Category Eat

Five modern-day hunter-gatherers share their passion for eating from the wild

Anyone interested in edible gardening tends to grow vegetables, but have you ever considered growing edible flowers?

Creating a truly local meal–where every part of the meal is produced locally–can be a challenge, but once you get into it, it is also quite addictive. It takes a bit of a mind shift – to look at the harvest first, then let the imagination run wild, and lastly find a recipe for final inspiration.

What would happen if we taught our children that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people planted crops, tilled them, irrigated them, stored and preserved surpluses, built houses and sewed their clothes? Would the sky fall in? And why would we teach them such things? Because that’s what the explorers saw.

You may shy away from the idea of eating cane toad leg stir-fry; Emma Lupin will not. As a Northern Territory resident for the last seven years, Emma has channelled all her efforts into learning the ways of the tropics, finding local produce and searching for sustainable ways to grow it and delicious ways of cooking it – including cane toads, which she doesn’t recommend because they’re poisonous.

A permaculture-designed diet is healthy, local and sustainable, with much of the food grown in our own gardens, farms and communities. When we choose to eat what’s in season, and to eat locally grown foods, we reduce or remove the harmful and wasteful aspects of processing, packaging, transport, storage and additives, and we begin to take control of what we eat.

Almost fifteen years ago, a young Shanaka Fernando dreamed of a world based on need rather than greed. He wished people would focus less on money and more on each other, and wondered if the act of giving would make a difference.

When I first heard about permaculture I was drawn to how it provides tools for living in sync with the planet, as a designed approach with ethics and principles. What I wasn’t prepared for was how it could be applied to so many aspects of life. So, when I was introduced to lactofermentation it was no surprise that it did the same thing, but on a microbial level: we have a gut food web similar to the soil food web, which can be nourished, maintained or killed by the choices we make.

Why not try your hand at homemade cheese. It’s not hard and the good news is you can use milk purchased from the shop to make cheese, as long as you have calcium chloride to re-calcify it.

Chorizo is a sausage that you can eat at three different stages: the first is fresh, and cooked on a barbecue as normal; the second is hung and cured for a couple of weeks, and then sliced and fried and eaten inside fresh bread; the third is hung for four weeks until it is hard, like a good salami. Try the different stages and see which is best for you.