Fork In Review

This book starts with a quote from Byron’s Don Juan:  “Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner”. Visser uses the conceit of an ordinary American dinner to look at the historical, cultural, agricultural, processing and marketing strands of it. In other words it is an anthropology of a meal which consists of: corn on the cob with butter and salt, chicken, rice, lettuce salad with a dressing of olive oil and lemon juice, and ice cream. The very stuff we take for granted.

It was written in 1986 well before Michael Pollan, Mark Kurlansky and Barbara Kingsolver were published, and covered similar subject matter.

Visser was curious about all things epicurean:

A meal is an artistic social construct, ordering the foodstuffs which comprise it into a complex dramatic whole, as a play organises actions and words into component parts such as acts, scenes, speeches, dialogues, entrances and exits, all in the sequences designed form them. However humble it may be, a meal has a definite plot, the intention of which is to intrigue, stimulate and satisfy.

To give you an idea of her approach, the following is a summary of the chapter on chicken.

She discusses the different traditions of carving a roasted bird, and how it would have been dealt with in various countries. Also, the festive and ceremonial aspects of roast chicken which continued for centuries.

Traditionally North Americans did not like their chicken mixed with rice,  as in a paella or biriani. They generally liked the elements of a meal kept separate, ie. the traditional ‘meat and three veg’.  This came from the British who wanted good food undisguised, and the Puritan tradition in the US continued with this aesthetic.

The fried chicken of the southern states has become ubiquitous along with the increase of finger foods with dipping sauces. This meant wholesalers are now selling more chicken pieces to the burgeoning fast food outlets, and not so much the whole bird. Visser also mentions the giant industrial agribusinesses, which control all aspects of this industry. Fast food chains want uniformity, so that customers can buy food which is bland, recognisable, with no ‘weird’ flavours. Also they want it fast, and never mind the environmental damage of all the packaging.

She discusses the origins of the first chicken, gallus gallus, in south east Asia, and the gradual uptake of eating chicken meat and eggs, which are symbols of fertility. People in the Indus Valley had domesticated this fowl by 2000 BC. This domestication spread far and wide, and wound up in Rome. Cockfighting started and continues today in places like Indonesia.

Cocks are related to the Greek god Hermes. They ‘rule the roost’ and are meant to protect their womenfolk from other cocks. She talks about the ‘pecking order’, and it’s a sorry state if a rooster is ‘hen-pecked’.

Modern methods of keeping and killing poultry are described, including the use of antibiotics, factory farming and ubiquity of eating chicken throughout the world. There was an American fad where supermarkets claimed that customers only wanted pre-butchered and boned chicken.

This was in the Sixties, when convenience and processed foods were being stocked at supermarkets, with not always healthy or desirable results. These practices continue today.

When you start reading this novel you quickly notice that there’s not a lot of punctuation, which is distracting until you get used to it. It’s the voice of the protagonist, Zac, a young man from a ‘shit-kicking suburb’, who is enrolled at Cook School, so that, as a previous offender, he can get work towards a career, and not re-offend.

This young man has not had much formal education, and seems naïve as he is willing to subjugate himself in order to become a celebrity chef. In the process of doing this, attending Cook School, he notices that Head Chef does not show up much. He is witness to dropouts, a suicide, non-payment of wages and accounts, the behaviour of a rich alcoholic employer and her children.

However, in the process of trying to impress his cookery tutor and rich employer, he wastes a lot of food, and is cruel to sheep.

The author, Macaulay, seems to be making a comment about trickle-down economics, where the rich pay their employees and suppliers, and, that theoretically, keeps the economy ticking over. However, it’s actually trickle-up because sometimes the rich don’t always honour their debts, and don’t seem to be ashamed of it.

Laissez faire economics and the resulting market failure is enough to make anyone angry except the very rich who seem to be oblivious of the results of their irresponsibility. This is probably why Macaulay wrote this book, and why Zac did what he did at the end of the novel.

It is also a scathing critique of the cult of the celebrity chef. There’s a hint of reality TV at Cook School; there’s the upstairs-downstairs of a Downton Abbey drama; and there’s the gritty TV drama of suicide, alcoholism, poverty and death.

This book is a compilation of chapters written by people involved in local food production in one way or another. Nick Rose asked them to write a chapter about how their interest in the food production business, and how that came about.

The main question is why did they write it? Because the food system is broken.

Here’s what Nick wrote in his introduction – it’s the issue in a nutshell:

Why is it broken?

Because we have fully applied the technologies and the mindset of industrialisation to food and farming. And because we have combined industrialisation with the logic and the imperative of endlessly increasing production, regardless of the consequences.

What does that mean? It means we have over-exploited our land, degraded our soils and damaged our river systems. It means Australia has one of the highest rates of deforestation, biodiversity loss and species extinction on the planet. It means, globally, that the food system contributes as much as 50 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

It means that we have a supermarket duopoly that controls 70 to 80 per cent of the grocery market, forcing farmers and food processors to take whatever prices the duopoly offers. A hundred years ago farmers received 90 cents of every dollar’s worth of food they produced; today it’s around 10 cents.

Some of these participants, from different backgrounds, have endured setbacks but they are so passionate about food that they have battled on relentlessly to become agents of change. These people’s lives indicate that one has to be resilient to stick at being an activist in changing the food system, and for that reason they are inspirational. You get some political theory, education, advocacy, memoirs, and autobiography.

Nick Rose is the national co-ordinator of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance which initiated the first crowd-sourced food policy document, the People’s Food Plan.

Michael Croft is a farmer and stepped into international food politics; he asserts that the failure of the food system is associated with the illogical nature of neoliberalism. Angelo Eliades writes about the virtues permaculture. Tammi Jonas started as a self-confessed junk foodie, then a vegetarian who became an ethical pig breeder and butcher.

But as consumers, do we really have to cut and roll our own oats? Or kill and butcher our own meat to become responsible citizens? No, but reading this book means that one is not alone in trying to shop, eat enjoyably, and not waste food. And protest when large organisations want to frack, mine and destroy the food bowls of Australia. And there’s some comfort in knowing that.

Maybe the next book could address the methods of how these people farm and produce food, as well as their visions for the future of farming.