We were almost at the dairy. There the ground was soft and the mud deep and sticky. Deep and sticky enough to pull your gumboots off. Jones explained that she grows her bobby calves out to adulthood. The females rejoin the milking herd, and the young males are castrated and allowed to grow for fifteen to twenty-four months before being slaughtered.
We were outside the dairy now and the pale light spilled out into the dark, lighting up Jones’s face. She has delicate features and quizzical eyes, framed by brown hair topped with a beanie. I asked her what is the difference between killing an animal when it is an infant or killing it when it is an adult. Jones’s gentle demeanour became harder. She squared up. ‘Richard,’ she said. ‘You are going to die. Agree? Well, why don’t I kill you right now? It makes no difference,’ she argued rhetorically. ‘I want farmers to have the opportunity to raise calves for beef and not have to kill them. I want there to be another way.’ Inside the dairy there was a smaller rotary dairy set up. The cows walked themselves into the yards and into the dairy. They were bright, alert, with a good covering of flesh on their frames. Jones’s husband placed the milking cups on the cows’ teats and looked up at his wife and smiled. Jones reciprocated and looked at her herd with a broad grin. ‘I don’t think it is acceptable that dairy farmers are enmeshed in this cycle of death. Animals want to live. It is pretty obvious.’
All Vicki Jones’s words rang true in April 2016 when the two large dairy processors in Australia, Murray Goulburn and New Zealand-owned Fonterra, cut milk prices overnight and demanded farmers repay the money the processors had paid to them. It was a hellish scene in the country with stories of farmer suicides dominating over-the-gate conversations while in the city the public turned their ire towards the supermarkets, leaving Coles and Woolworths’ $1 milk to curdle on the shelves in favour of more costly, branded milk. The truth of the matter was that milk was no longer profitable. Every litre customers purchased was still sending farmers deeper into debt as the cost of production was 1 cent a litre higher than the farm-gate price.
14
Reasons to Celebrate
When I was five I planted my first vegetable garden. It was in a strip of earth that ran parallel to the weatherboards outside my brothers’ bedroom. It was autumn and the earth was cold and wet. I remember pulling out some weeds and collecting some manure from under the cypress trees to dig into the soil. My father must have turned the soil for me, as the earth was loose and pliable when I planted the seeds. The seeds were hard, large and round and had what looked like a bottom on one end. I had been given them to plant by a grown-up and I did not know what they were going to grow into. They also had what looked like one eye winking out of the other end. They were rude and amusing but could also see. I had watched my father plant seeds in straight lines, poking them deep into the earth with his fingers, a good distance apart. So I did the same.
I went out every morning after I planted the seeds to see if they had grown. Never underestimate the sense of joy and achievement in a child when the seed they have planted emerges from the earth. The dual-leafed seedlings looked like rows of little men with bowed heads, the shell of the seed sitting on top like monks’ hoods. The seedlings grew over winter and by the time it was September holidays they were towering stalks. Bean stalks. Broad-bean stalks studded with white and black flowers. They were so high. I could stand among them and I could see the sky and clouds through their sharp-ended leaves. The aroma was sweet and delicious. The buds withered and little bean pods emerged. They were soft and spongy, and if you looked closely were covered in fine white hair. When very small, broad beans are very sweet. As they grow they have more texture and get more flavoursome, but that sweetness turns to bitterness.
That spring was my first season of broad beans. I was eager to pick them but was told to wait. ‘Wait until they are bigger and then there will be more for everyone.’ I waited for a few hours. We had them steamed with lamb chops. We ate lamb chops or steak with all our vegetables. The broad beans were small, fresh, sweet and, most importantly, I had grown and picked them myself.
At the end of winter they are the vegetable that I most crave. Spring is not a time of bounty. It is actually one of the leanest harvest times of the year. The winter veg are finishing and most summer fruit and vegetables are just starting their journey from bloom to ripening. But there are a handful of vegetables that mark the start of the year. Along with broad beans, peas, asparagus and artichokes mark the start of spring.
