Feather and Bone owners Grant Hilliard and Laura Dalrymple.

Preface

Every day for the past 14 years, we’ve been answering questions in our butchery from people trying to come to terms with their relationship to meat. People who have a desire to do the ‘right’ thing (whatever that may be for them), but find the food production landscape opaque and confusing.

‘Where does my meat come from?’

‘How did it live?’

‘How did it die?’

‘What impact did it have on climate change?’

‘What do the labels mean?’

‘How do I cook it?’

‘How much should I eat?’

‘Should I eat meat at all?’

This book gives you our answers to these questions, with the goal of helping you to decide which food production systems you want to support. We’re a partnership, so sometimes we tell our story in unison, and sometimes we speak alone.

We start deep in the soil and finish on the table and, along the way, we share our experiences, inspiring stories from our community, as well as recipes for eating the whole animal and not wasting a morsel.

We’re unapologetically on the side of food production systems that foster sustainable biodiversity, resilience and vitality in soil, plant, animal and human communities. That might sound a bit vague and possibly self-evident, like saying you’re on the side of good not evil, or that you don’t support axe murderers. After all, who wouldn’t support sustainable diversity, resilience and vitality?

Well, most of us, as it turns out. This isn’t intentional, of course, but we’ve become so disengaged from the sources of our food that we mostly can’t vouch for the way it was produced. In fact, when you look beyond the packaging, the truth is that most of the food we consume is over-processed, nutritionally compromised and produced out of an intensive, monocultural system that is dependent on external interventions. That system is intrinsically fragile — certainly not diverse, resilient and vital.

This is problematic in countless ways, not least of which are the consequences for human health. It turns out there’s a direct link between the diversity and health of microbial life in the human gut and the diversity and microbial life in the soil in which our food grows, via the chain of plants and animals we consume. We are, literally, what our food ate. The broader the range of foods we eat and the broader the range of foods they ate, the more diverse our gut microbiome becomes, and the more resilient we are to physical and mental disease. It’s not surprising that the exploding rate of inflammatory diseases, such as diabetes and dementia, correlates to the decline in the diversity of foods we eat and the attendant reduction in gut microbial diversity. (It’s what we see at the butchery every day: more and more people coming in with chronic, inexplicable allergies, and inflammation and gut problems. Of course, they are a tiny percentage of the population, but they come to us because they’re looking for clean food as medicine, and to us it looks like an epidemic.)

Incidentally, not only has the diversity of foods we eat declined, but we also don’t cook and eat together as much as we did 50 years ago. Given that social interaction is a key predictor of good mental health, it’s probably no accident that mental health problems are on the rise. (There you go, it’s not only doing the crossword and learning how to tap dance that will help fend off dementia, it’s cooking and eating together, too!)

When it comes to the way our food is produced, we do have a choice — we don’t just have to swallow what’s served up. We can start demanding more transparency and accountability from the people selling us our food — whether it’s plant or animal-based — and spend our money supporting agricultural systems that match our views and beliefs. We can eat a little less meat with a little more provenance — and we can cook together more, gathering around the table and building our own diverse, resilient and vital communities.

Pasture-raised Berkshire Duroc weaner pigs at Extraordinary Pork, NSW. Extraordinary Pork run a very rare closed- loop system in which the heritage breed pigs’ entire life cycle occurs on the farm — from birth to death. Read about them here.