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future food cultures
ReCIPeS FoR A HeALtHY PLAnet
our human existence and experience. It supplies the nutritional energy for life, the congenial context for our family and social interactions, the aesthetic pleasures of taste, aroma and texture. It is something everybody needs – but most people take for granted. It is one of the most creative things that we humans do.
RECIPES FOR A HEALTHY PLANET
Food lies at the heart of
Yet in a hot, resource-limited world of ten billion or more people living an ever-more demanding lifestyle, an endless supply of delicious, nutritious food is no longer a certainty, as Lars Charas explains in this vital book. Around the world scientists and nutritionists are warning us that we tread an increasingly delicate path between humanity’s rising demand for food – due to double within fifty years – and emerging scarcities of the resources needed to produce it: water, soil, nutrients, energy, skills, science and especially the stable climate that gave birth to the age of agriculture. In recent decades the ‘industrialization’ of food has led to an ever-widening gap between the consumer and the farmer, between our knowledge and understanding of food and how it is actually produced today. Most of us have little, if any, concept of how heavily our eating habits tread upon the planet. Put simply, each meal you, or anybody else, eats involves the loss of 10 kg of topsoil and the use of 800 litres of precious water, 1.2 litres of diesel fuel and 0.3 g of pesticide. If these figures were to persist when there are 10 billion people on the planet (estimated in around 2065), our current food system would collapse – and so would the ecosystems that support it, along with their wildlife and plants. Civilization would run out of topsoil and water. Our modern food system is not ‘sustainable’. It has to change. And it will.
healthy, environmentally sustainable, kind to people and to animals and far more diverse than the extremely narrow range of plant and animal foods we experience now. Today the average person eats around 200–300 different plants in their total diet. Yet there are 27,000 edible plants on this planet. Modern humans have yet to begin an exploration of Earth in terms of its true food potential. Drawing on these ‘undiscovered treasures’, the future diet will be far more healthy, tasty and sustainable than the present industrialized food chains permit. Lars Charas is a man with a vision for how to share this understanding of the need to sustain and enrich our food and our diet. He has pursued it with enthusiasm, quiet persistence and dedication for years. This book is one of the fruits of that dedication. It brings the people who design and create our food, as well as those who enjoy it, in touch with the real world need to sustain the food that sustains us far into the future. I strongly commend it. Julian cribb Author of The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It (University of California Press, 2010).
A second reason is that the modern diet is not healthy. Worldwide around two people in every three now die from a diet-related ‘lifestyle’ disease. In rich countries around four people in every five die by their own hand – the hand holding the fork. This fact too, as it becomes more widely known and understood by citizens, is going to drive dramatic change in the Nature and types of foods that we eat, how they are produced and prepared. The responsibility for bringing about that change rests with everyone – with each of us as consumers, with farmers and producers of crops, fish and livestock, with people in the food industry, in particular the chefs and writers of cookery books who decree the modern fashions and tastes in food. To them, above all, falls the responsibility for designing the new ‘world diet’ – one that is safe,
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Foreword
RECIPES FOR A HEALTHY PLANET
Global invasive species (from the center for Invasive species research, (cIsr), university of california, riverside, usA). This map shows the distribution of invasive species observed in various regions across the globe. The most affected areas seem to lie in Europe and the United States but, since the research budgets of these two continents exceed those elsewhere, their findings can only paint a partial picture.