During a recent spring I was working on a baking book with Melbourne baker Phillippa Grogan. During the process of the book, called Phillippa’s Home Baking, she led me through a steep learning curve in baking while I showed her the path to book writing. I had never made good bread before I worked on that book. Sure, I had followed the recipe on the side of a packet of Tandaco Dry Yeast, but always ended up with a scone-like texture that tasted like unfermented yeast. As I found out, a lot of bread recipes call for lots of yeast to make the dough rise quickly. Phillippa taught me to use less yeast and let the dough ferment for a longer period. The yeast was allowed to multiply in its own time. The result was bread with a more complex flavour, a crisper crust and a more even and better crumb. By the end of the winter I was baking every day to perfect the process and understand the technique. Which is when I discovered breadcrumbs.
With so much bread lying around and not enough gluten-tolerant neighbours to give it away to, I had to find a way of dealing with the excess. I turned the bread into breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs blended with rosemary, thyme, parmesan and garlic. The Moulinex blender got a real workout. This mix that makes a perfect coating for eggplant parmigiana. It works just as well on zucchini, broccoli and cauliflower. It perfects cauliflower cheese and, when fried, tops off steamed broccoli brilliantly, particularly when it is folded through al dente orecchiette and finished with a little more parmesan and a little extra virgin olive oil. Breadcrumbs went onto the top of everything that season.
One dish that I learned from Melbourne chef Ian Curley, from The European, is pasta primavera. (Ironic, but typical of Melbourne, that I live in one of the largest Italian diaspora cities in the world and get taught an Italian classic by a Pom.) It’s a springtime staple at his bistro opposite Parliament House. It is also a very, very simple dish of broad beans, peas, asparagus, parmesan, fried breadcrumbs and extra virgin olive oil served with some pasta. You can cut out the pasta, and make the breadcrumbs much larger by tearing apart old bread into very small pieces—the Spanish call these migas (diminutive of hormigas, or ants)—and fry them in lots of olive oil. Migas are also excellent with steamed broad beans.
That spring I realised just how well broad beans go with new potatoes and mint. By letting the warm salad sit together, the potatoes release some starch into the dressing and absorb some of it, in turn creating a rich and satisfying dish.
Just as rich and satisfying is the way that fresh broad beans, cooked in loads of butter, garlic and breadcrumbs, make a very pleasing dip. It works as well on crudités as it does with grissini, and is particularly nice with a buttery Australian chardonnay.
Another spectacularly simple dish I worked on is based on the technique from Raymond Capaldi’s pumpkin soup recipe. This involves, however, asparagus that is gently sautéd in butter until just soft, seasoned, then pureed with stock in a high-speed blender and served with goat’s cheese and extra virgin olive oil.
By that spring I had not been eating meat for more than six months. I no longer craved that golden brown, slightly salty crusted roast/chicken thigh/steak/roast pork, or insert any other description of cooked meat. I found that I was more aware of different sorts of hunger. Sometimes I felt like I needed starch. So I would cook a bowl of brown rice and add some curry sauce. Sometimes I really felt like I needed green. Powerful, strong green. Silverbeet. Rocket. Spinach. Other times I would spend a day in the country photographing the characters and iconic buildings and attractions of a town for a column I had been working on every week for seve
ral years, and really need to chow down on a lentil burger. Not the bun, but the yellow split peas that make up the patty. Sometimes it was the green tang and European aroma of dill I wanted to consume. Loads of dill. Chopped dill mixed with mint. Chopped dill mixed with mint, rolled through sour cream and fondled through handfuls of leaves. Chicory. Mizuna. Rocket. Lettuce.
Then there was a dish I often craved. Had done for decades and still do. It’s saag paneer, a classic dish from North India. Spinach and spices are cooked to a creamy consistency with the zing of ginger and turmeric. Pieces of firm cheese are added to the mixture. It is a really bright and spicy sauce that enriches rice. It is nutrient dense and not very much makes you feel quite full.
