I asked Aitken about his use of cosmic energy. He took a well-weathered hand and raised it to the sun. ‘That,’ he said, using carefully chosen words, ‘is cosmic energy. Energy from the cosmos beaming direct to us here on Earth.’ He broke into a smile. ‘It’s sunlight. Plants use it to photosynthesise,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I use it to grow my produce. Just as every farmer does.’ Aitken paused to let the information sink in. ‘I know the term “cosmic energy” puts some people off but that’s what sunlight is. Plants capture it. We dig the plants into the soil. The soil becomes more fertile.’
What he was describing is the form of agriculture that was prevalent across the globe prior to World War II. At its heart is photosynthesis. This is a silent and unstoppable process that occurs wherever there are plants, air, water and sunlight. Plants take carbon dioxide from the air and water through their roots and, using photons from the sun, break apart the carbon dioxide and water molecules, in cells called chloroplasts, reformulating them into carbohydrate and oxygen. Carbohydrate in the form of simple sugar, monosaccharide in the form of glucose and in different forms of starch or polysaccharides from pectin to lignin. It happens all around us, in our house plants, the potatoes in our veggie patch, the weeds in the footpath. To me it is a miracle.
As we walked through his orchard, Aitken continued to explain that the energy of the sun, now captured in new plant growth, is then ploughed back into the earth. The grass growing between the apple trees in his orchard would be mown down and ploughed back into the soil or covered with more mulch. Microbes in the soil would then break the grass down into humus. They would break down the manure from the chickens and ducks into humus as well. Humus is a spongy material made of plant matter, the faeces of worms, insects and microbes themselves. It is packed with energy and nutrients, and holds lots of water.
‘One of the ideas of biodynamics is that you don’t need to bring extra inputs onto the farm,’ Aitken explained. ‘It’s a closed system. You use what occurs naturally to create more life.’ This also includes creating great piles of compost made from hay, manures and the stalks and stems from plants that are surplus after harvest. Aitken bent down and tore out a lump of dark earth that looked like rich chocolate cake, except for the teeming numbers of worms and insects. ‘It’s the life you can’t see that really matters,’ said Aitken. He squeezed a handful of soil and it stuck together like moist black breadcrumbs. ‘This is colloidal humus. It can hold 75 per cent of its own weight in water.’
Running just under the surface of the lump of soil was what appeared to be a dense and random spider’s web. This was explained to me as being mycorrhizal fungi. ‘What we think of as being fungus are mushrooms and toadstools,’ explained Aitken. ‘But these are just the fruiting body of the fungus’. Mycorrhizal fungus itself is a network of threads that interlace the soil and that can spread over many square metres, and can, in some circumstances, cover entire hectares of land, particularly in forests.
I had seen mycorrhizal fungi growing earlier in the year, when I was walking with a mushroom expert, Alison Pouliot. We were in a clearing in a forest in Central Victoria and she pointed out a ‘fairy ring’ of mushrooms. Common Agaricus bisporus or field mushrooms. The mushrooms were in a rough circle about the size of a small car. Some of the mushrooms were older than others and some were just emerging from the grass in the clearing. Two things were noticeable: the ring itself, and the darker colour of the grass within and just around the ring.
I hadn’t understood why the grass was a darker colour until Aitken explained more about the relationship between the plants and the fungus. What goes on underground is a complex and symbiotic system of barter and exchange between the fungus and the flowering plants on the surface. The plants provide the fungus with glucose, and the fungus provide the plants with essential and trace elements. The fungus’s very fine threads interlock with the roots of the plants in a consenting and penetrative embrace. The plant’s roots have special receptacles that have evolved to accept the delivery of nutrients from the fungus and the passing of energy to the fungus in the form of simple sugar. By doing this the plant can extend its effective root cover to hundreds of square metres. This symbiotic relationship is in no way specific to biodynamic farming; however, the very practices biodynamic farmers embrace proliferate this silent and cheap army working underground to create healthier plants.
