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International News Title: Hunter-gatherer master chefs Would you cut the head off a chicken in front of your children? Survive only on what you can grow? What about needing a licence to eat meat? The harsh realities of food production that have all but disappeared from daily life are being reintroduced with vigour by a new flock of radical chefs. The farmer and Whole Larder Love blogger Rohan Anderson has been called a chicken murderer on Twitter and been forced to defend teaching his young daughters the bloody realities of the meat they eat. "Killing is considered so offensive because it's hidden from view of most people who consume meat," Anderson said. Four years ago he quit the rat race to live sustainably off a small Ballarat farm. Advertisement "We are addicts of convenience. If you did a vox pop on the main street of Ballarat no one would know how their food was produced." Anderson restricts meat to what he raises and hunts himself: chicken, eel, quail, rabbit and duck and the occasional leg of pork from a neighbour who treats animals ethically. Restaurateurs James Parry and Daniel Puskas are making plans to raise and slaughter their own cattle. Half the herbs and vegetables they use in their Stanmore restaurant, Sixpenny, are grown on a 300-square-metre plot on the farm of Parry's in-laws in Bowral. At least twice a week, after planting, tending and weeding, they fill two large portable coolers with vegetables such as lettuces, sweet potatoes and sugarsnap peas. They rarely print menus, allowing their harvest to shape their dishes. A soybean crop last year failed when autumn arrived early. "But if something fails then we do something else," Puskas said. “Growing our own food is what we want to be doing on our days off." Further afield, Canadian chef Michael Stadtlander and Sweden's Magnus Nilsson are both renowned for their fiercely regional cuisine, and their careers flourished after they abandoned the traditional trappings of "fine-dining" restaurants. At Faviken Magasinet, Nilsson's 12-seat restaurant on a remote hunting property 600 kilometres north of Stockholm, diners may be served wild trout roe rolled in dried pig's blood or pork broth filtered through moss. "The most important thing a chef can do is make the most of the situation he is in. We make a restaurant that makes sense of where we are," Nilsson said. A hunter and forager, he relies primarily on the producers around him – an act he says is more about quality than ideology. He also espouses the idea that people should require a licence to eat meat. "It's well established that we over-consume in every field. The emotional detachment from what you eat – it makes it very easy to not respect food." At Stadtlander's 12-seat restaurant Eigensinn Farm in Ontario, air-freighted fruit and vegetables and feed-lot meat have been off the menu for 20 years. The German-born chef sources his food from his 40-hectare garden and his livestock. "My pigs have 10 acres, chickens have no fences, my trout I don't feed at all. Regional cuisine – supporting local farmers, knowing where your food comes from – is definitely a growing movement . . . I would love to see it go mainstream." with Esther Han How to go radical Source your produce first, then decide what to cook. Raise and kill your own livestock. Ration your meat to stop over-consumption. Eat a strictly local (and seasonal) diet.
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