100 Million Years of Food by Stephen Le Read Free Book Online Page A

excess cash for amusement, like malls and restaurants? Or are communities supposed to be places where we look out for one another, buffering our fellow citizens against the vagaries of misfortune? This might sound like a philosophical question to pose in a book about food and health, but in historical terms, the sharing of food and risk in general was the cornerstone of communal life.
    It might be the case that Shanaka’s idealistic pay-as-you-can vegetarian restaurants (plant foods can be easily donated as surplus, but meat is trickier) will eventually fail from too much freeloading; in any case, his venture forces us to consider a critical issue: Should eating be a private, self-centered affair, or can food be recast in its original role, as a means of binding and protecting citizens?
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    There are two ways in which an eater can act in a benevolent manner. The first is to assist fellow citizens, which is evident in Shanaka’s pay-as-you-can restaurants, where better-off diners subsidize healthy food for the less fortunate. The other path to benevolence is to eat in a manner that safeguards the prospects of future generations. When we buy cheap meat, fish, and produce from a supermarket today, we are essentially being subsidized by future generations, who will have to pay more for the same meat, fish, and produce (if it can even be found), because there will be less fossil fuel and fish available, and because the planet will become progressively degraded by agricultural and waste-disposal practices that are oriented toward short-term profit and convenience. Food idealists are attempting to minimize the costs we inflict on future generations by eating and raising food in more ecologically sustainable ways. For example, instead of rearing imported animals and plants that harm local environments, consumers can opt instead for animals and plants that are well integrated into local ecosystems, as indigenous peoples necessarily did before the advent of global trade.
    Consider this irony, then: In Melbourne, you can indulge in a panoply of cuisines—Italian, Japanese, East African, Lebanese, Moroccan, Vietnamese, Indian, and more, reflecting the diversity of the immigrants in the city—with one conspicuous omission: There is hardly any native Australian cuisine to be found. A government-funded restaurant called Charcoal Lane is a striking exception. Occupying a two-hundred-year-old building that once housed an Aboriginal health center, Charcoal Lane offers native Australian food and trains Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal apprentices in the kitchen and dining area. The manager of the restaurant, a Sri Lankan Aussie named Ashan Abeykoon, and the head cook, a white Australian named Greg Hampton, are doing their best to expose Australians to the plants and animals that thrive in the wilds of their country. My meal there—camel sausage, mutton bird (a seabird), salad of bunyon nut, wattle seed, and kumquat berry—was terrific, teasing the tongue with new flavors and sensations; I especially liked the fishy taste of the mutton bird, and the camel was succulent. Other offerings on the menu include wallaby, emu, and saltbush lamb.
    Greg, who has been cooking for twenty-six years and at one point ran his own zoo, points out the environmental benefits of raising indigenous or desert-acclimated animals. When European settlers first arrived in Australia, they brought sheep, cattle, and pigs and cut down trees to grow wheat. Over time, the heavy use of water to grow wheat exacerbated the soil’s salinity; as the water percolated down, it served as a conduit for minerals and leached them from the soil. The sharp hooves of the imported animals compacted the earth, destroying landscapes and increasing water pollution and sediment loss from runoff. The decimation of vegetation on riverbanks increased river flow and worsened the problem of soil erosion.
    Greg points out that by contrast, native