That spring I returned to see my mate chef Rosa Mitchell. Her little Italian restaurant on the edge of Chinatown in Melbourne was kicking along. She was born Rosa Pagano in Sicily sixty years ago. She moved to Australia when she was a very young girl, so speaks English like an Aussie and Italian like a Sicilian peasant. What she lacks in height she makes up for in sheer exuberance for life. Her mains menu, at the beginning of this particular spring, was thick with meaty dishes like spatchcock with rosemary, vino cotto and potato. Snapper with stewed broad beans, cauliflower and mint. Rabbit cooked in marsala with rosemary on a bed of pearl barley. Slow-cooked pork with borlotti beans and fennel. Tongue, potatoes and salmoriglio—a fresh sauce made with olive oil, lemon, garlic, parsley and oregano. In true peasant form, all of Rosa’s dishes were based on a tradition where the meat is used as a condiment for the starch and vegetables. It was possible to remove the flesh from every one of those dishes and still end up with a delicious meal.
Instead, I opted for the contorni. This is a little secret I learned during the My Year Without Meat project. Go for the sides. Go for ‘contorni’. You can order a meat-free meal with plenty of nutrition by going for the sides. The sides are where you’ll find good seasonal vegetables and salads that taste good and will sustain you, without having to eat your body weight in the processed starch of pasta or white rice risotto. On the sides menu this day was a plate of broccolini with garlic, pecorino and fried breadcrumbs. Then there was a dish of artichokes, small pieces of potato baked in a little stock and lemon juice, and lots of parsley. Perhaps the most stunning dish was a plate of sweet and sour pumpkin cooked with whole quills of cassia. It could have been a dish from Morocco. It could have been Indian. They were are all stunning and they made me feel good. ‘That is the beauty of the simple peasant foods,’ said Rosa. ‘They are really adaptable. We can have a table of vegos, gluten free and dairy free and feed the lot with basically the same menu with very little stress on the kitchen. That’s the beauty of cooking traditional dishes.’
With a finer-tuned palate I began to seek out better-quality fruit and veg with missionary-like zeal. I found that by buying at a mix of farmers’ markets, markets and supermarkets the quality of the produce seemed to follow. The fruit and veg from farmers’ markets lasts longer than that from the market and much longer than that from the supermarket. The flavour tends to be stronger and the texture firmer.
It was that spring that my understanding of the true beauty of great fruit and vegetables was really awakened. There is a depth of character in really ripe, ready and fresh produce. In great beetroot there is an aroma that is like raspberries or cherries mixed with chocolate. Fresh rocket has a pleasant bitterness that matches the bright zing of its chlorophyll. The best lettuce is slightly ‘to the tooth’, with a sharp tang from the white milk running through the ribs. (Lettuce’s botanical name is Lactuca sativa. The genus name comes from the Latin lact, because of the milky nature of the sap. Lettuces were originally a medicinal food and the sap was much more bitter. That bitterness has been bred out of lettuce over the centuries, so lettuces now have almost no taste.)
One brisk Saturday morning I visited a farmers’ market, scanning the crowd for friends and colleagues, but the early spring chill had kept most of them in bed. I went to my mate Michael Zandegu. He was the chef who had asked me six months earlier if there was something wrong with me because I had given up meat. Back then he was cooking next to a butcher at farmers’ markets. Now he was on his own, away from the butcher, and serving breakfasts that involved lots of fermented vegetables, polenta, poached eggs, popped grains and kale. He looked like a younger version of Al Delvecchio from Happy Days. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Try this,’ proffering a purple frond of a leaf. ‘It’s red mizuna from a customer’s backyard. Eat it.’ It was delicious. Crisp, hot, peppery, a clean finish with layers of flavour. There was rocket as well. The fine-leafed baby rocket. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You know what you do with really good rocket?’he asked rhetorically. ‘Nothing. Good rocket needs nothing. You know why people put Parmigiano on rocket? Because it is gutless, tasteless shit that is more or less grown hydroponically. It has never seen soil, so has no flavour or nutrition. The same with lettuce,’ he continued. ‘Iceberg lettuce from a supermarket? It is just filler. Filler for American hamburgers. The Americans cut the lettuce so it sits as a bed to offer textural contrast but no flavour. Modern lettuce has no flavour and no goodness. Modern vegetables grown under modern conditions are tasteless and more or less useless.’ He offered another green from his friend’s garden. It was green mizuna. It was even more peppery and tasty and filled my mouth with a lasting zing.
