100 Million Years of Food (29 page)

It might be the case that Shanaka's idealistic pay-as-you-can vegetarian restaurants (plant foods can be easily donated as surplus, but meat is trickier) will eventually fail from too much freeloading; in any case, his venture forces us to consider a critical issue: Should eating be a private, self-centered affair, or can food be recast in its original role, as a means of binding and protecting citizens?

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There are two ways in which an eater can act in a benevolent manner. The first is to assist fellow citizens, which is evident in Shanaka's pay-as-you-can restaurants, where better-off diners subsidize healthy food for the less fortunate. The other path to benevolence is to eat in a manner that safeguards the prospects of future generations. When we buy cheap meat, fish, and produce from a supermarket today, we are essentially being subsidized by future generations, who will have to pay more for the same meat, fish, and produce (if it can even be found), because there will be less fossil fuel and fish available, and because the planet will become progressively degraded by agricultural and waste-disposal practices that are oriented toward short-term profit and convenience. Food idealists are attempting to minimize the costs we inflict on future generations by eating and raising food in more ecologically sustainable ways. For example, instead of rearing imported animals and plants that harm local environments, consumers can opt instead for animals and plants that are well integrated into local ecosystems, as indigenous peoples necessarily did before the advent of global trade.

Consider this irony, then: In Melbourne, you can indulge in a panoply of cuisines—Italian, Japanese, East African, Lebanese, Moroccan, Vietnamese, Indian, and more, reflecting the diversity of the immigrants in the city—with one conspicuous omission: There is hardly any native Australian cuisine to be found. A government-funded restaurant called Charcoal Lane is a striking exception. Occupying a two-hundred-year-old building that once housed an Aboriginal health center, Charcoal Lane offers native Australian food and trains Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal apprentices in the kitchen and dining area. The manager of the restaurant, a Sri Lankan Aussie named Ashan Abeykoon, and the head cook, a white Australian named Greg Hampton, are doing their best to expose Australians to the plants and animals that thrive in the wilds of their country. My meal there—camel sausage, mutton bird (a seabird), salad of bunyon nut, wattle seed, and kumquat berry—was terrific, teasing the tongue with new flavors and sensations; I especially liked the fishy taste of the mutton bird, and the camel was succulent. Other offerings on the menu include wallaby, emu, and saltbush lamb.

Greg, who has been cooking for twenty-six years and at one point ran his own zoo, points out the environmental benefits of raising indigenous or desert-acclimated animals. When European settlers first arrived in Australia, they brought sheep, cattle, and pigs and cut down trees to grow wheat. Over time, the heavy use of water to grow wheat exacerbated the soil's salinity; as the water percolated down, it served as a conduit for minerals and leached them from the soil. The sharp hooves of the imported animals compacted the earth, destroying landscapes and increasing water pollution and sediment loss from runoff. The decimation of vegetation on riverbanks increased river flow and worsened the problem of soil erosion.

Greg points out that by contrast, native Australian plants have long roots, which allow them to tap water from deep within the soil without increasing salinity. Kangaroos, wallabies, and emus have relatively soft feet, which do not compact the soil, and they feed on native plants with long roots. The plants along riverbanks are preserved, and the currents of rivers are slower. Salt-adapted trees have small, intensely flavored fruits that contain high levels of antioxidants, including vitamin C. Kangaroo flesh has high levels of zinc (which plays an important role in the immune system). Saltbush lambs are not native, but because they are adapted to arid environments, they consume natural vegetation that is rich in salt and other minerals.

So with all the positive environmental and health benefits and superior tastes of native plants and animals, why aren't people flocking to places like Charcoal Lane? Ashan, Charcoal Lane's manager, explains that when the restaurant tried to offer “kangaroo tail” on its menu, people stayed away from it. The tail was unfamiliar to diners, and its location far down on the animal made the meat less appealing. If it was called simply “kangaroo,” there was more interest. Still, kangaroo is unlikely to become a local staple. The kangaroo appears in the Australian coat of arms and holds a place of honor for many Australians. Other people simply are put off by the notion of native Australian cuisine, which conjures images of Aboriginal staples like grubs, peculiar foods that require effort to consume, rather than something to eat on a regular night out, like Italian.

