What's For Dinner 2040
- Creative Food Fiction
What’s for Dinner 2040? What’s on our plate. Creative fiction about sustainable agriculture and Enutriet farming
It’s another scorching summer day on the Fleurieu Peninsula, yet I’m surrounded by a botanical oasis here at Jed Manningham’s Enutriet farm. At yesterday’s 2040 National Agri-business Awards, Jed and his wife, Kala, won the prestigious Food Innovation Prize for enriching our lives with healthier, sustainable and delicious new edibles.
Good afternoon, I’m Katrina Lakluander, Public Relations Manager, New World Bank talking to Jed to unearth his Enutriet philosophy and understand why parts of the Fleurieu Peninsula are flourishing when so many other regions remain desolate and hungry.
We’ve just finished a sumptuous lunch at his Natures Harvest Restaurant and through a 2 part series we’re going to explore what’s on the plate, followed by What's behind the plate. The back story of what drove this historic change and the rise of a new farming philosophy and eating regime.
NATURES HARVEST RESTAURANT MENU
STARTERS
Wheatgrass & Pomegranate Shooter
Our own grown cold pressed energy boosting enzyme & vitamin shooter. Freshly juiced meal starter
Salt & Pepper Mealworms
Crispy air fried mealworms tossed with Murray River salt & native pepper berry, served with chili infused native pesto
Pulse Puffs
Toasted and spicy mixture of puffed barley, pigeon peas, quinoa, and chickpeas
ENTRÉE
Microbiome Broth with Roasted Cricket Bread
A rich golden bacterial broth served with sprouted new-gen wheat bread flavoured with freshly roasted crickets
Injera, Cicada Caviar and Native Finger Lime Foam
A swath of freshly harvested cicada eggs served on traditional Ethiopian nut flavoured fermented sourdough pancake with a tangy finger lime foam
Spicy Balut Balls
Soft boiled 16-day fertilised seagull egg served with salted chilli dipping sauce and freshly roasted crushed bunya nuts
Mushroom and Mycelium Pate
Rich mushroom and mycelium pate served with millet and quinoa crisp breads, salted caperberries and dry fried wrigglers
MAIN COURSE
BBQ Witchetty Grub Kebabs with Pepper Berry and Macadamia Nut Sauce
Char-grilled and smoked kebab with a satay inspired native pepper berry and macadamia nut sauce
Daisy Yam and Grasshopper Croquettes with Nopales & Cactus Flower Salad
Creamy daisy yam croquettes served with roasted grasshopper on a fresh salad of own grown prickly pear nopales, cactus flowers and prickly pear vinaigrette
Wild Coorong Catch (subject to availability)
Sustainably harvested Yellow Eye Mullet served with pickled samphire and sea lettuce and olive tapenade
Crazy Critta Platter
Tapas platter of lime & salt-cured chapulines served on creamed new-gen corn mash, wild spring rolls stuffed with green ants, fresh mung bean shoots served with spicy mint dressing, Bogong Moth Pate served with kurrajong damper
In-vitro Laboratorium Deluxe Meat Burger
A250gm flame grilled lab meat burger coated with spiced grasshopper dust served on native millet roll with fresh warrigal greens, emu apple & bush tomato chutney & roasted leek lily bulbs
SIDES
Fiddlehead & Portulaca Salad with Lemon Myrtle Dressing
Laverbread & Wood Ear Fungus Salad
Tofu & Tempeh Crisps
DESSERT
Dodecahedron Carob Delight
3 D printed carob flavoured polygon garnished with carob soil and ruby napoles syrup
Poached Emu Apple Jell-O Ring
Poached emu apples and quandongs set in agar aspic, with roasted nut pralines & tofu creame whip
Lilly Pilly Sugarbag Sorbet & Gingersnaps
Refreshing lilly pilly sorbet & wild harvested sugarbag honey served with a crispy ginger snap biscuit
Wattle Seed Tofu Cheesecake
Dairy free wattle seed cheesecake glazed with rich quandong & apple syrup & crystallised scaveola flowers
WILD HARVEST BEVERAGES & SWEETMEATS
Roasted Kurrajong Seed Cappuccino
Dandelion Coffee
Gumbi Gumbi Tea
Eucalyptus Tea
Sweet Treat Platter
Selection of our own made quince & quandong jubes, citriodora lollipops and native nut & carob clusters
KL: Congratulations Jed on winning this prestigious award. Your unconventional approach has produced outstanding results in the paddocks and on the plate. Let’s start with the menu. I’m surprised how exciting it is and how good the non-traditional foods taste. Talk me through how you put the menu together?