Earlier that year, before I had given up meat, I wanted to explore the basics of biodynamic agriculture. I had driven to Powelltown, a small settlement in the forest of the Great Dividing Range separating the Yarra Valley from Gippsland. This is the headquarters of Alex Podolinsky, the man considered by many to be the father of biodynamics in Australia. (The biodynamic movement in Australia is divided into two chapters. Podolinsky runs the more dogmatic of the two). Erudite and energetic, he spoke with a gentle Russian accent, emitting a Yoda-like wisdom that must be fathomed by understanding his riddles and quests. Podolinsky doesn’t preach. He either turns people away or sets them on a path of learning.
Podolinsky walked me towards his shed. The garden was surrounded by forest with lush paddocks, and there was a small warehouse where the Biodynamic Marketing Company distributes food to retailers. The Podolinsky family were fundamental in establishing biodynamics in Australia. Inside the small shed were sacks filled with cow horns stacked to the rafters. To the detractors of the biodynamic movement, cow horns are both the lightning rod that attacks criticism and the proof that it is at best pseudoscience and at worst witchcraft. Detractors make comments that horns are filled with magic potion.
Podolinsky explained that it wasn’t magic potion in the cows’ horns but manure. Each horn had been filled with fresh cow manure months earlier and buried in the earth over winter. Over the winter the manure had changed and matured into a substance that the biodynamic community refers to as Preparation 500.
Podolinsky held a small plug of the 500 in the palm of his hand and spelled out the differences between organics and biodynamics. ‘While organic certification requires the exclusion of chemicals, biodynamics is about the creative input,’ he said. ‘Creating humus to hold soil nutrients. My aim is to make our farmers observe what is happening on their farm and think biologically. I see our farmers as creative composers.’ He explained that founder Rudolf Steiner identified nine different ‘preparations’ numbered from 500 to 508 that were fundamental to plant health. He explained that the word biodynamic comes from the Ancient Greek bios, meaning life, and dynamis, meaning power or energy. It was coined after Steiner’s death.
Podolinsky spread the Preparation 500 out in his hands. The material that at the beginning of winter was wet, green and shitty was now putty-like and neutral smelling. In it were billions of microbes and particles of trace elements that would be stirred through water and sprayed over a farm, garden or vineyard.
To the uninitiated, Podolinsky’s words seemed confusing. To me it seemed that he was not there to initiate me into his sect, but was acting as a gatekeeper bar
ring my entrance. The terminology used by the biodynamic movement is a jargon that does little to describe the simple but quite remarkable transformations that take place in the soil and in plants when Mother Nature is allowed to go about her own work without the interference of man-made compounds and techniques.
It was suggested by one of Podolinsky’s employees that I have a conversation with a biodynamic farmer. It was late summer and the sun was beating down on his orchard on the banks of the Leigh River at Inverleigh. This is an old staging post between Geelong on Port Phillip Bay and Hamilton, some 200 kilometres to the west. It is a very pretty little town, made up of bluestone buildings and modern houses perched above the Leigh River, which flows through a gorge lined with river red gums.
Darren Aitken was fit and wiry, with an open face and broad grin. He led us to the orchard; long grass was growing knee high, little bugs and grasshoppers flying up as we disturbed them. A flock of chickens chased the bugs in the lazy warmth. A few ducks were nibbling on the lowest-hanging and ripest of the fruit hanging from boughs.
I had been warned that I would come back converted. ‘It’s a cult,’ said one farmer I know. ‘It’s full of nutters who believe in cosmic energy and magic potions stored in cow horns,’ said the owner of a local independent wine store. Their assumptions were based on a core of information that was ostensibly correct, it was just that the assumptions had altered the veracity. The biodynamic movement is based on the teachings of early twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Steiner. He was a man who combined the teachings of science and spiritualism to create a movement he described as anthroposophy. His teachings were adopted and coopted by organisations as benign and wholesome as the Steiner kindergartens we see today, as well as those with slightly more malevolent intent, such as Germany’s National Socialists, also known as Nazis. Because he combined science, which can be proved, with spiritualism, which can only be believed, he has been reviled.
My Year Without Meat Page 14