Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

Later, with a degree in agriculture and as a trained vet, Dr Wallach noticed how the human medical system was taking us further and further away from nutritional treatments for human health. His point was that you couldn’t patent and sell food nutrition easily if you were a drug company, so they steered society away from nutrition as a solution to ill health and a prevention to disease. Manufactured drugs, however, could be owned and sold through doctors trained by universities who were sponsored by the very same companies. When Dr Wallach began to speak up with some of his scientific findings based on his vet work, the medical profession mocked his ‘lowly’ vet status and his insights. In response, Joel trained in human medical science, became a naturopathic doctor and launched his famous and brilliantly titled lecture ‘Dead Doctors Don’t Lie’.

  The point of the title is that the doctors – the people who are meant to guide us about our health – on average die ten years earlier than other people in our population! This is based on American statistics, which stunned me, and I’d bet the stats would be similar here.

  The good news is holistic doctors are on the rise and more and more we’re questioning the ‘commercial lean’ of our medical system. Like Joel Salatin’s customers, doctors are seeking out food grown with love and integrity as healthy treatments to assist wellness for their patients, ahead of simply prescribing drugs. But back then it was interesting that I’d not only been cured by a vet, but I’d been given the keys for greater awareness about my own responsibility for my health via the nutrition in the food I ate, from none other than . . . a vet.

  When I spent time at my auntie’s, I noticed I always went home leaner and lighter, happier and brighter. For years I thought it was because I was more active there, but the truth was at home I jogged a minimum of 7 kilometres a day and played hockey and was extremely active. My diet was okay, eating vegetables and meat produced from the farm, yet I would regain the weight at home. This puzzled me. It wasn’t until this year that I found the missing piece of my puzzle about weight loss and health. When I was at home in the city, I wasn’t happy. My exercise wasn’t about health. It was about running away and the extra weight was about emotional protection. I lived with a chronic level of stress, feeling as if I never fitted in. City living also rattled my nerves and stress hormones will put weight on you as fast as you can say ‘Mars bar’.

  Since moving off the land to our rental, I’d been comfort eating like crazy and no matter how often I tried, the mental patterns on loop about my ‘eviction’ from my family farm kept playing in my head, and my ‘victim’ status seemed to remain stamped on my forehead. I thought it was time to do something about my self-defeating mind chatter and eating. I went in search of holistic doctors who could help me. Based on past experiences, if I hadn’t found one, I’m sure I would’ve tried the vet!

  First I located a doctor who kept me even-keeled with acupuncture, then I found a GP who was an holistic doctor, as colourful as she was cool. Both doctors had the conventional medical system down pat, but were as open and as enquiring about life as I am. At one point, when I visited my new technicoloured GP, I found myself lying on her floor with my feet up on her wall with her reclining in the same position next to me saying, ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’

  I looked to her as I lay on my back on her doctor’s surgery carpet, and thought to myself, I’m lying on the floor with my doctor with my legs up the wall! She’s not in an office chair writing me a prescription – she’s on the floor with me! She’s a real human! She knows what it is to have a body and how to exercise and move it to heal it. Hallelujah!

  With both doctors to help me there was no need for pills to ‘fix’ my mental loop about my farmless grief. Many other doctors on their fifteen-minute-session treadmills would have simply written me a script for antidepressants. As a writer who needs to ‘feel life’ to write about it for others, I would’ve binned the script anyway. Instead I opted for six hypnotherapy sessions with her. I have no idea what happened or how it worked, but it’s like the doctor took pruning shears to my neural networks and ‘snipped’ the tangle of brambles in my brain that kept taking me back over and over the grief of the past. After my third session I remember this weird sense of calm as I walked out of the surgery – weird because I hadn’t felt calm in a long time. After collecting the kids from school, my son asked, ‘How was the doctor today, Mummy?’

  ‘Great!’ I answered. ‘She hypnotised me and has turned me into a tomato plant.’

  Both my children laughed, a little too nervously, and I could see them checking me for leaves and red round fruit, and then assessing Mummy’s mental stability.