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food, not facebook, is the most powerful way to connect Interview with Alex Atala, executive chef at D.o.M restaurant, Sąo Paulo, Brazil, and creator of the AtÁ Institute of gastronomic biodiversity in Brazil. Chef Atala has a passionate interest in food, nature and indigenous people. Chefs have stepped out of the kitchen and are being celebrated for their art, visions and ideas. this new role can be used for the good, to protect the most valuable things in our profession: natural ingredients and the people surrounding them. Luckily, a new generation is emerging in Brazil and elsewhere that’s thirsty for knowledge and wants to share ideas and experiences in which sustainability, biodiversity and socio-diversity are interconnected. to strengthen this movement, young chefs need to be skilled enough to understand this complex relationship and make sure that the knowledge and experience available in our interconnected world can be furthered by those who spread the word. there are plenty of technologies available to feed the world population of seven billion, but it’s the social and societal dimension of re-organizing food chains so that nature takes a leading role that’s
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more challenging. It is not just about cooking in the kitchen, but about establishing relationships within the entire food chain, in which anthropologists and chefs work closely with psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, agronomists and environmentalists. the At Institute is trying to create new interconnections, and to change the way in which food chains operate. It researches and promotes the consumption of the thousands of local edible plants, mushrooms, berries, fruits and herbs; the institute is trying to get proper Brazilian honey back on the market, and opposes illegal overfishing in the Amazon Basin and Atlantic ocean. the fundamental understanding of food, nature and its people started when chef Atala joined the family during hunting and fishing trips. Forest gatherers started to provide D.o.M. restaurant with fresh produce 15 years ago. this initial contact created a web of foragers throughout Brazil who are collecting a broad variety of plants and herbs on a weekly basis, creating a new bottom-up, socio-economic ecosystem value chain. Still, the first customers who enter D.o.M. get a tasting menu where the chefs have to be creative in their food pairings. those initial experiments lead to a menu for the day or week, in which, in a move to support some of the
many small food-related projects in the country, foraged foods are combined with produce from smallholder farms and fishermen, along with some locally produced game. the increasing support and inquiring nature of consumers and chefs further strengthen the socioeconomic value chains and help to bring more value to local ecosystems and their inhabitants. It is up to the chef to bring about changes, and to choose which type of food chain to support. At the end of the day chefs are dependent on the forests, seas, rivers and land and our duty is to sustain their harvest in the future. Chef Atala has put Brazilian products on the map, it is up to chefs to popularize them.
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Cultivated breadfruit in a community garden in the Pacific region in Colombia, South America. The fruits can weigh up to 35 kg each. 47
ReCIPeS FoR A HeALtHY PLAnet future food cultures
A Fugu fish served in Les CrĂŠations de Narisawa restaurant in Tokyo, Japan.
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and far reaching,’ says Professor Paul Rozin in an interview in this chapter. We are naturally curious and keen to try out new things, he explains, but we are also scared of poisoning ourselves – particularly when confronted by food from other cultures, which may both intrigue and frighten us at the same time. there is no better illustration of this than the fugu, or Japanese puffer fish. the fish has certain parts that are very poisonous and need to be removed with extreme care before it can be eaten. If just a tiny bit is left, the consumer will not survive. Imagine how many people must have died before the most suitable preparation of fugu was arrived at.
The dilemma posed by the puffer fish may seem very extreme, but in truth it has always been with us. This balancing act between fear and curiosity is a natural part of the human state – something that would have been familiar to our hunter–gatherer ancestors, who continually found themselves forced to try out new ingredients by trial and error. More importantly, this process is also part and parcel of change, which evolving societies have always had to embrace. From time immemorial, humans have lived in even the remotest parts of the planet, from deep in the tropical rainforest to Arctic tundra, from the lush green hills of southern China to the high mountains of Peru. Each society adapted to its environment, finding and identifying edible parts of plants and animals and remembering what was useful and what was not. Slowly a food culture developed; people learned how to grow plants and farm animals and brought techniques such as boiling, grilling and braising to the kitchen. Cooking techniques and traditions that were specific to a country or region developed – for instance, slow cooking in olive oil in Turkey, steaming stuffed rice blades in China or fermenting fish in Scandinavia. At the same time, societies made contact with one another through trade, and soon started up an exchange of seeds and produce, of cooking techniques and visions. New ingredients and techniques were quickly absorbed in traditional ways of cooking, and slowly transformed what people were used to. However, the frightening prospect of food insecurity – not having enough to eat – was always around the corner and that in itself was a strong agent of further change. People did everything within their power to make sure that they didn’t go hungry, even resorting to dangerous preservation techniques such as putting maggots in cheese, as in the Sardinian casu marzu, or mixing eggs with ash and quicklime, as in Chinese 100-year-old eggs. (This is a classic case of good coming from adversity – although the techniques were probably an accidental result of experimenting in times of food shortages, they have continued because the resulting flavours proved so popular that they became part of the prevailing food culture.)
