My Year Without Meat Read online

  Seeing the beef hanging in the barn earlier that day had transported me back twenty years to a day spent in the Louvre. The shock of recognition in Paris’s temple to visual arts had left me punch-drunk. Not just the Mona Lisa but Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. But then, in a dimly lit room, was a large canvas by Rembrandt. Not a portrait or a biblical scene but something secular bordering on profane. It was a painting of a flayed ox. It was an image I had seen many times in our barn on the farm—a quarter of a tonne of meat swinging in the breeze, the internal fat smooth like stone in a limestone cave, the deep red muscles veiled by layers of fat, veins meandering on the surface like red rivers seen from far above. But this was truly and deeply beautiful and painted more than three centuries before.

  Once in the coolroom I laid the piece of meat down carefully, all deep yellow fat and greying cut spine, on a cold white shelf. I closed the door, the spring latch sealing it with a confident metallic click behind me.

  The day got warmer and the chefs worked hard preparing their dishes. Normally, as emcee, I would act as the audience’s proxy and try the food and describe it to them, giving an idea of what the dishes tasted like. But instead I passed the finished dishes to guests and asked them what they could taste, placing the microphone in front of their mouths. A few of them could give precise and clear descriptions of the food. Others fumbled to give language to their experience—for many, food is a oneway relationship that needs no account. I worked the crowd, drawing from them words they might have not thought about using previously. At this point I realised that most people have never been taught how to taste. The general public knows hot, cold, spicy and sweet but after that we are open to anyone’s suggestions, making us easy prey for fast food companies who appeal to our base taste instincts. Which makes Australia a nation of gastronomic illiterates. Most people have never been trained how to use their tongue or palate.

  It was then David Chang took to a cooking stage in the middle of the paddock. He was demonstrating the Caribbean technique of making jerk chicken, which involves marinating chicken in a thick mixture of vinegar, rum, molasses, ginger, cloves, allspice, nutmeg, chillies and more. At the end of thirty minutes, he passed me his perfectly executed finished dish. Reluctantly, as I wouldn’t be getting to New York to taste his food any time soon, I passed the dish to some members of the audience and watched the expressions on their faces change as they tried this incredibly aromatic dish, I assume, for the first time. I watched them sniff at the skin of the chicken, test the texture with their lips, pull the flesh away with their teeth, close their mouths and chew. I could tell from their eyes that Chang’s chicken was good. Very good. I could only watch. Thankfully the tasters were front-row food tragics. They understood the process and the way it should taste. They were satisfied and grinned with tacit satisfaction. The audience erupted in applause.

  Dario Cecchini was staying in Melbourne for a few more days to take part in the festival and cook a meal with Guy Grossi. The star of the dinner was the beef carcass that hung as the backdrop to Cecchini’s butchery demonstration-cum-oratory. When alive it was a massive white Chianina steer, a beast that would tower over most men. Like Cecchini, it was a Tuscan beast, albeit born and raised on a farm in Victoria. Chianina were traditionally bred in the valleys of Tuscany to spend their days as beasts of burden and end them as the famed bistecca alla Fiorentina and myriad other dishes. Its predecessors came from Asia sometime during the Bronze Age, making it Bos indicus. There is speculation among breeders that its roots lie in an obscure sub-species called Bos primitiva. European cattle are Bos taurus. This particular animal was raised by a woman who was one of the founding members of Slow Food Melbourne. Australian born to Italian parents, Daniela Mollica had teamed up with her husband, Sam Walker, soon after they were married to breed these cattle on a coastal farm on the lush Gippsland coast. Together with Grossi and Cecchini, they were hosting the dinner. I had been invited as their guest and there was no vegetarian option. The dinner was a celebration of the beast with fifteen dishes utilising, as Cecchini had extolled, every part of the animal. Declining the hospitality of an Italian is impossible. Declining the hospitality of three: Grossi, Cecchini and Mollica, is a mistake.

