What's for Dinner?

Jill Griffiths

Description

What are we really eating? How do we eat in a way that nourishes us and does least harm to the environment? What exactly do farmers do? Should the world go vegan? Do food miles matter?
Never before has so much food been produced by so few people to feed so many. Never before have Australian consumers been so disconnected from their food production, yet so interested in how it is done.
What's for Dinner? delves into the way our food is grown and our responsibilities as eaters. Weaving together science, history and lived experience, What's for Dinner? takes readers on a journey to meet the plants, animals and people who put the food on our plates. It's a book for anyone who eats.

Sujets

• Green Lifestyle
• GM
• General Motors

Informations

• Publié par: Thames & Hudson Australia Pty Ltd
• Date de parution: 30 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781760763190
• Langue: English

Extrait

In this deeply personal and heartfelt book, Jill Griffiths has separated the romantic from the reality, the emotional from the political and (literally) the wheat from the chaff in her exploration of how what we eat ripples deep into our farmlands. Far from being didactic, this joyous delve into food and farming allows readers to explore what it means for our environment when we eat, and how very little is as straightforward as the headlines would have you believe.
-Matthew Evans
For Rob, Toby and Lauren, for countless meals shared

Contents
Seventy-five - Twelve - Five
SOME PLANTS - SIX OF THE TWELVE
1 Tomatoes
2 Wheat
3 Potatoes
4 Sugar
5 Apples
6 Soy
A FEW ANIMALS - FOUR OF THE FIVE
7 Cattle
8 Chickens
9 Pigs
10 Sheep
ABUNDANCE - FOUR OF THE REST
11 Canola
12 Bees
13 Salmon
14 Macadamia
Enough on your plate
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Index
Eating is an agricultural act . Wendell Berry
Seventy-five - Twelve - Five
W HAT WOULD YOU like for dinner? I hear myself asking my kids as I stack breakfast dishes and wipe the kitchen bench. My mother used to ask the same question and it always frustrated me that she expected me to think of dinner first thing in the morning. Now I understand she was planning the day ahead, and that meant she was also thinking about food because meals don t turn up on tables without forethought and work.
As a child I never thought much about what I was eating. I got on with the business of being a child and, for the most part (forgetting the usual whinging and fussiness), ate what was dished up. Mum did the cooking and my family, like many people of Anglo-Saxon descent in 1970s Australia, mostly ate meat and three veg - mutton chops, mashed potato, peas and carrots; or perhaps beans or cabbage or cauliflower. Occasionally it was steak instead of mutton, sometimes pork, especially during the years when Dad indulged his long-held desire to be a farmer and kept pigs at a farm just outside the country town where we lived. Sometimes the meat was roasted and the potatoes brown and juicy from cooking in the pan with the meat, all served with lashings of gravy. Once a week there were sausages. From time to time we had chicken, but not often. In summer it would be cold meat and salad - lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrot. It was functional food. Economical. Simple. Made from what was available. Nothing fancy.
As an adult, I began to question what I was eating almost as soon as it was my responsibility to fill the fridge and pantry. Initially, my questions focused on cost and how to survive within my modest means as a university student. The lessons of that time were to favour basic ingredients, seasonality and making things from scratch.
I was a biology undergraduate and my studies made me begin to wonder about the way our food nourished us (and where and why it failed to do so). I quickly came to value nutrition and fresh food. I wondered where our food systems fitted in with the broader environment; how farms fit into the Australian landscape. I had grown up in the Western Australian wheatbelt hearing farmers talk about the spread of salt across their paddocks. Yet it was only when I got to university that I began to understand the links between land clearing and salinity, and to question the way we farm this continent s ancient soils.
I became concerned about the role of animals in agriculture. I took to ranting about livestock farming, which was somewhat ironic given my happy escape from the city was my uncle s farm (he ran beef cattle at the time and I never considered his cattle mistreated in any way). I tried vegetarianism as a possible answer to my environmental and animal welfare concerns and mostly stuck to it for the better part of a decade.
I have gone through stages of ordering weekly boxes of seasonal, organic vegetables delivered to my door. Then cancelled my subscription when I began to wonder whether it really was worth the extra money to buy organic, or when faced with an over-abundance of things that were already prevalent in my garden. At times I have tried to buy all local produce, caught up in the idea that food miles matter above all else, only to give up when I realised the local bananas in Perth travel almost 1000 kilometres south from Carnarvon. Besides, I was never going to give up drinking tea and the leaves cross oceans to get to my teapot.
