My Year Without Meat

by Richard Cornish

  Heating food destroys bad microbes. But cooking food at high temperatures creates acrylamides. Acrylamides have been associated with cancer in laboratory rats. You’ll find acrylamides in fried or roasted potato products, coffee, and cereal-based products, including sweet biscuits and toasted bread. So, raw food lovers do have some really good points to make.

  But what I found annoying and off-putting was the way the raw food argument is often couched in a passive-aggressive tone, something like this:

  Your body is actually sort of an alkaline battery, running on electrons. All life-giving chemical reactions only happen when electrons or energy flows between atoms. Cooking or processing causes food to lose electrons—the source of the energy your body needs. Things that are healthy ‘contribute’ electrons/energy, and are called alkalising or ‘reducing’. Things that are unhealthy steal electrons/energy, and are called acidic or ‘oxidising’ (which means to burn up, rust, break down or decay). Your body is designed to be alkaline, like the battery!

  It is interesting to watch a new food movement form. Unsure of themselves and eager to please, advocates of raw food are creating food analogues, dishes that replicate the concept of an existing and accepted format. The raw version of cooked food, the binary opposite of the norm;take an existing food and make a raw version of it. It’s like building props from papier-mâché. It’s the same sad path that some vegetarians went down by creating meat-free versions of the real thing. The logic behind an industrial vegetarian product like Tofurky—tofu turkey—is that it is the fake copying the ‘real’ version. While the raw food movement is still in the phase of trying to prove itself, it could possibly overcome this misstep. Hopefully, it will forge its own path, and create some interesting food that celebrates the flavour of truly excellent fruit and vegetables.

  I flew back to Melbourne on one of those hot days when the wind blows down from the north. A hot, dry wind that seems to pick up every different type of pollen, dust and tiny irritating granule of matter from the parched interior, and funnel it into one’s eyes, nose and throat. As a long-time sufferer of hay fever, these are the days I dread most. A blocked nose that can erupt into a streaming mass of ectoplasmic mucus in the blink of an eye. A roof of the mouth that itches incessantly. Eyes that feel like tiny ants are crawling around the sides of them. Sneezing attacks that last for minutes, rendering one unable to talk, walk or, even worse, drive. I walked outside the airport through a wall of cigarette smoke produced by ashen-faced travellers. A small eddy of wind picked up a pile of dead leaves, dust and boarding passes and threw it in my face. I did not sneeze, I did not twitch, I did not wheeze, I did not itch. I did not get hay fever.

  Meat contains a substance called arachidonic acid. I did not research this until my hay fever stopped. To me arachidonic acid sounds like something you’d get if you put spiders in a grape press. It is structurally related to arachidic acid, found in peanut oil. (Arachis hypogaea is the botanical name for the peanut plant.) Arachidonic acid is a fatty acid and is important in the functioning of our bodies, doing a range of jobs, such as getting certain cells to go about their tasks—that’s called cellular signalling. It helps get certain enzymes up and running to do their chores in the body. It is a vasodilator—meaning it widens blood vessels. It also plays an important part in our body’s inflammatory response.

  In the early 2010s, respected human nutrition researcher Dr Richard Rosenkranz, working at the University of Western Sydney, undertook a cross-sectional study of 156,035 Australian men and women. He found that high meat consumption was associated with a 25 per cent increase in diagnosed hay fever or asthma, and a 10 per cent increase in asthma alone. In an article detailing the study’s findings, published in 2012 in Nutrition Journal, he concluded:

  Generally, diets marked by greater intakes of meats, poultry, and seafood were associated with diagnosed asthma and hay fever. Taken together, these findings suggest that adherence to a more meat-based diet may pose risk for asthma and asthma/hay fever in Australian adults. The research also explored that a typical Western diet is poor in antioxidants and high in saturated fats that makes the people susceptible for these ailments.

  After a lifetime of suffering a face explosion every time the wind changed, I no longer had hay fever. A diet of really good seasonal vegetables and grains had put an end to over four decades of never feeling safe to leave the house unless I had several handkerchiefs stuffed into my pockets and a spare pack of tissues lying in my laptop bag.