JM: The menu is small, seasonal and reflects our environmental, agricultural and cultural reconciliation. For instance, some dishes are a new take on much-loved favourites from other cultures. Like Salt and Pepper Mealworms, our most popular entrée, it’s reminiscent of the Asian classic salt and pepper squid. The mealworms are hot, crispy, salty and high in essential fatty acids with levels of iron and trace elements, sodium, selenium, potassium and copper, similar to beef.
The poached emu apple and quandong jell-o ring, is cool and refreshing on hot days and it acknowledges our colonial roots and acceptance of our indigenous foods. A luscious combination of peach and cranberry-like flavours set in natural aspic that uses gelatine made from foraged seaweed.
Other dishes marry technological innovations with ancient wisdoms. Take our dodecahedron carob delight. Using a 3 D printer, we manufacture a natural chocolatey twelve-sided angular ball and offset its richness with an intense ruby red syrup made from cactus fruit. Mexicans have been consuming cactus as a source of food, drink and medicine well before the Spanish arrival and ancient Greeks and Egyptians valued carob for its nutritional content and flavour as well its ability to fix nitrogen and improve soil fertility.
The Wheatgrass and Pomegranate Shooter and Microbiome Broth are perfect examples of how ingredient selection and technique can create a sumptuous culinary concoction that sooths our cravings and ailments while stimulating our digestion.
The high nutrient value of our edibles means we don’t have to eat as much. Better for us, better for the planet.
KL: I’ve noticed the menu doesn’t have traditional protein sources that used to be staples in our diet. What’s changed?
JM: Our agricultural heritage is important to acknowledge, but the 20th century farming practices just don’t work anymore. Intensified weather patterns, out-dated farming practices and our improvident resource use produced an unforgiving landscape unable to support large animal proteins. They have a poor feed conversion ratio – that’s the amount of feed needed to increase an animal’s body weight by one kilogram. So, to produce beef, cows must consume 7 kilos of food to increase their weight by one kilo. Our tired and fragile land, couldn’t keep delivering. It has reached a starved equilibrium.
Sure, there are some remnant large-scale industrial farms producing footed and finned protein, but it’s just not affordable. It’s mostly foreign owned and shipped out before we even get a whiff of it. What’s left is third grade or lower. Only our richest can afford it. Food egalitarianism, who would have thought that Australia, the great southern land down under, the land of plenty, would ever have to contend with this?
We’ve rediscovered the food value of non-traditional western proteins. They’re our new alternatives. A wonderfully diverse range of worms and insects like crickets, moths, bugs and ants. They’re rich in flavour, nutrients, have a massive regenerative capacity with high protein content and are very affordable. Our Crazy Critter Platter is a great way to introduce the nutty taste of crickets, the sweet walnut-like flavour of Bogong moths and the zesty citrus tang of green ants. Each dish is prepared so you wouldn’t even know you’re eating insects.
Then there’s the plant-based proteins, like the tofu and tempeh from soybeans. My favourite though is the intense earthy flavour of fungi which grow out of the tangled weave of underground nutrient rich mycelium. They’re all power-house proteins.
JL: The menu takes us on an adventurous journey. There’s a world of flavours, ingredients and taste sensations that are confronting yet comforting, bizarre and fantastical to some but consumed as an everyday food and revered for their potency by others. One of those dishes is the Spicy Balut Balls. Why are they on the menu?