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‘Food is fun, frightening
future food cultures
Introduction
RECIPES FOR A HEALTHY PLANET
Heirloom carrot, quinoa and rabbit
future food cultures
nIVen KUnZ
serves 4 2 tsp melted butter 2 saddles of rabbit, about 300 g each zest of 1 lemon 5 g tarragon leaves, chopped salt and freshly ground black pepper for the poaching liquid ½ leek, green part only, chopped 1 celery stick, chopped 3 small sprigs of thyme 2 bay leaves ½ tsp white peppercorns ½ tsp coriander seeds 500 ml hot vegetable stock for the quinoa 200 g quinoa olive oil, for frying and drizzling 1 tsp thyme leaves 2 shallots, finely chopped 1 garlic clove, finely chopped 500 ml carrot juice tarragon leaves, torn for the carrots 1 purple carrot 1 yellow carrot 1 white carrot 1 orange carrot olive oil, for drizzling purslane leaves or other green herb, for garnish
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Apart from being very tasty, rabbit is one of the most sustainable meats to rear, taking about two-thirds less feed than cows to produce 1 kg of meat. In this recipe, it is cooked slowly with herbs to create a tender and delicately flavoured dish.
First prepare the poaching liquid. Put the leek, celery, 2 sprigs of thyme, the bay leaves, peppercorns and coriander seeds in a saucepan large enough to hold both saddles of rabbit. Add the stock and bring almost to the boil – about 90°C. Simmer for 5 minutes, then set aside to cool for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, place a sheet of foil on a work surface and spread the melted butter over it. Sit the saddles of rabbit on it, sprinkle with the lemon zest, tarragon and seasoning, then roll the foil around them, twisting the ends like a toffee to seal tightly. Place in the stock, cover with a lid and poach for 5 minutes. Set aside to cool in the pan. When cold, unwrap the saddles and carve into thin slices. to make the quinoa, place it in a pan with 1 tablespoon olive oil, the thyme leaves, shallots and garlic. Cook, stirring, over a low heat for 2 minutes. Pour in the carrot juice and deglaze the pan by scraping up the bits stuck to the bottom. Bring to the boil, then simmer for about 20 minutes, until the quinoa germ separates from the seed and all the liquid has evaporated. Add some olive oil, tarragon, salt and pepper to taste. to prepare the carrots, pare into long strips using a peeler. Blanch for 1 minute in boiling salted water, then drain and put directly into iced water. Drain again and pat dry with kitchen paper. Drizzle with olive oil, add salt and pepper to taste and roll up each strip. Put the quinoa on a plate, place some pieces of rabbit and rolled carrot alongside and garnish with the purslane leaves.
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GABRIeL LeVIonnoIS
serves 6 1 orange papaya 5 g honey 30 candlenut tree worms 10 g dry candlenut wood chippings 20 g fresh ginger, peeled and chopped 20 g galangal, peeled and chopped 20 g turmeric root, peeled and chopped 2 egg whites 400 g mountain taro root, peeled and grated 1 bunch ramps (wild garlic) 15 g fresh green peppercorns 5 ml grapeseed oil, for frying 100 g chayote fruit and shoots, peeled and chopped 100 g fresh wood ear mushrooms 100 g baby cassabanana fruits, peeled and chopped 100 g pumpkin shoots 100 g amaranth (tropical spinach) 100 g basella (Malabar spinach) 100 g leaves from horseradish tree (Moringa oleifera) 100 g edible hibiscus 100 g winged beans (asparagus peas) 50 g candlenuts, skinned 20 g chillies, deseeded and chopped 2 lemongrass stalks, chopped 2 kaffir lime leaves 5 g sugar milk from 2 coconuts lemon juice, to taste 1.5 litres coconut oil, for frying 100 g tapioca flour salt and freshly ground black pepper
RECIPES FOR A HEALTHY PLANET
Living on a tropical island can have advantages beyond those that first spring to mind. Of course, it’s wonderful to have sunshine, clear seas and unpolluted air, but the flora and fauna can also yield interesting and useful surprises. Fallen and partly decomposed candlenut trees (Aleurites moluccanus), for example, are a favourite breeding ground for worms that provide a useful source of protein. Simply gather them up and place in a wooden box for four days, feeding them daily with grated coconut until fattened and succulent. They can then be cooked with other island produce, such as mushrooms, greens, pods, shoots, herbs and fruit. There is a whole treasure-house of ingredients just waiting to be explored, and this recipe uses a wide selection of them.
