the doyenne herself, and opened up Stephanie’s Kitchen Garden Companion and cooked from that. The author in front of me pursed her lips and then broke into a cheeky smile to assure me that this was just a friendly goading.

  I didn’t go to the library unprepared. I knew where to look. I had been advised by a nutritionist, who had educated me on what foods to put together to get a really balanced diet. ‘Tell me exactly what you are eating,’ said Catherine Saxelby. She is a well-known nutritionist who I had worked with on stories before. I trusted her judgement. Previously I had always been suspicious of the nutritionists who had once recommended aspartame and margarine.

  I like her because she doesn’t take a reductionist view of food. A reductionist nutritionist is one who only sees food as the sum of its most basic constituent molecules. It’s a stream of thinking that divorces food from its interlaced cultural, social, gastronomic and sensory contexts, and sees it as something that is broken down in the great vat-like mix of acids and enzymes of our digestive tract, distilled into useful, or otherwise, compounds, to fuel the human machine. The reductionist nutritionist is the equivalent of an art critic who describes a painting as a canvas adequately covered in an array of different paints.

  ‘Not a dead creature has passed my lips for several months,’ I explained to Catherine. ‘Except perhaps some weevils.’ These I had found in a packet of lentils after I had cooked and eaten a dhal made with them. I told her that I was still eating a small amount of cheese and a few eggs. ‘Okay, I just wanted to make sure whether you were vegan or not,’ she said. ‘Because vegan diets are a little harder to balance.’ She quizzed me on the food I was eating, making sure that I was preparing food made from whole grains such as brown rice and barley, and giving a tick to the renaissance of quinoa, freekeh (smoked cracked wheat) and faro. ‘Whole grains plus legumes, such as chickpeas, lentils and beans, plus the small amount of cheese and eggs, will look after your protein,’ she explained. ‘But there are a lot of nutrients in meat and fish that are more difficult to get from a vegetarian diet. What you may run short of are iron and zinc.’Iron is found in whole grains and leafy greens but the iron is not readily available to the body; it is more accessible when eaten with vitamin C—a lemon-juice-based dressing, she explained, is perfect. Zinc, which is responsible for our immunity and sense of smell, is best absorbed from seafood such as oysters, red meat and chicken. It is also found in grains and vegetables. ‘Vitamin B12, essential for the prevention of anaemia, is basically found in red meat and some in eggs,’ said Catherine, ‘although there is evidence that mushrooms can provide vitamin B12.’ She also suggested a diet rich in flax seed, walnuts or pecan nuts for plant-based omega-3.

  ‘You’re a 44-year-old man,’ she said. ‘You’ll be fine. But if you were a young growing teenager, or were a woman, particularly a pregnant woman, I’d be watching you a lot more carefully. Anyone taking on a vegetarian or vegan diet should consult an accredited dietitian to make sure they are eating well and widely from the range of food available.’ I silently thanked her for not mentioning supplements in plastic-capped bottles. The concept that nutritional food can be broken down and isolated into its key components and concentrated into a pill is a bizarre confluence of industry and science fiction. ‘Good luck and watch out for bacon!’ she said in high spirits that barely concealed an underlying serious tone. ‘Cured pig flesh is the one thing that unsticks so many people trying to give up meat because it has such an enticing aroma.’

  With those words of warning ringing in my ears I turned my attention to understanding the concept of protein. It had been two months since I had gone meat-free and I felt that I didn’t really understand many of the basics of what food contains what nutrition, and which nutrition does what in the human body.

  Proteins are building blocks in the human body. They make up our muscles, skin, hair, eyes, organs and toenails. Protein itself is made up of amino acids joined together with other bits and pieces. Protein is like a chunk of preassembled Lego blocks that is made up of loads of little interlinked blocks of amino acids that the body pulls apart and rearranges according to need. When we eat, the protein in food is deconstructed into its constituent amino acids by the enzymes and chemicals in our digestive system. Our body then reassembles these amino acids into all sorts of new proteins that form our very beings. Pinch yourself. Pinch yourself hard. Everything you feel from the skin between your fingers to the pain itself involves protein.

  Nutritionists divide the amino acids that make up protein into two different kinds: essential and non-essential. Essential amino acids are his-tidine, leucine, isoleucine, valine, lysine, threonine, tryptophan, methionine and phenylalanine. Which sound more like animo superheroes than compounds essential for the healthy functioning of the adult human body. These are found together in what nutritionists have traditionally referred to as a ‘complete protein’. It is interesting to note that there are other amino acids the human body requires to survive, but we have found a way of synthesising these ourselves in our own bodies. Until recently the message was to eat complete proteins daily. This thinking continues, with health and diet manuals turning over the same instructions to eat red meat, poultry, seafood, eggs and dairy products, as they contain complete protein.