JM: Balut is a Philippine and Vietnamese delicacy made from fertilised duck eggs. Ducks prolific laying ability combined with eating partially developed embryo means there’s always a continuous supply of affordable high-quality protein. Clever protein management eh! The Coorong is teaming with sea gulls, so we forage their fertilised eggs. They’re lightly boiled, and the soft poached embryo is presented in its own intensely flavoured liquid and the remaining egg yolk which has a silky custard like texture. It’s teamed up with a salty chilli dipping sauce and toasted bunya nuts. It’s delicious and considered an aphrodisiac by some. Its sounds confronting but it’s like eating next level homemade chicken soup.
We all need support, some more than others to try new foods and venture into the unfamiliar. Building acceptance needs a new approach.
KL: Is that why you opened Natures Harvest Restaurant?
JM: Yeah. The enormity of changing what and how we eat can’t be underestimated. Hundreds of years of footed and finned protein food habits and breaking down the last-resort syndrome takes some changing.
The restaurant and its associated resource centre are an engagement hub. They’re integral in helping the community to understand how we can rebuild a better and more secure food future. They encourage curiosity, familiarity, knowledge transfer and stewardship.
The restaurant demonstrates how different food combinations create tasty nutritious dishes while the Centre explains the why and how questions. Cooking classes show how to prepare and cook nourishing family meals. The new edibles aren’t difficult to use, they’re just different from our traditional ingredients. Creative menus, sampling opportunities, cooking classes, tours and food awareness trails, collaborative partnerships and scholarship, have all contributed to changing perceptions and eating habits. Once foreign foods, insects, grubs, seaweed, mycelium, Australian native products, manufactured meat and printed ingredients are now staples for many around here.
The communities that haven’t embraced the new ways are still living hungry marginal lives. The restaurant brings the Enutriet philosophy alive. That’s the selective planting and harvesting of regenerative carbon neutral foods to heal the heart and spirit of our homeland. To be nourished by its terroir, it’s strength and vitality.
KL: You mentioned over lunch that the restaurant arouses curiosity, invites experimentation and creates converts for the new farming and eating paradigm. I must admit when you invited me to have lunch while doing this interview, I was very apprehensive about sitting down to a plateful of the unfamiliar. Mouthful by mouthful, one plate at a time, the new edibles stimulated my appetite, tantalised my tastebuds, enriched my perspective and has changed my life. Thank you Jed, for opening my eyes and being the vanguard for an exciting new culinary heritage. One that sits more comfortably in our natural environment. After-all, we are, the smallest, lowest, flattest and driest continent on earth apart from Antarctica.
What’s for Dinner 2040? What’s behind the plate?
2020 was supposed to be our environmental reconciliation decade. Armed with new technologies and common sense we would radically change our resource-use and waste management habits and our land, water and air would be clean again. Instead, through our inaction, our agricultural sector collapsed. Our food bowls, unproductive and comatose, could no longer produce the yields to feed a larger, drier, leaner Australia.
Reeling from a new agricultural reality, the quest for affordable footed and finned protein alternatives was imperative. Jed Manningham, Enutriet farmer and owner of Nature’s Harvest Restaurant has done just that and more! Let’s continue our conversation with Jed on his take of our agricultural demise and his architectural role in sculpting a revitalised and productive foodscape.
KL: Jed I understand you come from a long line of farmers. You’ve successfully rejuvenated this barren landscape, once a productive family farm, to produce nutritious and tasty edibles for the restaurant and farm gate. What did you have to do to produce this wonderful bounty?
JM: Thanks Katrina, you’re right, we’ve tilled the soil in these parts for generations. Feeding the community is in the family DNA. I’m still doing it but very differently from our forebears. Starting with no tilling. Ripping the heart out of the land and letting it cremate in our blistering heat, that’s a thing of the past.
We started with healing the land, by combining best practice ecological management with the ancient wisdom of drought resilient cultures. Using food and water scaping techniques we responded to the landscape and designed integrated drought resistant orchards and vegetable precincts. We’ve built state of the art production facilities to grow our lab-based insect, meat and mycelium range. These protein sanctuaries are scalable, resource efficient and highly productive. Following the wisdom of the Ngarrindjeri people, we forage judiciously along the Coorong and its marshes. Nurturing it, only taking enough for today, allowing for tomorrow’s seeding.
