46 GOURMETTRAVELLER.COM.AU
Trend is a dirty wordwhen you’re a
farmer. We have to play the long game.
It’s a tricky thing. The kale that was a fad a couple
of years back – not withstanding people having eaten
kale for millennia – took me a few seasons to master.
Planted too early, it succumbed to marauding grubs;
too late and the first frost checked its growth before it
had even begun. When I’d finally grown enough to
satisfy demand, the smoothie fanatics had raced off
in their activewear to find some turmeric and açai
berries, and I was left with just the few customers who
understood the timeless joy that braised kale brings.
Micro-greens, historically sprouted in pantries or
on windowsills by people with a hankering for greens
in the cold months, become a bizarre use of resources
when shipped for miles. I once weighed the snippings
from a pot of micro-shiso – actually purple mustard
greens, misleadingly labelled as shiso – and the seed
used could have grown 50 shiso. Oh, hang on, mustard
plants. My five bucks bought me five whole grams of
tiny, tasteless food, along with a plastic pot, bag and
label destined for the bin.
Perhaps the oldest fad in human history is foraging
- I don’t think Cro-Magnon man could nip down to
the shops for a KitKat. Foraging is laden with pitfalls:
contending with contaminated soil in industrial sites,
dog wee on anything lower than a great Dane’s crotch,
weed killer used often by council maintenance crews,
and plant identification risks. Once a proud young
cook Instagrammed the “wild parsnip” he’d harvested
from a creek. It was hemlock. We let him know right
away, but let’s not have a dead philosopher get in the
way of a fashionable plate.
As someone obsessed by bush foods, I find them
to be the most morally challenging. Never mind the
rarely discussed myriad sustainability issues that come
with gathering wild plants; I think the biggest concern
is cultural appropriation – that in seeking to find an
Australian cuisine we miss the opportunity for lessons
from and connections with the custodians of this
knowledge. It’s a complex question; I’m lucky enough
to have a friend who is an Indigenous Tasmanian to
guide me through the pitfalls, but gathering Australian
edible plants and preparing and presenting them for
novelty alone does a disservice to thing that offer
so much more than “new” flavours. It’s rare to see
them used in a way that shows respect for the keepers
of the culture.
We farmers are not immune, though, to the lure
of the new, to jumping on bandwagons. I’ve sat agog
at lectures on microbes and new science that shows
us how to nurture those tiny lives in the soil. I’ll pore
over seed catalogues looking for new delicious or
disease-resistant plants, and find the lure of the new
impossible to resist – providing, of course, that it’s
delicious. The burgeoning kimchi culture has seen me
planting rows of Chinese cabbages, and Mexican food
has given me licence to experiment with tomatillos,
epazote and Mexican coriander. All these things feel
like they’re having their time in the sun in Australia,
but they’re so delicious that I suspect they’ll move from
trend to classic, as did so many foods we now consider
to be everyday fare.
By all means, please hang on to the trends that
do good. Buy fair-trade chocolate – as a farmer, I’m
right into living wages for other producers. Choose
free-range animal products – as an animal myself
I can vouch for the joys of movement and sunshine.
And bring your own basket to market, then you won’t
have sea turtles mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish, and
you’ll look so great riding your bike home with your
“I liked this kale before it was cool” bunch of greens
whipping in the wind, declaring your antipathy to
passing fads for all the world to see.# ILLUSTRATION ADRIANA PICKER“
When I’d finally
grown enough
kale to satisfy
demand, the
smoothie fanatics
had raced off in
their activewear to
find some turmeric
and açai berries.
”Feast or fandom?
When it comes to ever-changing food fads, writesPaulette Whitney,
the trick for farmers is to winnow the wheat from the chaff.
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