  I bumped into Mollica a few days before the dinner, at a hotel where a 2-day-long series of food masterclasses was being held. This woman, skilled in Italian and Italian charm, took me aside and very quietly and very politely stated her case as to why the way she raises her beef is ethical. And why I was wrong to give up meat.

  ‘We are not advocates of people eating more beef,’ she said. ‘That’s not the premise on which our company was founded and that is not the message I want to be associated with. I do not think, for many reasons, that eating more beef is healthy. It is not healthy for our bodies and it is not healthy for our planet,’ she explained. Her comments were not off the cuff. The argument was well considered, practised and erudite.

  ‘What we believe is that you should eat less meat but better quality meat,’ she said. ‘Where I think our food system is failing is making meat cheap enough so people can consume it every single day. It moves from something quite important in a nutritional sense to being a volume commodity. That is not the place that meat should be taking in our diet,’ she continues. ‘When you’re seeing steak at a supermarket for $9.95 a kilogram, then meat producers need to bring down the cost of production and hasten the growing period. Which means animals are fed grain in feedlots. And when you go down the grain route you are then forced to look at the philosophical argument about what animals are meant to eat.’

  Mollica and Walker at that time killed two animals a month and delivered 10-kilogram boxes of meat to customers’ homes for $220. That is $22 a kilogram. Delivered. The boxes contained mostly lesser-loved cuts such as chuck steak and skirt steak that require a modicum of skill to cook. What Daniela was saying to me was that we need to look at the way we consume an entire beautiful animal.

  The eye fillet of beef, the muscle that runs along the inside of a cow’s spine, and the most desired cut at a wedding function, weighs around 2 kilograms. A steer can weigh over half a tonne, producing a lot of muscle that is not eye fillet, sirloin or T-bone. A steer weighing 600 kilograms, once its head’s off, and innards and hide are removed, will weigh around 350 kilograms. Once the bone and fat are removed there is about 270 kilograms of red meat. Our most desired cut is just 2 kilograms. That is crazy.

  There are about 28 million head of cattle in Australia with around 9 million slaughtered every year, producing over 2 million tonnes of meat, resulting in around 16 000 tonnes of eye fillet. With 60 per cent of all Australian beef exported, that leaves just under 7000 tonnes of eye fillet to share between 23 million Australians, or roughly half a kilogram each. Every year, on average, we consume individually 33 kilograms of beef and, to complete the statistics, we consume, each year, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, beef and mutton weighing 110 kilograms in total. That’s the weight of a footballer. On a daily basis that is 300 grams of animal meat every day. That’s a decent steak, a chicken breast from a very large chook, or most of a tin of Spam. Health authorities would be happier if we ate around 100 grams or less of animal flesh a day, with more emphasis on seafood.

  With the humiliation dished out to me by the Country Pasty Nazi still taunting my ego; the subterfuge undergone in hiding my new meat-free ways from the food society of Australia; and the most beautiful philosophical dressing-down from one of the most food-informed people in the country, it was time to make some serious, fundamental changes. First, I realised, I would have to learn to cook without meat.

  4

  Howls of Derisive Laughter

  Back in the early 1990s I lived in Edinburgh. My best mate James used to tell me in his clipped Portobello accent: ‘In Scotland, we don’t have racism. That is because we don’t have races.’ He would pause to allow the irony to sink in. ‘Instead,’ he would add with a cheeky gri
n, ‘we have gingers!’ This was true. The socially acceptable ‘other’ in Scotland were people with red hair. Also known as ‘gingers’—the first ‘g’ pronounced hard and the second ‘g’ pronounced to rhyme with ‘singers’. At this point I have a dreadful confession to make. Despite having a ginger-tinted beard, I too took part in the open discrimination against gingers in Scotland. James and I ran a pub quiz that was a demented live game show in which people would publicly humiliate themselves in various Edinburgh pubs in order to gain free drinks. One of the ‘games’ we played was called ‘Ginger Stick’. The stick was simply a long piece of dowel with a carrot dangling from a piece of string tied to the end. One of us would stand on the bar, swinging the carrot over the heads of the packed bar below. The other would press the CD player that had been cued up to the chorus of Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ ‘Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick’. You know how it goes—Dury, in his gruff London accent, asks repeatedly to be hit with a rhythm stick. The pub regulars, mostly university students, knew what was coming and would shout along with the chorus. At the tops of their voices they would demand to be hit with the rhythm stick and shout out three times, ‘HIT ME’.

