Category Eat

Does what we eat affect the health of the planet? With agriculture producing an estimated 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, you could say it makes a significant difference to the planet’s health.

While we are told that eating less meat or eating a plant-based diet is the most earth-friendly way to go, it’s worth looking more deeply into this advice; and rather than just considering whether we eat meat or plants, consider how each of these foods are farmed.

It’s well documented that regenerative agriculture can not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but actually sequester carbon dioxide – by pulling carbon from the air and storing it in the ground. By eating food that is farmed using regenerative practices, you will be helping to build soil fertility and grow healthier and more nutrient-dense plants and animals; which will create a healthier you and a healthier planet.

Once you have made your own pasta at home, you will realise that homemade pasta is on a whole other level when it comes to quality and flavour. Not to mention you avoid the plastic and food miles associated with pasta in a packet.

Making pasta at home might seem like a lot of work but it is actually much easier than it appears. It’s also heaps of fun and a really great way to spend time with friends. You don’t have to make it every time you need it either, it is possible to make large quantities of pasta in a day’s session and store it in a jar for use over several months.

Seafood has traditionally been a nutritional powerhouse for humans, being high in protein, minerals and vitamins and low in saturated fats. It’s often touted as a food we should be eating to get our omega-3 fatty acids, lose weight or to give our children the best start in life. Seafood is entwined in Australian culinary culture, from smoked salmon and prawns on the barbeque to fish and chips. Australians eat 25 kg of seafood per person each year.

But is our abundant Australian appetite for seafood sustainable? Is the fish or shellfish we eat caught or farmed in a way that does not affect the long-term health of the species, or the marine habitat where it is harvested? Current data shows Australian fish stocks are following the worldwide trend of being stressed and over-exploited. We are still eating plenty of species categorised as depleted and vulnerable to exploitation, such as shark, tuna and Orange Roughy.

For the average person, presented with a smorgasbord of seafood to buy in the supermarket, or turned into enticing meals in the restaurant, it’s hard to remember which species of seafood are sustainable. Fortunately, there are some comprehensive guides available to help us make ethical seafood choices. It’s also good to have some understanding of what’s behind these guides and what they mean.

Wheat has been an important food for humans for thousands of years. Along with corn and rice, it’s a global staple that makes up a huge part of the diet for billions of people. So why has wheat fallen out of favour in recent years? This once nutritious food seems to be creating a growing incidence of intolerances, gut dysbiosis and life-threatening allergies. Is it possible to eat wheat in a way that can be well-digested and nutritious?

The Evolution Of Wheat

What used to be a tough, wild grass began to be gathered and cultivated by humans over 10,000 years ago in the ‘fertile crescent’ – the area now known as the Middle East and Turkey. Varieties of wheat, such as einkorn and emmer, have been shaped by human cultivation over thousands of years to become the high-starch, easy-to-thresh, short-statured plant we now call modern wheat Triticum aestivum.

Making your own dairy basics at home can not only save you money on your grocery bill and avoid plastic packaging, but allows you to experience the flavour and freshness of homemade food that will far surpass anything you can buy from the store.

Source the best quality cream you can find with the highest milk fat content, preferably 35%, with no additives or thickeners.

If you’re into low-tech, add cream to a jar with a tightfitting lid and shake it well till it separates. This can take anywhere from five to thirty minutes.

It feels difficult to reduce your waste when you go to the shops and everything seems to be individually wrapped in plastic. Recycling was once an important part of the waste hierarchy, helping keep resources from landfill, but Australia is experiencing a recycling crisis as countries that once took our recycling waste are now refusing it. With China enforcing tight restrictions around the types of recyclable waste they will accept, and India and Indonesia following in their footsteps, a lot of our recycling is being sent to landfill despite our best efforts.

Most plastics are down-cycled, meaning they can only be turned into one more item before eventually going to landfill. Moving away from plastic altogether is the preferred option. Buying less, and using more of what you have might seem like old-fashioned notions, but in this modern world they may be exactly what we need on our journey to reducing plastic and creating less waste. You may not be ready to have all your rubbish for one year fit into a small jar, but there are lots of simple and easy solutions to start reducing waste in your life.

It’s apple season again! Apples eaten in season and fresh are definitely the best for flavour, crunch and vitality. If you have a healthy apple tree at home, you may well be wondering what to do with them all. Never fear, there are lots of ways to use up your apple harvest and preserve the excess.

With an endless choice of varieties that cover almost the entire alphabet, apples can be grown in every state, and are harvested from January to May depending on where you live. If stored carefully you can be eating fresh apples all year round.

Whether you’re lucky enough to have your own apple tree, can snaffle a few boxes of seconds from the markets or wild harvest the trees in your neighbourhood, the apple bonanza is upon us. Here are some ideas from several Australian apple growers to make the most of this year’s harvest.

Food traditions are vital in binding us together as families and as communities. From our very first mouthful, food deeply connects us to other humans. It connects us to our parents and grandparents, connects us to our friends, and can connect us to our children in how we share our food knowledge, habits and values with them.

Food expresses our cultural identity and helps define us. In some cultures eating is always a social activity. Sit down at an Arab or Chinese dining table and you will not eat from a single plated dish per person, you will eat from shared, communal platters. Immigrants take their food traditions with them to new countries and cook the food they know as a way to preserve their culture. If you grew up with the smell of Nonna’s slow-cooked sugo wafting through the house, it will have created a bond with your family that will be there for life.

For many of us, food traditions are not part of our social fabric anymore. They have been lost amongst a busy life of full-time work, running a household and trying to navigate a healthy diet. But it’s not too late to resurrect or create a food tradition in your family, household or community, whether it’s a regular Sunday meal with extended family, creating a family cookbook, or one of the more involved food traditions outlined below.

There are so many great reasons to grow your own herbal teas. Having a range of herbs on your doorstep, each with varying flavours and health benefits, is the main one. You will also have fresh organic tea available whenever you feel like having a cuppa. By growing your herbs organically, you are avoiding hidden pesticides and herbicides, as well as saving yourself money. And finally you are reducing waste and reducing the environmental footprint involved in bringing tea from a commercial grower to your kitchen.

As long as you have a few different plants growing you will always have a cup of herbal tea available for yourself or when visitors pop by. Here are some of our favourites.

As superfood fads go, the movement towards eating insects has a lot of hype, but is less commonly adopted. An untapped source of protein, high in amino acids, wildly abundant, easy to grow, with a tiny ecological footprint—the sales pitch sounds great to most of us until we’re presented with a dish of mealworms.

There’s something taboo about the idea of eating creepy crawlies in the Western world, but according to its proponents, entomophagy (the practice of eating insects on purpose) is going to get a whole lot bigger, despite the small size of its heroes.

The French eat snails, Mexican and Thai people are wellknown for their fondness for crickets, and even our homegrown witchetty grubs and honey ants are part of traditional Australian ‘bush tucker’ folklore.

For most of us however, eating insects (beyond say, a few stray aphids on our homegrown brassica leaves) is pretty low down on our to-do lists. Perhaps it’s because in the West we see insects as dirt dwelling vectors of disease. Or perhaps it has more to do with our Judeo-Christian cultural heritage, where insects were almost never deemed to be ‘kosher’. Or perhaps there’s something deeper too.