Sometimes the relationship between plant and fungus is specific. Autumn foragers heading to the countryside in search of pine mushrooms will be well aware that in order to find the mushrooms, they need to head to the pine forests and pine trees growing in considerable numbers. Under them they look for circles of Lactarius deliciosus, the salmon-coloured mushroom much sought after by old Italian couples, en trende chefs and hipster foodies. Pine trees and pine mushrooms have one of these special relationships. In the early days of the pine plantations, Australian foresters were puzzled as to why they couldn’t get their Monterey pines, or Pinus radiata, to grow as high and prolifically as they did in their native Californian coastal habitat. The growing conditions in southern Australia were similar enough to achieve success but the early seedlings in the plantations would take, then fail to thrive. It wasn’t until foresters visited similar pine plantations in New Zealand that they noticed the pine trees of a similar age there were green, robust and doing very well. The difference was that the New Zealand foresters were inoculating the roots of their seedlings with a solution that contained the spores of Lactarius deliciosus. With the fungus working silently underground foraging for nutrients, the pine trees were able to grow to their full potential. New Zealanders are true to their canny Scottish roots, and the foresters there established a complementary income to that from their trees by harvesting and selling the mushrooms, giving them an income stream long before the pines were ready to be chopped down for timber.
Aitken explained that the formulation of his preparations was time consuming, that the creation and turning of compost was laborious, and the mulching of the soil was backbreaking. Aitken, however, does not spray pesticides or apply fertiliser, in itself not only time consuming but also very expensive, with the cost of the chemicals compounded by the cost of fuel and labour. The more machinery drives over the earth, the more compacted it becomes, which can disrupt the network of fungi. The effects of fertilisers and chemicals on mycorrhizal fungi are not clearly understood across a broad range of the horticultural community. It has been explained to me that if a plant has its basic nutritional needs met by artificially formulated nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium fertiliser (N, P and K), then those bonds formed with the fungus underground are diminished and other complementary elements are no longer forthcoming.
Aitken explained that because of the way he grows his vegetables, they are healthier. Because they are healthier they are able to resist pest attack. Having given up his chemical armoury, Aitken, like other biodynamic growers, relies on other forms of pest control and avoidance. He breaks up his crops so they don’t appear as a monoculture to attacking insects. Some biodynamic farmers opt for ‘peppering’ in which the pest weed, for example, is burned and its ashes spread about. Others use more practical solutions. One biodynamic orchardist I heard about had a problem with codling moth, a bug that lives under the old bark. His solution? He hired a sandblaster and removed the old bark. Problem solved.
I took away more with me that day than new understanding. I was laden with a box of Aitken’s produce. It was some of the best food I have ever seen. Aromatic, beautifully shaped, green leafed and firm stalked. The five different varieties of rhubarb were sweet and pleasantly earthy, with some carrying the faint fragrance of tea roses. The unifying experience of tasting his produce was a sensation of feeling sated. I understood that it wasn’t just vegetables that I was craving, but good vegetables. Like the difference between the cheap ethanol fuel one puts into the hire car on the way back to the airport and the high-octane stuff you pump into your car to buzz around town. Both are called unle
aded but the differences in the running of your car are very apparent. Same with veg. Some just don’t have the taste, the flavour and that ability to make you feel good.
THE BLOW OUT
I am a food writer. I drink. It is part of the job description. Sometimes I drink too much. That is not part of the job description. What follows I am not proud of. That spring I was preparing for a mate’s birthday party. His present was a paella and slow-cooked leg of lamb, to be shredded and served in bread rolls with gravy and mint sauce the following evening. Although not eating meat myself, I was not emphatic that others should not also, so I had no problem in cooking the meal.