  Most vegetables, however, don’t contain all the essential amino acids. There are global culinary traditions that have cleverly overcome this. The town of Atlixco is a fine example; it sits under the shadow of Popocatépetl, an active volcano in Central Mexico. It is always growling and sending off puffs of smoke, threatening to erupt. Which gives the locals a fatalistic attitude to life and a dark sense of humour—a local baker bakes conical buns finished with white sugar at the apex, as a replica of Popocatépetl. As if, somehow, by making an effigy of the snow-capped summit it would stay that way and not be suddenly melted by a surge of hot gas and lava
blasting from the bowels of the earth. There has been a market in the town since long before the conquistadors arrived in Mexico. Five hundred or so years later and not much has changed. Instead of woven palm mats, market-stall holders now lay out blue plastic tarpaulin on which they display the piles of black, red, yellow and brown beans they sell. I had visited the area shortly before researching and shooting photographs for a book on Mexican food. In the heart of the market was a middle-aged couple who tended to their piles of different coloured beans. She would rake them every now and then to keep their pyramid shape but also to create some colour and movement to attract the shoppers. One lot of beans was pinkish brown with mottled dark-brown marks on its skin. These were called frijoles culebra or snake beans. They had been bred sometime in the distant past to be planted alongside corn seeds. As the corn grew and unfurled its long broad leaves, the bean shoots would follow, snaking a leading tendril around the stalk as they grew together skyward. Harvested and dried together, they were both stored for eating throughout the year. If the Mexicans had grown and eaten just one without the other, they would have had an incomplete diet, unless they went out hunting for wildfowl, fish or small deer. Most beans are deficient in methionine, while corn lacks lysine and tryptophan. Together the corn and grain formed the binary food foundation for much of the diet of Mesoamericans, complemented by squash and tomatoes from the garden, and wild herbs, or quiletes, from the surrounding woods. The Mesoamericans also discovered that if dried corn is soaked in water, with a little lime added, the proteins in the corn bind together to form a dough. The process is called nixtamalisation. Without nixtamalisation we would never have had tacos. An added benefit is the release of available niacin, a B-group vitamin that staves off the dietary disease of pellagra. On this diet the Aztecs created shining cities of pyramids and floating farms that awed the Spaniards.

  Many empires have been built on pulses and grains. Roman centurions marched on porridges of barley and fava beans. The power of the maharajah was based on armies marching on lentils and rice. The Chinese emperors led armies fed on fermented soy and rice. The grain and legume dietary duo is mirrored in Europe, where broad beans and barley are sown together.

  What is interesting is the underlying bias in contemporary nutritional literature towards meat, describing it as ‘complete’. The implication being that most vegetables are ‘incomplete’, from which the obvious inference is made that vegetables are inferior. It’s logically correct but words have more than one meaning. Seventy per cent of the protein in the Western diet comes from animal protein. In the rest of the world more than 60 per cent of the population’s protein comes from vegetable protein. In the reductionist world of nutritional numbers and statistics, a steak is supreme and lentils lesser. Figures like these, however, don’t take into account the concept of culture. In traditional diets where meat is scarce or not eaten for cultural reasons, cuisines have developed that combine legumes with whole grains and vegetables. Indians eat lentils. Yes. But in a meal that most likely will also contain rice, wheat, cheese or yoghurt, and other vegetables. Mexicans eat corn. Yes. In the form of tortillas, filled with cooked beans, cheese and perhaps foraged wild greens.

  In the protein argument against the vegetarian diet, it is steak versus vegetables. Steak will always win in this loaded game. It’s a simple concept and easy to comprehend. It underpins much of the understanding of the vegetarian diet and informs a lot of the bias and prejudice against vegetarians. It’s like pitting Tom Jones in an eisteddfod against Art Garfunkel. Meaty old Tom is always going to win against reedy little Garfunkel. But combine Art with his naturally occurring companion Paul Simon and you create a completely different beast with amazing range, complexity and nuance. Arguments hate complexity, so it’s rare the meat-versus-veg-protein argument pits lean beef against corn tortillas with refried beans, or lamb chops take on spiced dhal and rice. It’s usually just one lump of animal versus one lump of vegetable. The language we use to describe food does not make for a fair fight.