  Then I explained, ‘A tomato plant is still. It’s like a seed. It does nothing but trust that it will grow. It takes what it needs in water and nutrition from the soil and it turns itself to the sun for energy. Without even thinking, it grows steadily and slowly on its own time, and bears fruit. No stress. It just is. I’m like that now. Still, like a tomato plant. I like being a tomato plant!’

  The kids laughed but there was something in them that seemed hopeful that the doctor was at last giving me the support I needed as a single busy-as-all-get-out farmless mum. Now it’s a running joke with the children, and each time I am doing my ‘get to school speed wobble’, the kids chant to me, ‘You are a tomato plant. Remember, Mummy! You are a tomato plant!’

  Weirdly, a few weeks after that hypnotherapy session with ‘Dr Tomato Plant’, I planted a rhubarb crown in a nice pot, in good soil and mulch. I watered it. Mysteriously, the crown died and instead in its place up came . . . drum roll . . . a tomato plant. This summer we’ve been dining on its perfect little red balloons of fruit every day, and each time I see the leaves stressed from lack of moisture, I water it and remind myself to do the same. One must water (care for) one’s self . . . something we women forget.

  Dr Tomato Plant also had me buy a diet book she described as ‘very good’. I’m a short, stocky, strong girl who has learned to accept the Tasmanian genetics I was handed, so I reluctantly bought the book, but I’m so glad I did. It has given me the piece of the puzzle I had been missing around the issue of food and weight gain for years, which stretches back as far as the windy road all those years ago to my childhood.

  The Slow Down Diet by Marc David has turned my ideas around on food and my relationship with it. When I sit down, or in my case, don’t sit down to eat, I’ve been slowing down my metabolism. Constantly in ‘flight’ mode, my system metabolises what I eat as fat. Marc David reveals the intimate connection between stress, digestion, metabolism, weight and health. I saw how I was eating fast, always on the run, and I realised that as a child, I always sensed tension at our table. Not good for a healthy metabolism, despite the farm-fresh food on offer all my life.

  In comparison, at my aunt’s at meal times, there was laughter and there was time. For each other. For the meal. For digestion. And even though Auntie Susie was crazily busy, she always sat and ate with us. I watched her milk house cows at sun-up and feed poddy lambs on her way to giving hot barley mash to the chooks, then Susie would head off across the paddock and over the Harefield Road to join Colin in the dairy for the twice-daily milking.

  She would still put her energy into feeding my cousins and me with vegetables from her garden, butter churned by her own hand, bread kneaded with her strong knuckles and baked in a wood stove that was fuelled with timber she had axed herself. There were oat biscuits made from the basics of sugar and flour, with honey mixed through them collected from their own hives. I used to love pulling the handles of the big vermin-proof tubs in the kitchen to see the vast quantities of sugar and flour within. It wasn’t until all of us kids were in bed, that she would join her husband fireside and begin to spin wool by hand to sell, giving the piglet or lamb that was nestled near the wood stove in the kitchen a feed before she went to bed.

  They were humble beginnings in farming in the seventies in Tasmania, but the hard work of my auntie and uncle has led to setting up their children in farming,
and they get to experience the rich challenges of an agricultural life and the freedom and constraints farming provides. I’m sure it wasn’t as idyllic for my aunt as I’ve recalled it. She would’ve worked herself to exhaustion, and then had to manage the kids. I remember all of us getting into trouble for flicking dollops of mashed spud on the ceiling, but she must’ve liked our cheekiness on some level, as the brown stains remained there for years as a reminder to all of us of the good times and fun we had around that kitchen table. Mealtimes at their house were a joy, our digestion serenaded afterwards by music Uncle Colin played on his squeezebox, piano, organ or harmonica. Happy tunes of living. Instead of the nightly dread of television news.

  In the mornings, I recall too the way my cousins would load up their breakfast bowls with porridge, much the same shape as St Patrick’s Head mountain, and coat their oat mountains in thick layers of brown sugar like rocky screes on the slopes, with lashings of milk from the house cow that had dollops of cream still within, landing like blobs of snow. They were and still are thin as whips, those boys.