We now forage, grow and harvest and design and manufacture a diverse range of highly nutritious and productive edibles. Some of the technology behind this is new but food and water scaping and foraging isn’t. What’s different is we have integrated these three regimes into the geographical and climatic characteristics of this region.
Our carbon neutral Nature’s Harvest system produces nutrient dense food with minimal water, power and food miles and revolves around a natural regenerative life cycle. Its abundance feeds us, itself and it has rebuilt the Fleurieu community. That’s what living within our changing ecosystem and not on top of it does.
KL: In your acceptance speech you spoke about the struggle of living on the land and taking too long to change. What was happening?
JM: Farming was under attack from all sides. Exaggerated climatic systems with crippling droughts. The Big Dry in the 20’s and our inequitable water distribution network contributed to the collapse of the Murray Darling River system: politically AND environmentally. Then Water Wars because we couldn’t manage our most precious resource. Farming is thirsty business. Even dry land farming, like here on the Fleurieu, needs rain. Overcropping, overstocking, the relentless use of artificial fertilisers to extract growth from compacted soil meant that when precious precipitation did come, instead of quenching a thirsting land, it just ran off. It’s simple. No topsoil, no water, no food, no community. Like they say, “water in agriculture is like blood in the body”. But it didn’t stop there!
Pushing for population and economic growth we sacrificed precious topsoil for densely populated housing estates. The urbanisation of our food bowls replaced good arable soil and productive farms with concrete, asphalt, congestion. More carbon being indiscriminately pumped into the atmosphere!
Farming was driven to increasingly marginal land. Crop failures, devastating insect plagues, dust storms and fish kills, the ever-increasing cost of feed, water and energy year on year. Decreasing farm profitability and ability to repay the banks or to raise funds for critical Agri-technology investment, changing consumer habits and increasing foreign farm investment. The list goes on and on. To begin with family farms were the most vulnerable.
It got pretty dam depressing downsizing to breeding stock when there’s no feed. Watching them wasting to walking bones in death brown dust bowls. Once the pride of our country, our sheep were reduced to Ovidae refugees staggering in a malnourished stupor. As farm profitability plummeted, depression and suicides soared. It was happening across Australia. Why too long to change? I became comfortably numb, accustomed to the cancerous creep of our agricultural failure. A silent acceptance as the kismet of its demise loomed closer.
KL: Do you recall that defining moment of change?
JM: See that gate over there, just over the rise? Bill, Jackie and the kids lived there. A family property for four generations: just like us. Bill and I grew up together. Born on the same day. What’s the chance of that! Bill was my best friend and the best shot in the district. He worked as a feral animal controller, fencing contractor, general farm hand. Anything to supplement the farm income. As it deteriorated, he worked harder. His gnarly sunburnt face, tired and cracked like old paint. He aged before his years.
I met him, one Friday night, on the back road between our properties. Said he was putting down the last of his flock the next day. Feed, money and hope had long gone. He counted out the exact number of bullets plus one. Two seconds was all it took. He rocked Jackie and the kids’ world forever more and changed my direction.
Failure as a Manningham descendent unable to protect the family’s land, and, as a husband unable to provide for my family. Humiliation, grief, fear, self-loathing: a raging tempest crashing uncontrollably around me. Change or be changed eh? If I didn’t act my demise was imminent. Just like Bill’s.
Drawing upon the foundations of nutritional ecology and learnings from time spent with the Ngarrindjeri people and the other drought resilient and protein production savvy cultures in my youth, I established Nature’s Harvest: an Enutriet farm as a self-sustaining feeding web. I still think of Bill and thank him for saving my life and my family’s future even though he couldn’t save his own.
KL: The legacy of the collapsed agri and aqua culture sectors was unaffordable finned and footed proteins and our empty dinner plates left the country hungry. What were some of the new alternatives you produce so efficiently and abundantly?