  6

  Meat Map

  I was now in the market for a new type of food experience. In my previous life as a committed carnivore I had a meat map of Melbourne and Victoria seared into the navigational sector of my brain. I knew where the best meat was to be had and for a variety of reasons. There was Cut Price Tony. Not that his meat was cheap, but his face was so brutal it always seemed that his meat would have to be cheap. An old-fashioned Italian butcher who butted his fags into the pools of serum out the back of the inner-city butcher’s shop where he made the best fennel and garlic sausages in town, the ones the Italian migrants bought before they began making their own sausages from their own pigs. Then there was Werner. Swiss and cheeky, he was a butcher who was so charming he had the middle-class matrons eating wieners out of the palm of his hand. With his flashing smile he would entice the wife standing at your side into his aura of Teutonic smallgoods, right there in front of you. His bratwurst and weisswurst were the best in town. For good lamb I had to wait for the deliveryman. He would bring a plain cardboard box, into which Jenny Anderson, a fifth-generation farmer from Ned Kelly country, had neatly packed one of her own sweet little lambs, to the front door. When my daughters were born she sneaked lambskins into the box for them to sleep on. Then there was the best steak in Australia. It is grown by an ex-butcher called Bones. He owns a pub and a farm. His mum owns a butcher’s shop, and his brother, the abattoirs. His cattle are grass fed on native pastures and are sent just a few kilometres to slaughter. They are hung for twenty-four days, if not longer, and Bones would save the best cuts for his mates. It was worth the half-day drive, or waiting until racing season when he arrived trackside for a week, the boot of his sedan packed with homegrown, grass-fed, dry-aged Hereford steaks. I remember once receiving a late-night delivery of one of his specials—spring lambs grazing on native pasture that had gone to seed, giving protein-rich pasture to the lambs. It was in a supermarket car park. The lamb had been dressed but not butchered. This meant that it was dead, beheaded, dehooved, skun, eviscerated and chilled. Not words one uses every day at the office. It was sitting on a blanket without a cover in the back seat of his sedan; it was a hot day and the aircon inside was keeping it cool. He pulled it out and threw it over his shoulder. Judging by the astonished reactions of the other people in the car park, not many were happy to see a whole dead lamb.

  Those days have passed now. I had to make a new map in my mind.

  SOUL MAN

  The first time I walked into Soulfood Café was the second-last time. The bare-wood interior of the inner-Melbourne café was indicative of the vegetarian ethos of the restaurant. It was unadorned, down-market in a back-to-the-earth kind of way. So was the Friday-night crowd. This vegetarian restaurant had been a Fitzroy stalwart since the junkies were roaming free in this once-unloved Victorian-era strip of Smith Street. The dealers and their clients would disguise their deals with a lateral handslap. The passing of a little bag of white powder—part heroin, part glucose, part horse dope—was obfuscated by the mock-streetwise gesture. Many of the diners of Soulfood were young urban professionals, slightly pale for that time of the year and slightly serious for that time of the week. They were interlaced with groups with badly kept hair, colourful clothing and scant footwear, and surrounded by the fading aroma of sandalwood. The menu was big and inviting but was reminiscent of meals in share houses when the resident vegetarian was throwing a dinner party: tofu wrapped in roti, ‘pumpkinopita’, chickpea curry. The food was good, including the rich chickpea stew with evenly cut vegetables and fresh spices lacing the sauce. The literature around the room was preaching to the converted, with calls to political rallies and notices about spiritual enlightenment classes. There was a certain aura of self-aware spiritual superiority. Having never paid too much attention to vegetarian aesthetics or culture before, it was taking me a while to absorb it all.

  I stepped out into the early evening and could smell meat in the air. While well-intentioned young co
uples hovered prevaricatingly outside the windows of the vego place, pondering about committing to lentils that night, the newly opened hipster burger place a little way down and across the street was heaving with bearded young men and freshly tattooed women making their way through burgers and fries, and longnecks of Melbourne Bitter beer.

  A few weeks later I walked down Smith Street again. My partner had opened a clothing store just around the corner, in Gertrude Street. I walked into a glorious old bank that had been turned into a hipster gift shop. I couldn’t help but notice the inordinate number of meat-orientated gifts, such as bacon bandaids and meat moustaches. It had been a few short years since the rise of hipsterism as a cultural force had seen the blending of anti-fashion as fashion, lowbrow as highbrow, and sheer force of online numbers had made it the dominant trend. I had been to Los Angeles for work eighteen months earlier and already seen how meat was as much a hipster cultural icon as beards and tattoos. The foie gras burger and poutine with oxtail gravy at Animal on Fairfax Avenue were harbingers.

  In New York that summer, upmarket left-wing food retailer Whole Foods Market took over a park for Meatopia, described as ‘Meatopia 2012: the City of Meat’ or ‘Woodstock of Edible Animals’. It was set on Randalls Island, a park between Harlem and Queens on the East River, where the massive space was divided into districts, with names like Meatopia Heights, Game Reserve, Carcass Hill, Beaktown and Off alwood. With big-name sponsors like global alcohol manufacturer Diageo on board, the original ethical-meat message was somehow lost and Meatopia was a hedonistic festival of flesh. Even the personified steer on the poster had a knowing look that suggested it not only knew it was going to be eaten but wanted to be.