  By the time I reach my fiftieth birthday in a few years, I wish to be somewhere equally as wonderful as my auntie’s table, or an extraordinary place like Kenya. And on that day, I shall have good health thanks to good food, good thoughts, good friends and plenty of laughter. I shall eat with the turn of the earth, and allow myself to stop and breathe. Big meals as the sun rises, small as it fades. Shared meals with simple recipes and good company, because that’s what makes our lives rich and healthy beyond measure.

  You can search the finest menus of the fanciest upper-class restaurants of all the land and you’ll never find it on offer . . . a truffle, chicken and cheese sandwich. That’s exactly what my mates and I would chow down on, sitting on the dropped tailgate of a ute, fingers grimed with dirt and a feather-eared dog nearby looking up at us hopefully.

  For a good few years in the early- to mid-2000s I was one of only a handful of truffle-dog handlers in the country and had honed my skills as a perfumist and harvester of that delicacy: the elusive black truffle. Originally from France, these little black underground blobs that look a bit like pin-pricked polished dollops of horse poo bring in big bucks at the fancy-pants white-tableclothed restaurants. I was lucky enough to be hired as a harvester by Perigord Truffles of Tasmania, a fledgling company with a big vision to supply black truffles in the off-season when the Europeans were in their summer.

  When I first began my job, most of us Tasmanians hadn’t heard of truffles, confusing them with chocolates. Locally, we could pluck crayfish out of the seas and barter our own wild venison or wallaby meat without having to fly interstate to a five-star restaurant. Our tastes were pretty much limited to our island and the seas that surrounded us. We didn’t know about the significance of the truffle in other places. But the world was changing and Tasmania was opening up to new markets. As a young journalist on the Tasmanian Country newspaper, I’d driven north-west of Hobart into the Derwent Valley to interview Nuffield Scholarship winner, Peter Cooper, a co-founder of Perigord Truffles of Tasmania. Driving past old hop kilns towards the equally old sandstone homestead, I had no idea where this interview would lead me, but eventually it led me to the end of a dog lead.

  It was in his country kitchen that Peter waved a truffle under my nostrils to sniff for the very first time. I couldn’t help wrinkling my nose, and frowning in confusion. Delicacy? To me the ugly thing smelt like a confusing combination of stinky socks, chocolate, melted butter and old-man sweat. But like good coffee, caviar and fine wine, it’s an acquired taste, and now I can’t speak or write about a truffle without salivating.

  ‘Some day, once we’ve grown the business, we’ll be looking for dog handlers to harvest them,’ Peter had said during our interview. As I scribbled notes my mind buzzed. I was not a desk or office girl, and I knew journalism and my place in the Hobart newspaper offices was only temporary. My goal was to write a novel and bide my time until I could convince my dad to let me come home to build the business on his farm. A job as a dog handler harvesting truffles seemed like my dream job in the meantime, so as I listened to Peter talk, I tucked the idea away in my mind as a far-off fantasy.

  Fast forward a few years and I happened to see a tiny ad printed in the classifieds of the Tasmanian Country. Perigord Truffles of Tasmania wanted dog handlers! Living in a $10-a-week farm cottage on my cousin’s farm I was writing my first novel Jillaroo and gathering work in from anywhere so I could pay for my addiction to writing. The job would suit my living-day-by-day lifestyle perfectly. I sent my application off straight away.

  It wasn’t long before I was driving past those old Derwent Valley hop kilns again with a sense of excitement. I would not only meet ‘my dog’, that I would be in charge of housing and handling, but I was also to meet ‘Dog Man’ Steve Austin, whom Peter Cooper had commissioned to train a team of truffle sniffer dogs. Steve is a high-energy, passionate trainer and when in action he reminds me of a kind of Steve Irwin of the dog world. I can still hear his convincing exclamation of ‘Yes!’ each time the dog got it right and hit on a scent target. I’ve used his communication techniques on my own dogs in training.

