Future food, future health

Future food, future health: remodelling traditional Indigenous food and lifeways.!

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Dr Patrick Jones, author of “Walking for food: Regaining permapoesis” (Doctoral thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2014)."

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Indigenous Men’s Health Conference, Cairns, October 15-17, 2014"

The author acknowledges the Palm Island community, the Manbarra and Bwgcolman peoples, for their generous spirit in sharing their knowledges."

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All of the photographs in this paper were taken by Dr Patrick Jones on Palm Island in August 2014.

A description of each image can be found at the end of this document."

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Please note. The contents of this paper falls under a Creative Commons, non-commercial and share-alike license. It therefore can be shared and copied for all purposes other than commercial.

Future food, future health: remodelling traditional Indigenous food and lifeways.!

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Abstract! !

Does the food we eat and how we go about obtaining it shape the culture we make, shape the people we become? In this paper Jones examines this question and outlines his theory and practice of 'walked for food', based on remodelling traditional forms of food procurement. Jones recognises the inherent damages of the industrialised food system, both to the land and to peoples' health. By studying the traditional foods of Indigenous Australians and the newcomer foods that have naturalised since 1788, Jones puts together a comprehensive inventory of what he calls ‘autonomous edibles’ in Australia and explains their health benefits in an era of chronic foodrelated illnesses. For the past 11 months Jones and his family have been slowly cycling up the east coast of Australia from southern Victoria, camping and sampling numerous species, which will constitute a new book of freely obtained, edible and medicinal foods found in Australia. Jones argues that community gardening, foraging, fishing and hunting are profound ways to re-establish healthy diets and are active modes of food procurement that cost little or nothing to achieve. He argues that traditional Indigenous lifeways concerning food and energy consumption are future models for healthy people, communities and environments, and a way for people to reconnect with the land in spiritual, cultural and practical ways. Even if these autonomous edibles constitute just a small percentage of a community’s diet, the nutritional, medicinal and cultural values of freshly gathered food may be significant. These non-monetised foods, medicines and cultural lifeways currently have little status in Australia and this, Jones argues, needs to be challenged. He believes communities like Palm Island are at the frontier in reclaiming health and well-being as the people remain close to what he calls ecological gift economies."

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Dr Patrick Jones, " author of “Walking for food: Regaining permapoesis” (Doctoral thesis, UWS, 2014)"

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No, no, no sickness really, only clean one – because they lived on wild honey and meat" – they have been living on bush tucker – nothing – no tea, no sugar, no ice-cream or lollies, nothing – only been living on bush honey, bush tomatoes, bush raisins, edible seeds and grass seeds – any kind of seeds – they lived on yams – no sickness – nothing, all good – nothing, they were good living in them days – they only got sick from a cold – only catching a cold, that’s all – no more – no sickness, nothing – because they living on different food – yeah, different food bush tucker…1"

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The Indigenous health model pre-1788 is unsurpassable. People ate a wide range of nutritious foods and were active and fit by obtaining them. The type of food consumed and the way they were obtained helped develop cultures of ecological sophistication where people were extremely knowledgeable about the world around them. Samantha Martin, a young descendant of the Kija and Jaru from the east Kimberly region of Western Australia, writes how this knowledge was passed on generationally: “My mother would show me the shape of the different leaves and the barks of different plum trees and berry trees and she would tell me to memorise that plant for next time.”2 Remnants of such handed-down knowledge continue today, but overall the western diet and the western economic imperative that has produced it has seen to the proliferation of food-related disease and the erosion of ecological knowledges. As a result our ecological footprints are heavy and damaging."

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While the future of food may appear to many as what new convenience product is seductively screened on highway billboards or in TV ads, I argue in this paper that the future of food is actually the past, and this, contiguously, is the future of health."

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Throughout Australia the statistics for chronic food-related illness appear to aggregate each year, especially among Indigenous communities. When I asked Grace, a Torres Straight Islander working at the Dreamtime Cultural Centre in Rockhampton, what was the greatest threat her people faced today she was unhesitant in identifying western food. Poor diet and chronic food-related disease is becoming a generational problem as the old food knowledge looses status and interest, replaced by a perceived convenience. Food-related substance abuse, addiction and dependancy is the result of unscrupulous admen, a profit-obsessed industry that employs them and weak governance. There is no quick fix to such a systemic predicament, particularly when ‘monoculture money’ has grown so large. Sugar, processed in the same way as cocaine but arguably more addictive, is a powerful and seemingly untouchable industry, and despite the immutable link between diabetes, heart disease obesity and mental illness, the industry goes on unchecked and remains freely ‘open for business’. According to Dr David Reuben, refined sugar is not a food, it is

1

Joe, Ali Curung elder, NT, transcribed from Message Stick, series 12, episode 11: ‘The Artists of Ali Curung’, ABC iview, April 2010.