  The stick was allegedly imbued with special powers that enabled it to detect the ‘most ginger’ person in the bar. As it swung around, the strawberry blondes and other slightly ginger-haired people would self-consciously try to avoid being under the carrot lest it tarry above their mop. Inevitably it danced ceremoniously above the reddest head in the pub and that poor person would be dragged up onto the bar, and submitted to some humiliating questions and forced to explain their gingerness to the room in a kind of twisted Lothian Inquisition. There was a lot of sympathetic laughter and they were given a voucher for a pint (£1 back then) and then sent back to drink it with their chums.

  Cruelly, the Ginger Stick would then spring back to life if there was a person in the bar with dyed red hair, be it a pleasant henna tint or a more antisocial punk red. Ian Dury would arc up again and that person would be dragged up onto the bar and forced to explain why they chose, of all things, to have red hair. For further humiliation they were given some tat we had bought from the op shop—perhaps a Blue Peter yearbook, an album of Scottish laments or just a tartan lampshade. For the drunken Scottish crowd, a natural-born ginger person was the focus of mild derision. When a person who had made the choice to be different was pointed out, the tone of the room changed noticeably. People don’t like other people who choose to be different. I learned that when it comes to discrimination, there is safety in numbers.

  THE LETTER

  When I started this experiment I was prepared for a lot of things to change in my life. I was expecting my weight to change, my food bill to drop and my cholesterol level to lower. What I wasn’t prepared for was the backlash. The day after the story about going meat-free ran in the Good Living section, as it was known then, of The Sydney Morning Herald, I received this email from a person working with Meat and Livestock Australia.

  Dear Richard,

  I read your piece in Good Living yesterday. Wow what a change! Great news about losing the six kilos too—congratulations. Perhaps it was the lack of processed meat such as jamon and bacon rather than lean beef, lamb or goat which contributed to your weight loss?

  You mentioned also concerns about animal welfare and the environmental impact of animal farming in your article—is it possible for you to give me a little more detail about your concerns with regards to the farming of beef, lamb and goat; I’d be really interested in hearing about them and understanding if there is anything the industry can do to allay them.

  Have you decided yet if you’re going to keep it up?Yours,

  xxxxxxxxxx

  What I learned from that day on is that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t like vegetarians. Announcing to the world that you have given up meat means people say things to your face they wouldn’t normally say. The above email had a derisive tone regarding me eating a lot of bacon and jamón and assumed I didn’t eat lean meat. That someone in the meat industry would want to assuage my concerns about animal welfare is like Clive Palmer talking down the dangers of coaldust. It was not the voice one would be addressed with normally. There was a noticeable shift in the dynamic. Usually someone from an industry body contacting a food journalist would use very professional language. This was very personal and bordered on the dismissive. Something had changed. It was something I had to get used to.