Prepping paella for sixty people involves lots of chopping. One has to chop up loads of red capsicum and tomato to make the sofrito. You could do this in a blender but the blades do too much damage at a cellular level. This releases too much water, which means that the sofrito effectively boils at 100 degrees Celsius. This in turn stops the caramelisation of the sugars and slows the Maillard reaction, which adds to its colour and flavour. Anyway—it’s best to chop the ingredients for a paella by hand. It is a repetitive chore that requires speed to get through the two sinks filled with vegetables. One with tomatoes and the other with red capsicums. Speed and skill. Skill with a knife is essential. Chopping at speed requires concentration. And what better way to concentrate than drinking pinot noir. And after the first bottle and one sink full of vegetables, perhaps another bottle.
Meanwhile, in the oven had gone two whole shoulders of lamb. They were complete with neck and leg, giving them a slightly sinister Snowtown quality. (A reference to the small South Australian town perched somewhere between arable land and the outback, where police made the grizzly find of eight bodies decomposing in barrels. There is a butcher there who sells perhaps the best saltbush mutton in Australia. Years ago, on a trip back from a filming expedition, I stopped there and bought our small crew gifts of legs of mutton to take home.)
The lamb shoulders were laid out on big trays, and sitting on a bed of hard-leafed herbs from the garden: bay, rosemary and thyme. I had preheated the oven to 260 degrees Celsius. The shoulders had been covered in olive oil and rubbed with salt. After a good thirty to forty minutes the skin had browned and crisped. I reduced the heat to around 100 degrees and allowed the shoulders to cook slowly while I chopped away, quietly slugging pinot noir and listening to BBC programmes on ABC NewsRadio. Somewhere between National Public Radio Morning Edition and the end of the second bottle of pinot noir, the capsicums and tomatoes were finally all chopped, incident free, and sealed in great plastic boxes in the fridge, and the golden lamb shoulders removed from the oven. The kitchen was redolent of garden herbs and sweet, soft lamby flesh. I sat on the couch to wait for them to cool, the last of the pinot splashed in the glass in my hand, and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Tower of Song’ now playing very loudly on the stereo.
I woke up the next morning with a heaviness in my stomach, to find the kitchen cleaned, as I had left it, and the legs of lamb in the fridge. I must have wrapped them up and put them away before I went to bed. There was one small issue. One of the legs was missing several sizeable chunks of flesh. The entire calf muscle on the shank and the muscle that sits next to the scapula on the shoulder itself. The meat was wrapped, if not particularly well, in cling film, and the dog was still locked in the laundry. No one else was awake in the house, and whole muscles of meat are not things small female children are likely to squirrel back to their rooms for an impromptu midnight feast. There was a greasiness around my mouth and a familiar lanolic tang. There was a sensation in my back molars I had not experienced in some months. Short strings of muscle. Lamb muscle.
I had, in my stupor, eaten a fair portion of one of the shoulders of lamb. Hangover notwithstanding, I felt terrible; for I had almost half a kilogram of lamb sitting in my stomach that I was having trouble digesting.
I was in an ethical dilemma. Would this put an end to My Year Without Meat? What would I say to my editors? Would people smell meat on my breath? Luckily I had been a keen student of the Renaissance and Reformation and was keenly aware of the old Catholic custom of indulgences. An indulgence was a ticket of leave, as it were, for a wealthy person to commit carnal, mortal and deadly sins. By paying a hefty tax to Rome, they could have people pray on their behalf and save their soul from hell or, even worse for some, its slightly more boring sister campus, purgatory. ‘For every gold ducat that falls into the indulgence box another souls flies from purgatory,’ was the advertising slogan that allowed the Medicis, Sforzas and Borgias to build empires on assassination and incest.
With self-appointed self-righteousness due to the hundreds of animals already saved from death over the past months, I felt that one small transgression could be made up for by penance. I couldn’t give up alcohol. So I set myself the task of a further several months past the one-year deadline for giving up meat. I cleaned between my teeth with dental floss, which washed away the sins of the night before, and continued on my year and a half without meat.