Some years ago, a Saturday morning farmers market started up within walking distance of my suburban Perth home. There is a lot about it that I like. The produce is fresh and seasonal, mostly sold by the people who grow it. I like knowing where my food comes from; I am forever seeking that elusive connection to place and food is a tangible aspect of that. But I have to admit that I baulk at some of the farmers market prices. Like most people, I m conscious of price when I shop for food, even if I feel guilty about it because I know how hard it can be for growers to make a profit. Working in science communication with agricultural researchers gave me an insight into just how much farmers are squeezed by profit margins and gripped by the vagaries of nature. My job afforded me the privilege of meeting and talking to many farmers finding innovative ways to remain sustainable and profitable. It s work that is invisible from the supermarket aisles, tempting though it is to think that s where food comes from. It s not, of course, but supermarkets do feature in my family s food shopping.
I also grow a few veggies in my yard and have some chooks. Keeping chooks and growing food are near constants in my life - when I was growing up we always had chooks and a productive garden, and for most of my adult life I have kept chooks and grown veggies where possible (and in a few places where it looked almost impossible). It simply makes sense to me to do so.
While it s easy enough to grow a bit of lettuce and a few herbs, they alone won t sustain a family. People need protein and calories. In Out of the Scientist s Garden , agricultural researcher Richard Stirzaker analyses the reality of backyard self-sufficiency, looking in detail at the calories needed to sustain a family and the difficulties of producing them in a backyard. Potatoes offer potential for supplying the required calories, Stirzaker suggests, but his analysis of just how many potatoes need to be grown is daunting. The feasibility of growing a cereal crop in a backyard simply isn t there, let alone harvesting and processing it. We rely on farmers, and farms, for our daily sustenance.
I ve always had a soft spot for farmers. My maternal grandparents were dairy and beef farmers and I spent my childhood among wheat and sheep farmers. To this day, I believe my love of winter rain was kindled as a child when watching the sheer joy of the local farmers when good rain fell. Their success or otherwise is held so much in the grip of the weather but urbanites are largely immune from knowing or feeling it. Drought in the wheatbelt sends farmers bankrupt but doesn t affect the price of a loaf of bread in the city. How can that be? Occasionally a cyclone in Queensland will briefly push up the price of bananas in the southern cities, but mostly city dwellers are protected from the difficulties of food production. There is a disconnect between the economics of agriculture and the economics of food consumption. Even as public discussions about food and environment become more common, I keep thinking something is lacking, some underlying bedrock of truth and connection. It seems we as a society are less aware that the food we eat comes from the earth, regardless of what we eat. As American farmer and poet Wendell Berry put it, Eating is an agricultural act. But we deny that reality every time we demand unseasonal produce or reach for conveniently pre-prepared food with a long list of industrial ingredients.
In a bid to better understand, I started deeply questioning the food I choose to put on the table and how I make those decisions. I questioned the food system that makes that food available. I questioned the diet and health books that push us towards this or that fad. I questioned the call to eat less meat and the rise of veganism and what it means for farming and the environment, even as I continued to wrangle with my own meat eating. I questioned what it means to have food traded internationally as a commodity, and what food miles really mean. I questioned the use of synthetic chemicals in growing food and whether we would be better off without them. I wondered what impact the push for paddock-to-plate traceability has on farmers.
In the midst of seeking answers, I stumbled across a startling fact: 75 per cent of the world s food comes from just twelve plant species and five animal species. I learned the list by heart: the plants - wheat, sugar, maize, rice, potatoes, soybeans, cassava, tomatoes, bananas, onions, apples, grapes; and the animals - cattle, chickens, pigs, goats and sheep. The lack of diversity in this list alarms the biologist in me, while the consumer in me, faced with the plethora of foodstuffs cramming the supermarket shelves, cannot quite comprehend it. Is it really true? Does that abundance come from such a narrow range? What are these things and where do they come from? What about the other 25 per cent of our food? What about the people who produce our food? Who is really feeding us? The answers raise yet more questions. So I go looking for deeper, more satisfying answers to the question of what s for dinner.
Some plants - Six of the twelve
CHAPTER 1
Tomatoes
S CRAWLED ON MY shopping list, somewhere between cheese and soap, are the words tinned tomatoes . Sounds simple enough, but as I stand before the shelves the choices are mind boggling. Crushed, whole or chopped? With added herbs or without? Organic or not? Australian or imported? I ignore the cheaper price of some of the imported cans in favour of buying Australi