  I also lost weight. Lots of weight. As I said before, I am not a small man. But after nearly twelve months without eating meat (except for some notable transgressions) I was substantially smaller. When I first spoke to the editor of The Age Epicure about writing on this topic, I weighed 120 kilograms. That’s about two washing machines. When I stepped onto the scales a year later I weighed 103 kilograms. I had been walking around with the equivalent of a well-built blue heeler around my waist for almost a decade. This weight loss made my knees very happy. I suffer from a degenerative bone disease (nothing serious, you don’t need to organise a crowd-funded charity bike marathon for me), which makes my knees hurt. Weighing less means they hurt less.

  It was time for the doctor’s appointment. Again, nothing serious, just the ritual sitting down and being told off for drinking too much and being too fat, by someone who drives a considerably better car than I ever will. I also had my blood tested to see how my iron levels were going. I knew I was healthier but it’s not something you can put a number on. It’s not often I get praise from my GP. It’s not often that I leave the doctor’s rooms feeling emotionally better. But on this day I walked out the door feeling taller, lighter, fitter and healthier. My cholesterol was down from seven to five. He told me the lower the number, the better. I believed him. He drives an Audi S4.

  16

  The Loneliest Vegetarianin Andalusia

  The flight attendant ushered me to the left. I took my seat and played with the seat controls, like an 8-year-old boy. I made the seat lie flat then bend in the middle, before quickly bringing it to upright position as the cabin crew started pouring the champagne. I have the best job in the world. I travel across Australia and around the world writing about food. On this occasion, my work with MoVida group of restaurants saw MoVida chef and co-owner Frank Camorra and me heading back to Spain for another book. We were flying Turkish Airlines, as they fly into Málaga from Singapore. We were up the pointy end of the plane, thanks to a favour from our mates at the Spain Tourism office in Singapore. Turkish Airlines prides itself on its food and has an onboard chef plating up meals for business class. Once the passengers were seated, the chef, wearing a large, soft beret, entered the cabin with a theatrical flourish. It was impressive but still quite absurd, as airlines use the same airport caterers. He was garnish.

  I have always ordered vegetarian meals when flying. Not due to health concerns. Quite the opposite. ‘Special’ meals are delivered before the main meal drop, so you get the flight attendant wandering around the aisle trying to match the seat number on the sticker on the meal with your seat number on the display above the seat. You get served first and get a glass of wine before the rest of the cabin. On long-haul flights you can be fed and watered, wrapped up in the thin synthetic blanket and have your eyeshades on while the rest of the plane is still grinding their way through their chicken in grey sauce.

  The meal was good. A really well-presented, inoffensive pan-global vegetable dish, showing off some good knife skills in carving the veg;a nod to Turkey’s Mediterranean culinary heritage and a decent feed. This was followed by French cheese, Turkish pastries and good coffee. Excellent. Because I was heading to Spain, a nation where vegetarianism is still in its conceptual phase, I realised it would probably be the last time I would easily get a meat-free meal.

  A NANO-HISTORY OF SPAIN AND ITS LOVE OF PORK

  Spaniards eat a lot of meat. The average Spaniard consumes 118 kilograms of flesh each year, a 6-fold increase since the dark days
of the Franco era, when they existed mostly on seasonal vegetables and around 50 grams of meat per day. Today, Spaniards eat over 300 grams of meat a day. Their industrially raised chicken is really good compared with the bland $10 chicken we see here. But travellers to Spain don’t see much chicken in restaurants, as it is considered food for the home. In the centre and north of the country, Spaniards also eat a lot of lamb, and game in season, and throughout the country seafood, jamón and pork appear in almost every dish. And I mean every dish. There’s a great vegetable dish called menestra—seasonal veg of perhaps runner beans and squash, sometimes cooked in a little tomato sauce. Various versions are made across the country, perhaps with more tomato in the south and more beans in the north. What unites them is not just the seasonal nature of the dish but the use of jamón. Jamón in Spain is not just air-dried ham. It is not the Spanish equivalent of prosciutto; it is much more than that. Eating jamón is a patriotic act, something one does when one is truly Spanish. This has its roots in the fifteenth century, when publicly eating pork was a culinary shibboleth, a tacit act to prove to everyone watching that one was neither a Muslim nor a Jew.