2

Martin, Samantha. Bush Tukka Guide, Explore Australia Publishing Pty Ltd. Richmond 2014.

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a pure chemical, a drug.3 Professor Graham MacGregor, from the UK campaign group Action on Sugar, says “sugar is an unnecessary source of calories and a major cause of obesity, therefore causing many deaths and diabetes.”4"

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Today government hands are tied tightly by the donating lobbyists of big industries and because of this communities cannot rely on governments to create effective responses to a predicament or crisis. According to a Queensland Health official I spoke with on Palm Island, funding in health is given to producing chemical pharmaceuticals, because that is were the money is. It’s a perfect system of ill-health: create an impoverished food system by taking the medicine out of the food and what you then require is a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry. While this is a win for business and capitalism, it is a great loss for people and their environments. An example of this is the food store on Palm Island. It is owned by the Queensland State Government and it sells a disproportionate amount of highly-processed and innutritious foods such as sugar drinks, lollies, packaged chips, frozen foods and even 4 litre tins of white processed sugar. The rates of type 2 diabetes, obesity and heart disease on Palm Island are among the highest anywhere in Queensland.5 But the negative news from Palm Island is well documented and discussed, what about the positive stories?"

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Referring to his painting of two echidnas hunting ants, reproduced as the cover art of the Palm Island Health Action Plan 2010-2015, Allan Palm Island, a traditional custodian and artist, writes: “This is one of the traditional foods and like all bush tucker has a strong connection to the health and wellbeing of people on Palm Island.”6"

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My family and I recently spent a week on the island, witnessing and participating in non-monetised food procurement. What Allan Palm Island also says in the report about people still gathering traditional foods7 is true, and what was inspiring to see is how many young people are knowledgeable about such food. Each day we would walk or bike around the island documenting edible and useful species. We asked Bwgcolman children to help us identify certain plants and asked them the traditional uses. There was always one who had the knowledge. Each afternoon we fished on the jetty with kids who like us were catching dinner. Barracuda, trivially and barramundi cod were our mainstay catches. It occurred to us that young people here are more prepared for the challenges of this century than any we’d come across in our eleven month, slow transit north by bicycles up the east coast of Australia from cold southern Victoria. "

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Often left to their own devices Palm kids are free-ranging joy seekers. Breaking open 3

Reuben, Dr David. Everything you always wanted to know about nutrition, Simon and Schuster, 1978 4

Carpenter, Louise. Life without sugar: one family’s 30-day challenge, Carpenter interviews Professor MacGregor, The Observer, 15 March 2014.

5

Palm Island Aboriginal Shire Council: Palm Island Health Action Plan 2010-2015, Brisbane 2011.

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ibid. p4.

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ibid. p4.

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coconuts on the beach with large rocks, fishing and hunting, making tools such as spears, riding bikes, swimming, walking, playing ball sports, bareback riding horses that also free-range on the island, playing with the town dogs, listening to music, play-fighting, dancing, laughing, jumping off the jetty. Much of this life is unsupervised and filled with joy. For many of these kids learning takes place in their environment. Older kids pass on knowledge, as do parents, aunties and uncles. At the jetty one afternoon we met Wayne, a young father, twenty years old. His knowledge of traditional foods was exceptional and as we walked home with him, his partner Katrina and their newborn son, Wayne junior, we ran through a list of free foods, medicines and other useful species we had observed and consumed on the island. "

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Our combined list that was later added to by Nick McBride, another knowledgeable local man, includes the following species: Mango, chinee apple, banana, bush banana, African tulip tree, bush lemon, amaranth, coconut, barracuda, barramundi cod, sea turtle, bush passionfruit, snakeweed, snapper, trevally, brush turkey, echidna, possum, Burdekin plum, bush cucumber, cluster fig, autonomous goat, queenfish, clam, native mulberry, rock wallaby, mud mussel, spider shell, crab, pipi, cassava, sweet potato, naturalised squash, mangrove snail, mud whelk, stingray, sea caper, beach cherry, autonomous pig, jackfruit, emu berry, Pacific rosewood, lady apple, fleabane, goats foot, dugong, grasshopper, naturalised tomato, green ant, guava, mullet, nardoo, native gooseberry, native rock fig, pandanus, paw paw, peanut or monkey nut tree, mackerel, purslane, oyster, emu berry and tropical almond. I believe that this cursory list of near 60 species could easily aggregate with more thorough research and further compiling of local knowledges."