I reduced and thickened the cooking juices of the lamb, to make a thin gravy. I chopped up several bunches of mint, mixed them with brown sugar and poured over some boiling hot water, to which I added a little vinegar, to make the mint sauce. I stripped the lamb from the bone in long morsels of muscle strands. At the party, after the paella was served and everyone was a little more boozy, I toasted some rolls, warmed the lamb and pressed it into the rolls, spooning over a good serve of gravy and mint sauce, salt and pepper, all wrapped in a paper napkin. I was told later just how good the lamb rolls were. Between two back molars nagged a muscle fibre that I had missed with the holy dental floss.
THAT EMAIL
Spring turned into summer. It was coming up to Christmas. The supermarkets had put on their special Pavlovian spending music, formerly known as Christmas carols, and the ships stacked with containers of useless-objects-later-to-be-given-as-gifts waited out on the bay for a berth to unload. I continued writing my column for The Age Epicure, called ‘Brain Food’. This is a collection of single entendres and social commentary thinly veiled as a food and cooking question-and-answer column. A question had come in from a reader, an A Garfield, that seemed festively consistent.
The query was a little long and needed editing to get to the nub of the question. It ended up reading: ‘How do I cook the Christmas turkey so it doesn’t end up dry? A Garfield’.
I replied:
You could consider one of the supermarket ‘fresh whole’ turkeys which contain 94 per cent turkey. Fancy that! The other 6 per cent contains diphosphates, polyphosphates, guar gum, xanthan gum, canola oil and sugar. Merry Christmas. Esteemed British food writer Matthew Fort gives a method that cooks the bird at 61°C–63°C for ten hours then finishes it with a blast of heat to brown the skin. Most ovens can’t deliver such low temperatures accurately so it’s not something I would recommend. The best turkey I ever had was cooked by my mate Macca. He took a free-range bird, not too big, and brined it in five litres of brine made with 2 cups of grey sea salt and a cup of raw sugar with half a dozen bay leaves, a small handful of fresh thyme and 6 crushed juniper berries which he simmered for 15 minutes and allowed to cool before putting in his turkey and keeping it overnight in the fridge. He roasted it in the normal manner. It was brilliant!
I felt this was quite a generous response and offered a good deal of information with a modicum of comment. I received several emails adding to the comments about supermarket food and suggesting other methods for brining and roasting a turkey. There was one email that stood out. I kept it. Here it is:
From: A cow
What gives YOU the right to KILL animals so you can stuff your fat arse?
I hope you come back as a pig … or a turkey … and get slaughtered inhumanely, like many animals do.
Pigs are very intelligent creatures—not that you’d give a fuck. Think about that this Christmas, cunt … and every other cunt that eats animals.
; The ‘restaurant industry’ thinks it’s ok to kill.
It isn’t.
It reminded me that some do not see the consumption of meat as a subject for debate or a moral issue. They see it as war.
[email protected] was, as you probably have guessed, a fake address.
I posted the email from A Cow as a mildly ironic Christmas greeting on social media. It received some comments, the best from one sharp friend who noted that the anonymous poster ‘obviously and fundamentally misunderstands the basics of food consumption. Merry Christmas’.
MY MEAT-FREE CHRISTMAS
There are several smells that, when combined, signal to me that Christmas is around the corner. First, the smell of nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice. These are the three spices that my mother’s maternal grandmother listed on the Christmas pudding recipe that she handed down to my mother. They are folded through a batter of egg, flour, milk, breadcrumbs, brown sugar and dried fruit: namely, raisins, currants, sultanas and mixed citrus peel that are soaked in brandy. This speckled sticky batter is spooned into greased pudding bowls, covered and gently simmered for four hours. They are generally cooked on one of those days bordering on subtropical that sweep through Victoria before the crap weather settles, spanning Christmas Eve to the week after New Year. Those spices always punch through the muggy air, painting the atmosphere with the aroma of anticipation.
My Year Without Meat Page 15