Cafe Society: Time for a little more conversation

Some of the big names in Tasmania’s food industry reveal the immeasurable value of bush tucker, and why we should pay more for quality food.

From left, Nick Haddow from the Bruny Island Cheese Co, managing director of Nita Education Trish Hodges, Stillwater chef Craig Will and Rodney Dunn from the Agrarian Kitchen. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES

WHEN we met yesterday, bush tucker expert Trish Hodge was just back from gathering native-plant seasonings for an afternoon workshop at the Taste of Tasmania.

Trish was one of four panellists talking about tradition at the Mercury’s second Live-in-Conversation, which I hosted on the Taste’s forecourt stage at Princes Wharf I.

The cultural educator, of Nita Education, spoke about traditional seasonal harbingers and fare.

“Today we have four seasons,” she told fellow onstage guests Nick Haddow of Bruny Island Cheese and chef/restaurateurs Rodney Dunn of the Agrarian Kitchen and Craig Will of Stillwater and Black Cow Bistro.

“We don’t know how many seasons we had here traditionally. Every single plant, every single animal has its own season.

“For instance, when the beautiful wattle flowers are in season, it tells us that we don’t eat wallaby because that is wallaby breeding season.

“At the moment our native hops is in flower, and that tells us the oysters are big and fat and ready to eat.”

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ROSALIE MARTIN: INSPIRING HIGH HOPES FOR OUR STATE

Trish said she knew of at least 220 bush tucker plants in Tasmania.

“We use them every day in our cooking. In my garden I have about 20 kunzea plants [an East Coast myrtle shrub] and we use it in sweet and savoury dishes. It is beautiful with possum.”

Getting on to traditional lands to hunt and to harvest other plants was often difficult, though, with Aboriginal Tasmanians lacking access to many areas in which they longed to spend time.

“You [often] need licences to access our traditional foods,” Trish said. “We would like to be able to take our Aboriginal families out and share the foods we have eaten for 2000 generations.”

For all panellists, keeping traditional skills alive is a core mission. An artisanal and agrarian approach, drawing on ingredients very close at hand, is fundamental.

Sharing the stories of their farms and trades directly with customers is a way of honouring traditional methods and articulating aspects of the distinctly Tasmanian products. It’s also a way of helping the businesses explain why their products are relatively expensive.

“I think society has been conditioned to expect to pay less for their food than it is worth,” Nick Haddow said.

“You can buy a cheese for $30kg which is imported into Australia for half of that amount, or, say, my cheese for $100kg.

“I can’t make my cheese for what the other is being sold at a retail price. Mine is expensive to make. It’s made by hand in small batches from a dairy with 55 rare-breed cows farmed organically.

“Every decision we make probably results in extra cost, but we don’t really care about that. The only decision we make is through the lens of what is best for the cheese, beer, bread or whatever it is we are making.”

At the two restaurants he co-owns, chef Craig Will’s team is known for its adept front-of-house teams. Floor staff know which farm grows which ingredients — and can proudly say it is almost entirely from a network of growers around Launceston.

“We let the customer know why we use it, which is because it is the best in the world,” Craig said.

“We can grow just about anything here. What we can’t, we don’t use.”

Rodney Dunn said artisanal producers and chefs wanted to give people the very best, including incomparable flavour. He said ingredients could look the same, but be of vastly different qualities and flavour depths.

“Getting people to understand that is key, or they will think you are ripping them off.

“In fact, your profit margins are smaller than if you went down to the local club and had a chicken parmy.

“If you look at what you pay, and the amount of time and energy that has gone into [what we do], the value proposition is way more.”

He believes it is more than worthwhile to support food businesses that are trying to preserve soulful growing and cooking, and customs all but destroyed by massive-scale conventional farming.

“Do we want to live in a world where all our food is industrialised?” he asked.

“If you want to spend your money on that product, that’s what you will get more of.

“We can’t sit back and say ‘yeah, I want my food to be cheap and I want it to be good’, because that’s not how it works.”

Nick wondered whether we ate better in the past than today.

“I think we ate a lot more honestly,” he said.

“I think we ate a lot more consciously. I think we ate a lot more within our seasons and within our regions — and that had environmental, social and economic flow-throughs.”

Trish agreed. “I think we absolutely ate better 20,000 years ago.”

And with that, she was off with her nephew Craig Everett to cook abalone and possum three different ways for guests at a sold-out native bush tucker workshop.