JM: The Aussie stuff, for instance, includes Warragul greens, samphire and yam daisies in the salty mudflats adjacent to the Coorong, with quandongs planted in the sandy areas. More of the indestructible Mediterranean olive, which has always proliferated around here, for oil and olives. The prickly pear cactus for the flowers and nopales, their succulent paddle shaped leaves, as a vegetable. Carob trees, as a chocolate alternative, pomegranates and capers were planted along the ridges and across the hillside to address erosion, while native pepper and lilly pilly grow in the gullies to provide the orchard’s shelter.
The labs produce vast quantities of our invertebrate protein: mealworms, crickets, cicadas for their highly nutritious eggs, green ants, moths and chapulines - that’s grasshoppers. We also grow petri-dish meat, several types of mushrooms and harvest the mycelium which is rich in essential amino acids - the building blocks of protein.
Then there’s the foraged food. It’s not feral food, it’s seasonal food at its best. Luscious wild sugar bag honey from native bees, nutty wattle seeds, edible kelps, emu apple – think of it as a native cranberry and the sea gull eggs, just to name a few. We forage across the region. If there isn’t enough produce, it’s not on the menu. Not like the old days.
KL: What do you mean, not like the old days?
JM: Products flown around the world to satisfy consumer whims. Take asparagus for example. It’s a spring vegetable with a relatively short season of about 10 weeks, but consumers wanted it all year round. The carbon emissions on transporting it from California or Peru for the other months, how indulgent, how careless! Our consumption habits were unsustainable.
Enutriet farming is more than just an Eat Local philosophy. It’s about acknowledging, respecting and eating within regional capacity. Even inter-regional transportation, moving food across our vast land to satisfy consumerism contributed to our carbonised fiasco. We cannot return to it.
KL: As you say food is a moving feast. Over the centuries we’ve embraced the new and bizarre foods from exotic ports and immigrants, survived food rationing, food contamination outbreaks and a generation of superfoods. Now the agri and aqua cultural crisis has forced us to consider a new basket of foodstuffs. What do you see as our food future?
JM: It will continue to evolve as our landscape knowledge and its connectivity to our global water and climatic systems develop. But to remain connected to the earth and terroir of the land, we must continue to collectively move forward as the new custodians. New technologies and our actions must respectfully serve Mother Nature and a balanced life cycle must be preserved in order to feed an increasingly larger, hungrier population.
You know, agriculture has always been in a constant state of flux. Food availability, choice and our everyday meals have changed over time as our civilisations have waxed and waned over the centuries. When food is plentiful, cultures thrive. Nourishing our spirit, our arts, crafts and science reach new heights. When food is scarce, we hoard, plunder, ravage and maim just to survive. There lies a cautionary tale in food insecurity. As greed became the creed, we sacrificed the heart of the land. Lived not within the ecosystem, but insolently on top of it.
It’s time to be whole again, to be a civilisation of custodians and to stop being the civilisation we’re not meant to be. But if we don’t get our balance right today there will be less food and we will became increasingly disconnected from our land and who we know ourselves to be. This will be our price for not looking after the land.
We’ve been slow learners, but there are encouraging signs. Modifying our food, energy and water consumption habits, waste and land management practices and carbon footprint have brought about some change, but we can’t stop. Will we ever see the scale of footed and finned protein of yesteryear? I don’t think so. They’re pretty much an endangered taste.
KL: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today. Your insights on the epic developments leading to the collapse and how to live an enriched sustainable life provides a reconciliation and reconstruction pathway for all. Your mantra is clear. Our existence is dependent upon the everyday ritual of what we eat. Those that have adapted and live an Enutriet life are no longer hungry and desolate like the land we created. You have shown us how to dine sumptuously and nutritiously by embracing the Enutriet philosophy.
JM: Thanks Katrina. Collectively we’ve made lots of mistakes and been slow to react. Restoration, of the land and ourselves, must be accelerated. Each day it’s imperative we use our talents, wherever we work in our unique spheres of influence, to build a cleaner, greener and brighter future and the on-going development of our culinary heritage. Let us continue to change, help others as they struggle through this critical lifestyle change and let’s reflect on the menu when we ask, “what’s for dinner”. We can never forget there is no planet B