  When the Moors crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa into the Iberian Peninsula in the early 700s, pork was well and truly on the menu. Previous invaders, the Romans, had already established a trade in ham, sending back to Rome pork preserved in lard in terracotta amphorae. As the Roman Empire in the west fell, the Visigoth rulers filled the vacuum. Within a few centuries the Visigoths were at war with each other, leaving them vulnerable to the expanding Muslim caliphate that was sweeping out of the Middle East and around the African shores of the Mediterranean. In 712 a Berber called Tariq ibn Ziyad landed near Gibraltar and marched north towards where Jerez de la Frontera is today. His troops defeated Visigoth king Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete and then marched north, eventually taking over almost all of the Iberian Peninsula, stopping at the Picos de Europa and leaving the Christian Kingdom of Asturias on the green coast of the Bay of Biscay intact. For most of the 780 years of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, Jews and Christians were allowed to remain and still practise their religions, as long as they paid the jizyah, or tax. Jews and Christians are considered ‘People of the Book’ according to the Qur’an, and are allowed to live in conquered lands as long as they pay the jizyah and ‘feel themselves subdued’.

  The Christian kings of the north were less convivial towards the Muslims as they slowly reconquered Spain, slaughtering many of them as they regained territory. The Jews too were massacred, with tens of thousands killed in genocides in cities across Spain. The reconquest of Spain, however, also saw Jews and Muslims offered the possibility of converting to Christianity. Those who did became conversos. Becoming a converso meant more than being baptised. The reality was Jews and Muslims were worshipping Christ and eating pork in public but praying to Yahweh or Allah in secret.

  There is a groundswell of Jewish academics believing that one of Spain’s greatest and most memorable literary characters was a converso. In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the sidekick, Sancho Panza, describes himself as an ‘old Christian’ while the Don Quixote just says that he is a Christian. In one chapter, Quixote’s food is described as ‘una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos’. This refers to such dishes as a stockpot with beef or chopped mutton. Salpicón is salad, which is eaten most nights; he eats lentils on Fridays, and on Sundays he has some squab—a dish showing his pretensions to nobility. Notice, however, there is no pork. Except a dish called ‘duelos y quebrantos’. This was a dish of eggs cooked in pork fat, with other porky bits, and eaten by conversos in public on the Jewish Sabbath and to break the laws of kashrut to prove that one was not a Jew. Chewing the fat to save one’s neck.Conversos went to elaborate lengths to prove their newfound obedience to the Catholic Church and, more importantly, the Catholic kings of Spain. Cured hams would hang in kitchens, where they could be seen by the outside world.

  The foods of the Moors and Sephardic Jews are still cooked in the kitchens of Christian Spaniards today. Dishes such as lamb roasted with honey, and fish balls made with minced fish and stale breadcrumbs. While these dishes are largely eaten in the south, pork and jamón are ubiquitous across the peninsula. From the fat rendered from chorizos spread on toasted bread at breakfast, to the lard used in pastries made in convents, to the chunks of pork and jamón that sit in legume stews such as cocido and fabada, pork is king in Spain. Long live the king.

  Asking for a meal without meat in Spain is greeted not with contempt but puzzlement. ‘Why would you not eat meat?’ is asked politely. This attitude comes from a people for whom starvation during the Spanish Civil War is still within their living memory. Thousands died from want of food. Countless thousands more fled to the hills and lived on food foraged from the wild. This plays out today with a craze for fungus in the wealthier north of the country, particularly among the Gen Xers and younger people. In the south there is still resistance, particularly from older people, who associate eating mushrooms with the hard years of the Spanish Civil War.