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We saw a number of these species being consumed and we consumed a modest number ourselves. The availability of this walked-for, hunted and fished food was to us a gift economy of significant importance. When governments have successively crippled Indigenous communities with ‘fly in fly out’ bandaid solutions, demanded Aboriginal people perform like white suburbanites anchoring them to a dependancy on the monetised economy and its toxic food system, it is little wonder Indigenous groups are resistant to more governmental interventions."

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Community sovereignty over food, uncorrupted by money, is the future of food and health in Australia, and this is the model of health that has been in operation in Australia for the majority of human existence. Ignorance or intransigence of such an optimal health model has been wrapped up in various forms of racial discrimination over the past 200 years and more, and continues today.

But if we undress all the prejudices, mis-truths and lies we find an exemplary food model – local, free, organic, medicinal, diverse, nutritious and walked-for. Within such a model the corruption of food by big business becomes more difficult. Money is instead traded for knowledge, and with greater knowledge less money is required."

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Rich culture comes from healthy peoples. If a culture is starving it doesn’t have the time or inclination to produce rich cultural forms. The same can be said if a culture is too affluent leading to complacency, passivity and ethical corruption. The rich cultural forms produced in Australia pre-1788 are testament to a diverse and abundant food supply. Traditional bush tucker was the mind and body fuel used to make rich culture, culture that was holistically sustainable and

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regenerative, not extractive and polluting. Indigenous art, food, science and economics were all contiguous and non-delineated, all part of producing numerous ecological cultures embedded in loved and understood country. "

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So what forms and lifeways from the past can we include in a future food-health model that involves a bottom-up, community-led rebuild?"

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Foraging is not just about free food and medicine. It is about understanding land, being involved in the processes enacted by our earth others and observing changes in our environments with infinite detail. Margaret Ah Sam, a descendant of the Mitakoodi and Waanyi people of northwest Queensland, writes that “[k]nowledge of the seasons and signs of food sources was learned when we were young. For instance when the white wood blossoms, we know the freshwater crocodile is laying her eggs. When the turpentine wattle is in bloom, the emu chicks are hatching and when the bloodwood and other eucalypts are in bloom it means it’s time for the sugar bag, ‘nature honey’.”8 "

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Foraging, forest gardening, fishing and hunting enact lifeways that don’t extract and harm systemically, but rather are in relationship with other lifeways and forms. This food is communitybased and non-privatised. The industrial food model is the opposite. It puts food production into the hands of a few and so knowledges about land, species, climate and sustainability are lost or privatised. Under this model we have seen the depletion of vast species of plants and animals and witnessed widespread damage to the biosphere. If we keep handing over our pay cheques to such a system of abuse we will continue to path the way for societal and environmental ill health. "

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Despite the reduction of possible forgeable bush tuckers in Australia due to privatisation of land for farming, mining and human settlements, there are a surprising number of newcomer species (weeds and feral animals) that are edible, medicinal and common. The combination of traditional tuckers alongside useful newly naturalised species increases the foraging sphere significantly.

Weeds and feral animals have proliferated, and many are beneficial to human life. Government and business have together grown a multibillion dollar industry to chemically poison these potential edible-medicinal species, and in doing so have created environmental hazards (notably1080 and glysophate) and herbicide-resistant superweeds.

Knowledge about newcomer species remain scarce and marginalised, however with the serious potential for descending affluence this century there is again a growing interest in these hardy and resilient species. "

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On a walk through the streets of Palm Island we came across Ashley Walsh, a Bwgcolman man, who came out of his house brandishing a copy of the Townsville newspaper our family was in. He introduced himself by asking us to sign the article which discussed our research into free food in Australia. Ashley listed for us all the different meats on the island that did not come from the island’s store. Wild pig can be hunted, brush turkey, possum, echidna, wallaby, all manner of seafood including dugong and sea turtle and an endless supply of wild goat that live autonomously on Palm and a nearby island. He 8

Ah Sam, Margaret. Mitakoodi Bush Tucker: Edible and medicinal plants of the northwest highlands and gulf plains of Queensland. Black Ink Press with Mitakoodi Juhnjlar Corporation, Thuringowa and Mount Isa Queensland 2006.