Mark Olive is an Aboriginal cook who runs an Aboriginal food catering business located in a nondescript warehouse just a few blocks away from downtown Melbourne. He is widely known and has been featured in TV shows. When I visit Mark's catering business, I find him to be soft-spoken and charming, resembling a gentle bear. He once started an Aboriginal restaurant in Sydney, the Midden, but he says that the restaurant opened before the public was prepared to accept Aboriginal foods.

His current business offers an impressive range of native herbs and fruits: bush cucumber, desert lime, spicy desert raisins (kutjera), lemon myrtle leaf, marsdenia (bush banana), mountain pepperleaf and native pepperberry, muntrie berries, native basil and thyme, passionberry, quandong, rivermint, saltbush, sea parsley (also called sea celery), tanami apples, and the wattleseed that found its way into my meal. Ironically, the biggest consumers of Mark's herbs and spices are overseas buyers. Mark is dismayed by Australians' reluctance to recognize the bounty of native plants and animals and their inability to see popular “cute” animals as food.

“We have to get our own people in our own country to start utilizing more and more of these herbs and spices. We've got kangaroo, emu, and crocodile in this country that people tend to walk away from. I think that's because it is our coat of arms. For Aboriginal people, it was never their coat of arms. Just like sheep, pigs, everything else, it's a food source. Yes, they're cute, but I think lambs are cute, yet we eat them.” Throughout much of recent Australian history, Aboriginals did not exist, in political life or civic society, and so their cuisine was also ignored. “If you weren't counted, you weren't part of the country,” Mark says. “It wasn't until 1967 that we got birth certificates to say we're actually here. There have been big changes. Australia still has a long way to go, I think, in owning its Aboriginal history, being proud of it, for our immigrants to understand the history of this country. These sorts of things have to change.”

Jon Belling, an Aboriginal man who works with Mission Australia, the group that runs Charcoal Lane, expresses similar frustrations. When I meet him at his office in downtown Melbourne, he looks placid and is exceedingly courteous, but as he begins to speak, something inside him uncorks.

“One of the nicest things we had here was wallaby burger that we did here for NAIDOC Day”—a reference to the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee celebration of indigenous heritage in Australia. “We put it on the menu. I had some Aboriginal apprentices from one of our programs come and cook it. We had some chicken as well because
‘WALLABY???'
Some people loved it; some people didn't even want to try it. They are cute, furry, cuddly little things that we throw food to, or look at.” Like Mark, Jon laments Australians' inability to appreciate their native resources. “We have a treasure trove of food here in this country. We have companies coming here from overseas, coming from the States, looking at what we have here and taking it back. Australia has always been hesitant to look inward. Don't acknowledge the people—why would you acknowledge the product? Chefs from Spain and Germany are just crying for this stuff because they can see what it is.”

Jon launches into a passionate speech on the virtues of Australian finger lime. As we leave his office, he tells me that he has just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes—the result, he believes, of eating a Western diet. His doctor told him that Aboriginals are especially prone to an aggressive form of the disease. Aboriginal peoples were not exposed to Western diets and lifestyles until recently, and it is possible that their genes are less acclimated to aspects of Western diets such as high-glycemic foods (white flour, for example), which lead to greater increases in blood sugar, or lifestyles such as sedentary living. Australian populations with a greater mixture of European genes have lower rates of diabetes, which is consistent with the hypothesis of Aboriginals having greater genetic susceptibility.
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Australia is struggling with acceptance of native foods that could be more sustainably harvested and perhaps offer better nutritional value than imported animals and plants. What is the situation like in Canada or the United States? Do Canadians and Americans similarly disdain their native animals and plants? When I return to my home province of Ontario after almost two years abroad, I am eager to try native Canadian foods. The area where I grew up used to be the territory of First Nations peoples like the Algonquin, Iroquois, and Cree. In the north, the Cree hunted bear, deer, beaver, and waterfowl; to the east, the Algonquin and Iroquois supplemented game with corn, squash, beans, and wild rice. To the west, the Plains Indians followed herds of bison, and in the far west, salmon runs sustained the Pacific Coast Indians. In the far north, the Inuit hunted caribou, seal, whale, and fish; along the East Coast, the Micmac harvested shellfish, fish, and beaver. When I tell shopkeepers and butchers around Ottawa that I am looking for bear, beaver, and other game, however, they are baffled. One butcher in a trendy yuppie neighborhood just outside downtown Ottawa advises me to try a Chinese butcher shop in Chinatown, but the Chinese butchers are also unable to help.