  This understanding of poverty has resulted in food waste being a non-existent problem in the traditional kitchens of the south, where there is a use for anything that is edible. This sees tiny bits of jamón, such as the bone and the skin, used in dishes to create flavour, texture and nutrition. This also sees every single part of the pig, as well, used in the kitchen after slaughter. In a bar in Extremadura, several years before this visit, I was served a tapa plate of pickled pigs’ tails sprinkled with local smoked paprika. That was it. Pickled pigs’ tails. In Calle de la Cruz in Madrid, there is a bar that specialises in flat grilled pigs’ ears and sweetbreads called La Oreja de Jaime. In Australia we’d call it ‘Jamie’s Ears’.

  Breakfast for a vegetarian in Spain is easy. It’s generally coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice and perhaps some toast and jam. Depending on what you did the night before, the juice and toast can be substituted with a cigarette and brandy. If you want manteca, rendered sausage fat, you can have it on toast. Or you can also have fresh tomato pulp, salt and extra virgin olive oil on toast, if you like. If you’re staying in a hotel with a dining room, then order the revueltos. These are like scrambled eggs but eight times better. Slightly wet and silky they are often enriched with hongos or setas, known in English as mushrooms. With coffee and juice, reveultos con setas sets the day up beautifully.

  When we landed on this trip it was early spring and the first of the artichokes and asparagus were in the markets. This made eating meat-free a lot easier as they were specials on most menus. Artichokes cooked in sherry is a popular dish, although jamón is often added to the dish. The port city of Málaga is known for its porras, thick cold soups made with bread, and a cousin of gazpacho. The recipes for these dishes are thousands of years old, mentioned in the Old Testament, and the dishes are still eaten on a daily basis. They could be made with oranges; perhaps tomatoes or garlic. We found in Marbella a dish of eggs stuffed with piquillo peppers and slathered in mayonnaise, a fragrantly spicy dish of spinach with chickpeas and pine nuts, plus desserts with sponge and cream. The south of Spain is also home to a diverse range of sheep’s and goat’s milk cheeses, some raw milk and semi-matured, making them very deep flavoured and delicious. There is also a new breed of bakers in the south of Spain who are supplanting the Franco-era dry industrial white breads with really good-quality long-time fermented bread.

  EL MATACHIN

  After some time spent on the sunny Mediterranean we were heading up to the region of Huelva. We were driving there to explore the lore around la matanza, or the killing of the pig, and to speak with the maker of one of the best jamóns in the nation. Huelva is to the north-west of Seville. One way of getting there is to go down to the coast near Cádiz, then follow the shore north towards Portugal. This route more or less follows the meandering estuary of the Guadalquivir,
or Great River. Literally. ‘Guadal’ is Arabic for river and ‘quivir’ means great. It rises in the Sierra de Cazorla and flows through Córdoba and Seville, before making its way through the plains to the Atlantic at Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Dotted on the plains are towns with names like Isla Mayor or ‘biggest island’. The area was once a waterworld, a massive wetland, the Kakadu of Europe. It was home to an ancient civilisation called the Tartessos, who navigated between the islands in boats. They had their own language, currency and culture. When the wetlands began to be drained by the Phoenicians for salt farming and aquaculture, the Tartessos were vulnerable and their civilisation died out. This vast wetland was slowly diminished over the millennia, river flows slowed and the delta it fed silted up, creating a brand new coast around Cádiz. The final straw came with Franco, who turned over vast areas to rice farming. One of the planet’s great wetlands was transformed into farmland. When we talk about the effects that agriculture has on the environment, you only need look at what is left of the Guadalquivir delta. There are remnants, amazingly, of what once covered a sixth of Andalusia. In the Doñana National Park flamingos sieve for krill in the briny lagoons, while kites reel in the sky above. Hares lope about the scrub on the dunes, while schools of young fish break the surface of the still waters in a silvery shimmer. There is a drainage channel, and then flat rice fields to the horizon in every direction for 180 degrees.