Scoop the seeds out of the papaya (you need about 15 g of them) and roast for 5 minutes in a pan at a low heat until crisp or popped. Crush the seeds coarsely and mix with a little salt and the honey. Place the worms in a bowl, add the papaya seed mixture and leave to marinate for 1 hour. Put the candlenut wood chippings in a smoker over a low heat. When they start to smoke, insert the worms and smoke for 4 hours. Combine the ginger, galangal and turmeric with the egg whites to make a paste. Put the grated taro in a bowl, add the ramps and green peppercorns, then season with salt and pepper. Combine the dressing ingredients and season with salt and pepper. Heat 2 ml of the grapeseed oil in a pan and fry the chayote, wood ear mushrooms and cassabanana fruit together for 5 minutes. transfer to a bowl. Deglaze the pan with the dressing, then stir in the pumpkin shoots, amaranth, basella, horseradish leaves, hibiscus and winged beans. Fry for 2 minutes, then combine with the chayote mixture. Put the remaining 3 ml grapeseed oil in a pan, add the candlenuts, chillies, lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves and fry on a low heat until they begin to brown. Add the sugar and stir until it starts caramelizing. Slowly add the coconut milk and mix with a stick blender until a smooth sauce forms. Add lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste. Heat the coconut oil to 150ÂşC. Meanwhile, coat the smoked worms in the tapioca flour, then dip them in the taro mixture. Deep-fry for 5 minutes, until crispy and light brown. Serve straight away with the tropical vegetable mixture.
for the dressing 5 ml grapeseed oil juice of 1 lemon
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smoked candle-tree worms with wild tropical vegetables
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RECIPES FOR A HEALTHY PLANET
JACK YoSS
serves 4 4 tbsp uncooked sticky/sushi rice 160 g octopus, cleaned and refrigerated for 24 hours before use 240 g clams 4 tbsp fish sauce 4 tbsp sugar 2½ tbsp chilli powder 2½ tbsp lime juice 80 g shallots, sliced 4 tsp sliced spring onion 4 tbsp sliced Thai celery 4 tbsp chopped coriander leaves 15–20 mint leaves sea salt
RECIPES FOR A HEALTHY PLANET
The traditional way of preserving salmon in Nordic countries was to salt it heavily and bury it in cold or frozen sand – indeed, the name gravlax means literally ‘buried salmon’. This curing method can be applied to almost any type of fish (though freezers replace frozen sand today), and a variety of seasonings can be added. Oregano, basil and pine needles are commonly used, and some people even add aquavit or cognac. Alcohol, though, tends to overwhelm the delicate flavour of the fish. Preheat the oven to 150ºC. Put the rice on a tray and roast until fragrant and golden brown (about 30 minutes). Allow to cool, then grind in a blender to a slightly coarse texture, not a powder. Bring a small amount of water to the boil in a saucepan, add some salt and cook the octopus, covered with a lid, for 30–40 minutes, until tender. Drain, reserving the water, then set aside to cool. Slice thinly. Put the clams in the reserved water, cover and steam until the shells start to open. Quickly drain and cool. Combine the octopus and clams in a large bowl along with the fish sauce, sugar, chilli powder, lime juice and roasted rice and mix well. Just before serving, stir in the shallots, spring onion, thai celery and coriander leaves. Put in a serving dish and garnish with the mint leaves.
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clams with shallot, celery, roasted rice and thai herbs
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