  DERISION

  ‘Why aren’t you eating meat?’ asked a chef mate. ‘Was it on doctor’s orders?’ That’s Michael Zandegu speaking. He’s a hardworking chef who has cooked for big names, and now makes some really simple and tasty little dishes at the farmers’ markets where we shop. He goes around all the stallholders very early in the morning and buys from them the least attractive fruit and veg. While it is still dark he wanders over to Aphrodite, the organic market gardener, and picks over her beetroots, finding the more misshapen ones, the beetroot most likely to be left on the shelf at the end of the day. He drops by the other farmers and seeks out the deformed carrots that look like a rude and amusing appendage. He buys the cabbages that may have just a little too much slug damage to make them appealing even to the most ethical cook and he brings them back to his makeshift kitchen in a corner of the market. For the next hour he uses his impeccable knife skills to slice, dice and julienne the lumpen produce into salads that are metabolically and gastronomically good. On this day, his set-up was perched next to Warialda Belted Galloway. This is the name of the award-winning beef sold at farmers’ markets. Zandegu was cooking some of their lesser-loved cuts of meat from their mobile butcher’s shop that does the rounds of the markets. He’d stuff a fresh bread roll with some juicy pieces of grilled intercostal—the muscles that run between the rib bones—and top with a great serve of chopped salad. I had always ordered a roll without the meat from him, long before I gave up meat, for, like most people, I have never been able to stomach fat-marble-score-five beef before lunchtime.

  Apart from bacon, I had never considered meat a breakfast food. But my having announced I was no longer eating meat allowed him to openly deride me. His market neighbours, Lizette and Allen, with whom I had previously enjoyed a very genial relationship, called out to me across the heads of their customers. ‘What’s wrong with you? Gone soft. Bloody vegetarian!’ It was meant to be fun, but when people team up against you it oversteps the line.

  OUTSIDER

  It was a Sunday afternoon, at a late BBQ lunch. Middle-aged men in loud shirts stared transfixed at the grill plate as the alpha male with the tongs turned the meat. When men of means get to a certain age they become picky with their meat. No longer able to consume large amounts of animal fats without impunity, they choose small amounts of premium product. The same goes for wine. Single vineyard, single block, late harvest, basket pressed, open ferment, unfiltered and aged in old oak. Over forty and you consume less but it’s of the best. Jack Daniel’s? No. You’ll go for a Tasmanian Highland rye whisky made from farm-grown grain distilled in a hand-beaten copper still. On the grill were Wessex Saddleback sausages and dry-aged sirloins. By this stage I had pretty much perfected the lentil burger (see page 179 for recipe). I placed them on the grill beside the cooking meat. My host reeled. ‘What are they?’ he said. ‘Lentil burgers,’ I replied. ‘Get them off!’ he demanded.

  It was as if the lentil burgers were contaminated with something that would make the meat impure, like they were impregnated with some bacteria that would destroy the wholesome meatiness of the steak. ‘No animals died in the making of these burgers,’ I joked. But he wasn’t joking. The host took the tongs off me and moved the lentil burgers to the perimeter of the grill—the part where the burner underneath had failed and there was no heat. I had to wait until the steak and sausages had been cooked before I had space to cook the burgers. The meat was removed and the ‘carnivores’, as they chose to call themselves, moved to the cool of the inside kitchen. I was left outside
to turn my burgers. Being vegetarian puts you on the outer, literally.

  At the table someone cracked a gag about vegetarians. ‘What do Aborigines call vegetarians?’ There was an appropriate comedic pause. ‘Bad hunters.’ Laughter ensued. Someone else chipped in. ‘Did you hear about the vegan devil worshipper?’ they asked rhetorically. ‘He sold his soul to seitan!’ Boom boom.

  IT’S THEIR FAULT

  ‘How many wines by the glass?’ I asked the restaurant owner. I was doing a piece for the newspaper and it’s a standard question a food writer asks restaurant owners to get a snapshot of their beverage offer. I was in a regional pub brewery with a restaurant. The owner was a 50-plus woman who had a sweet hardness that successful women in pubs either have or adopt. ‘What are the bestselling mains on the menu?’ I asked. ‘We have a really good relationship with the local butcher, who has some good grass-fed beef,’ she said. ‘So we are known for our steaks. And perhaps the best chicken parma in the district,’ she added. This is a usual boast and a good indication of not only where owners rank themselves in the local dining pantheon but where the profit centres of the menu may lie. ‘The chef hand-beats out the chicken breasts and crumbs them with house-baked breadcrumbs. It’s really good.’ She enthusiastically also talked up the beef pie, pasta with pork ragout, a Moroccan lamb dish and pizza with prosciutto.