  Just like Steve Irwin, Steve Austin is a bit of a legend. He’s trained dogs to seek out rabbits, rats and feral cats on the near-impossible-to-get-to Macquarie Island, 1500 kilometres south of Tasmania, whilst the dogs range past and ignore the carpet of birdlife who nest there. From the outback to the rainforest, he’s taught dogs to find cane toads, feral cats and foxes in the most difficult terrain so as to protect our threatened native animals. He’s even got squads of dogs protecting us from the rise of illegal narcotics flooding our society. Equally importantly he teaches dogs to seek out mines in war zones and find missing people in the aftermath of natural disasters. Often his dog students are misunderstood canines on deathrow, unwanted and untrained, imprisoned miserably behind mesh and about to be euthanised. Even back then, in my early truffle days, before Steve’s career fully bloomed internationally, it was an honour to meet him and spend a day as one of his pupils. He was an unforgettable personality. As I sat with a springer spaniel I’d only just met, I found myself behaving just like the dog . . . wanting beyond measure to learn and to please Steve and to extract an enthusiastic ‘Yes!’ from him.

  Converting my working-dog knowledge to sniffer dogs was not easy. The learning curve was steep, but when the student is ready, the master will appear, and I had waited years for this job to surface. You couldn’t have had a more willing student than me, nor a better master than Steve to teach me about dogs. From the truffle point of view too, Peter Cooper was a master at helping me define the perfume of a truffle and decide if it was ready or not to ‘take’. I came to love the smell of truffles as much as my dog loved them, and felt myself wagging my tail as much as him when we locked onto a zigzagging scent trail and found our target. It was exciting beyond belief. I was in my element.

  Just a waft of a truffle nowadays sets my senses alive. Not just because it’s a specialty food, but because of the memories it evokes of my learned art, the hours of searching in beautiful Tasmanian countryside in sometimes harsh conditions, and the euphoria a woman experiences when it’s just her and her dog in the landscape, and in particular, finding one of the precious black truffles as if it were the Holy Grail.

  Today in Australia, truffles aren’t so unknown and can be found widely in food stores. Sometimes they are infused in golden oil contained in tiny bottles, bottles so small they look like they belong in doll’s houses, but still with big price tags. Or you’ll find their little flea-like shavings peppered through gourmet salt.

  From Sydney to New York’s finest restaurants truffles are placed at the highest-priced end of the menu, shaved over pasta or creamy potato or melted through a cheesy risotto. Or in fancier guise, on one menu I read, ‘Black pudding with morel and truffle puree and wagyu tenderloin poached in truffle jus’. I mean, really? Is that entirely necessary? Impressive though the dishes
are, I liked the way we enjoyed truffles. Simply. In outdoor surrounds.

  Each week in winter I would travel north for two days of harvesting and stay with my fellow harvesting workers in their homes. If we harvested truffles one day, we would sneak an unsaleable one that may be damaged by insects into the fridge with some free-range eggs overnight. The flavour of the truffle would infuse through the shells of the eggs as if by magic and by the next morning, before we’d loaded up our dogs, we’d be sharing truffle omelettes for breakfast. On our seasonal ‘cut out’ – meaning our last day of harvesting for the winter – our boss Peter would provide us with a giant wheel of King Island brie sliced in half with slivers of truffle set within. We would crunch down on biscuits with the melt-in-mouth truffle-infused cheese, fingers stained black or red, depending on the soil type in which we’d been digging.

  These tailgate-truffle feasts out in a paddock, amidst long winter grasses, with sheep over the fence looking on, always sat in such contrast to the transformed truffle that was served on a large white restaurant plate in Sydney, Japan or the Netherlands. I’d imagine the scene sometimes as I handed over my bounty for Peter to clean and package up on ice for the airport. I could see my diner cloaked in subdued atmospheric music and romantic lighting. Starched table napkins would be sitting stiffly on the diner’s lap, after the waiter had flamboyantly and flourishingly placed it there, the starch causing the napkin to remain angular like the flying nun’s habit. The waiter proudly reciting the menu as if it were some glorious poem and not just the convoluted dishes that a genius chef had devised. A second wine waiter bringing out a carefully selected wine that complemented the truffle, and pouring it into wine glasses alive with the reflections of candlelight and so clean the glass would sing simply from a fingertip touch. The wine waiter would then bow slightly as if he’d achieved some kind of artistic accomplishment. In other words I’d envisage a scene a whole world away from mine, with my grubby jeans, tangled hair jammed under a cap, nose smudged with dirt and gumboots caked in mud. My fingernails alone would have had me thrown out of such a place.