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told me that a dog and a knife is all that is needed to hunt pigs. Colonisation has tried to instruct Indigenous people all over the world to feel ashamed of their non-monetary economies, their lifeways and their cultures. Work to the coloniser is framed in terms of monetary exchange so as one can go to the shops to buy privatised food for the family. What is not valued are localised gift economies that are inherently ecological, producing little or no packaging, production and transportation pollutions. With such nuanced and local ways of food procurement business cannot profit"

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Many Indigenous communities in Australia do not have access to their own land or water to enact or recreate more traditional lifeways and therefore create better food health. Cutting access to land and water have crippled Indigenous gift economies and forced people to join the exceedingly damaging and health-destroying global monetary economy, an economy based on perpetuating war, unrest, pollution and hatred."

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The longer my family and I were on Palm we realised that it wasn't far from being a significant model for healthy food and living for all Australian communities. Yes, the impact of western food is a significant problem, but unlike most communities in Australia, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, the remnant knowledges and the possibilities alive to recreate healthy food ecologies within walking distance to people's homes is extremely strong. It became clear to us that the Palm Island community is in many ways leading the way for a walked-for food economy, that is a return to nonmonetised health food. The greatest challenge for this community and indeed all in Australia, is how to transition away from damaging monetised food and re-establish medicinal-ecologicalcommunity food networks. "

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When my family and I came to Palm Island we learned that there are about 3,000 people on the island, comprising both the traditional custodians, the Manbarra people, and the many tribes brought here punitively and brutally who are now known as the Bwgcolman people. We also learnt that about 800 people are ‘unemployed’. That’s nearly 25% of Palm residents. But if we return to the many tribal economies in Australia prior to 1788, it is easy to argue that 100% of Indigenous Australians were unemployed according to the western idea of economy, poverty was non-existent, and people’s health, according to ethnobotanist Dr Beth Gott, was unsurpassable. The reason for such health is because people were eating a diverse range of walked-for foods and their carbohydrates were mostly fructans not starches. Speaking about traditional diets of tribes in Victoria and their main staples of various lily and murnong tubers, Gott argues that fructans, which are polymers of fructose sugar, undergo digestion by bacteria in the colon, producing short-chain fatty acids and no rise in blood glucose. Starches on the other hand, she argues, are polymers of glucose sugars, digested in the small intestine and cause a rise in blood glucose.9 It is clear that Aboriginal people were extremely sophisticated nutritionists unclouded by the imperatives of profit and fully focussed on community health and well-being. "

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The marriage of flour and sugar has been a lethal weapon in destroying Indigenous health across Australia for over 200 years, as has the shepherding of people into ‘jobs’ rather than the continuation of community roles that foster ecological food, energy, arts and preventable medicine sources. Diabetes, chronic heart disease and obesity were unheard of in pre-1788 Australia, acknowledgement of which must raise questions about unchecked civil prejudices and what is intelligent human life and what is not. "

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Gott, Dr Beth. Aboriginal Medicinal Plants, unpublished powerpoint presentation, Monash University 2012.

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It is my thesis here, being wholly informed by the Indigenous model, that health food is synonymous with free food. Once food is capitalised upon it is more than likely impoverished and innutritious, corrupted by the will-to-profit. Walked-for, gardened, just-picked, foraged, harvested and hunted food not only produces fresh and nutritious food, the body has participated actively in its procurement. Fast food outlets and supermarkets both brandish the word ‘fresh’ at every possible place to manipulate people into thinking that what they eat is really OK. More than likely the freshest food in these places has been in cold storage or frozen for weeks if not months. How many studies compare freshly foraged food eaten within a minute of picking with store bought or fast food produce? Do they exist? Why don’t they?"

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Because there is little or no money in funding such transitions back to ecological and communityderived healthy food, communities will need to instead work on promoting and even reinstating gift economies and community resilience around food. Small-scale gardening and farming, reproducing perennial grasslands by traditional fire management knowledge to grow animal populations, and hunting and fishing all go together to create a permaculture. Permaculture bases its theory and practice on human settlements that have produced long-term (permanent) cultures.

Palm Island is very close to re-establishing a model permaculture, and could be regarded as a frontier community in re-establishing non-damaging life-ways. The major challenge for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is how to re-instate culturally-specific lifeways that honour the wisdom of ancestral knowledge and help heal the scars from the pathologies of monetary colonisation."

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All of the photographs in this paper were taken by Dr Patrick Jones on Palm Island in August 2014.

They include in order of appearance. Page 1. unripe native rock fig. Page 2. bush cucumber. Page 3. Palm Island store sugar tins. Page 4. Palm Island kids eating coconuts. Page 5. unripe fruit of the peanut tree. Page 6. autonomous goats. Page 7. Palm Island store soft drink isle. Page 8. tropical or beach almonds."

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The author acknowledges the Palm Island community, the Manbarra and Bwgcolman peoples, for their generous spirit in sharing their knowledges."