The paucity of game around North America is due to a historical legacy of white settlers hunting many species almost to extinction. As a young man, Theodore Roosevelt went on a hunting trip to North Dakota, but the buffalo were nowhere to be found. An avid hunting enthusiast, Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887 to help conserve wildlife and promoted the use of science in wildlife management, which became known as the Roosevelt Doctrine.
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The U.S. government eventually enacted laws that forbade the distribution of game for commercial purposes; the disappearances of the American bison, passenger pigeon, heath hen, and Carolina parakeet were alarming examples of what could happen to remaining species.
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Canada followed suit, though Newfoundland and Nova Scotia permit the sale of game in restaurants, and Quebec is experimenting with looser restrictions. On its face, banning the trade in wildlife seems like sensible policy; without such an aggressive policy, the wilds of North America today would resemble Europe, virtually devoid of large game.

I drive to the outskirts of Ottawa on a cool spring morning to meet with a hunter, Kyle Worsley, who kindly donates some game meats for me to try, left over in his freezer from last year's fall hunt: bear, deer, moose. Head shaved bald, and gentle-spoken, Kyle comes from a family with a long tradition of hunting. He prefers hunting by bow and arrow. “Part of why I like the archery hunting versus gun hunting is you tend to see more wildlife. If you sneak as quietly as you can into the woods, you see a lot of different things walk by. Things that aren't necessarily in season that you are targeting. They just happen to wander by. I saw a wolverine once. I've seen wolves, coyotes, bears, just about every different creature that wanders through the Canadian wood.”

Kyle, who runs a utility trailer business, heads out to the woods every fall to hunt deer for weeks at a time. Some hunters, Kyle notes, buy hunting tags but allow the prey to pass by, simply to enjoy the experience of hunting, rather than the killing.

So why not just leave the bow and arrow or gun at home and sit in the woods, I ask him.

“It's not the same,” he replies. “There's an adrenaline rush when you see the animal walk up and you have the opportunity to shoot it. Even if you don't shoot it, the adrenaline rush is still there. If all you're doing is sitting in the woods, you're not as attuned, you're not listening for footsteps, you're not there with a purpose. When you're hunting, you're there with a purpose. You're looking for movement, you're listening for noises, you're trying to spot the game you're after.”

Kyle understands his prey deeply; he discusses sex-ratio imbalances among deer due to misallocation of deer hunting permits with the keen observation of a naturalist. I wonder to myself: If someone had to be trusted with taking care of the woods and their wildlife, should it be a bureaucrat, a politician pandering to populist rhetoric about animal rights and gun control (Kyle seethes when he describes Liberal Party policies on gun control), or a hunter like Kyle, who surveys his domain in the woods week after week while fending off bugs? The wildlife in the woods would likely be in better shape if hunters had more voice in wildlife management.

Kyle supports the ban on wildlife trade, though. Roosevelt, instrumental in setting into motion the preservation of America's wildlife and wilderness, was himself a big-game enthusiast. No one could be more motivated to preserve the wildlife and wilderness than a person who derives great joy from them. Because of this wildlife-trade ban, however, enjoying the taste of native game is not easy. If you want to eat bear or beaver, as the Algonquin Indians did for thousands of years in the woods around eastern Ontario, you either have to buy a permit and shoot or trap the animal yourself, find a kind person who is willing to part with such meat (even bartering for wildlife is illegal—the regulations are uncompromising), or resign yourself to fantasizing about eating game meat while you're pushing a shopping cart down an aisle lined with factory-raised chicken, beef, and pork.