Matthew Evans

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Matthew Evans: former chef and food critic turned gourmet farmer

Full transcript

“I’ve always thought, oh, if I have enough time on my hands, I’ll write the great Australian novel, or I’ll become a sculpture or something. But I’m still the same person, even with lots of time on my hands, and I’m a bit rubbish at some of those things and I’ll never be good at other things, but where I can express myself and where I do get joy are the things that I’ve always found joy in, which is family, sharing meals around a table, being able to cook for people, and share the joy and love that I have for creating something from the ground up and putting in on the plate and being able to share that with the people around me. And that is no different.”
– Matthew Evans

Madeleine Dore: I came across this lovely quote recently my novelist Kathleen Winter. It said, “People are rivers. Always ready to move from one state of being into another. It is not fair to treat people as if they are finished beings. Everyone is always becoming and unbecoming.”

It made me ponder as to whether it’s our shifting, our ever becoming and unbecoming, that makes something like a rigid routine so difficult to uphold. Our moods, our emotions, our state of being isn’t something that’s necessarily receptive to being constrained in a specific sequence. Our routines can be as dictated by our moods as they can our desires to do a particular thing at a particular time.

As another novelist Zona Gale writes, “I can never understand why I should eat at one or sleep at 11. If it is, as it often is, my one and my 11 and nobody else’s, for it’s between the clock and me alone, one and 11 and all other o’clocks are mine and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who would interrupt a sunset to go to dine or wave away the stars in their courses to go to sleep, mainly because the hour had struck.”

If the hours are ours and we are not theirs, as Zona puts it, what do we do with them? For me, one of the best ways to both honour or to shift my moods can be to take action. Often we think of action as being something that’s tied exclusively to productivity, but I think it could also be tied to things like delight.

A recent mood shifter of mine has actually been watching episodes of The Gourmet Farmer. When I was feeling either overwhelmed or stifled, seeing the expanse of land in Tasmania, the bright fresh produce, the transformative process of baking or preserving or curing, was like a balm.

So it was an absolute pleasure to speak with this weeks’ guest, the star himself of Gourmet Farmer, Matthew Evans. A former chef and food critic, now a Tasmanian smallholder, restauranteur, and food activist.

While Matthew is quick to acknowledge that each day is different because our emotional outlook is different, he does share in this ritual of delight. At the moment, he’s starting his day with porridge and a dollop of clotted cream, putting the greatest thing right at the top of his day.

It’s a lovely compliment to this idea of eating the frog. The productivity advice inspired by Mark Twain, who once said that if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day. This was popularised by author Brian Tracy, so the eat the frog technique suggests that we tackle our best-dreaded task first thing in the morning, when we’re less susceptible to distractions.

But I quite like the eat the clotted cream method. If we start our day with the most delightful thing, then it might just have a ripple effect on how our moods unfold for the rest of the day.

So after some clotted cream on porridge, Matthew Evans spends his days raising pigs, milking cows, tending to the garden, usually running the farm restaurant, and teaching from Fat Pig Farm on a 70-acre farm in southern Tasmania.

As the author of over a dozen books, including On Eating Meat: The Truth About Its Production and the Ethics of Eating It, he also has a lot to share on the writing process. But what struck me in this conversation in particular is the wonderful overlaps between life on the farm and the creative process.

We talk about what happens when productive work loses its meaning, daily life on the farm, and how there’s always more to do. But accepting your limitations, how being behind is inevitable and mostly a good sign, the beauty of boredom, and how sometimes you have to launch in to avoid getting stuck in the research phase, or perfectionism.

So, to begin, here is Gourmet Farmer Matthew Evans on the ever-shifting landscape of our moods and emotions, and how he is today.

Matthew Evans: Today I’m good, but this is not the usual day, I guess, at the moment. I think most of us wake up every day and think, oh, what’s today going to hold? We know it’s going to be the same in terms of stuck at home or wherever it is, and not being able to do the things, like travel and see friends that we would normally do, but I still think it’s remarkable how different every day can be considering we already know, the day before, that we’re not going to be able to do so many things. My emotional outlook every morning is different.

MD: And so what have the days been holding, or how have they been different?

ME: We’re about a month into closing a little restaurant down here in southern Tasmania and having to work out what we do with all this food that we’ve been spending the last 12-18 months growing to use in the restaurant, so every day has been a little bit different. Like what do we do with the food? What do we do with the 12 or so people that we had working here six weeks ago? What meaningful jobs can we give them to do? Have we got any capacity to earn income? How do we look after the health of our land and our community and the people around us, but still remain financially viable and positive?

Because there’s a lot of different challenges involved in our little business. It seems very simple. We just grow food, cook it, serve it, but actually, putting that together is enormously complicated and it relies a lot on the human beings around us. Not just the environment and the farmland and the weather, but more importantly the human beings around us, which we feel incredibly responsible for and, particularly in times like this when no one really knows what’s going to happen next week, next month, next year.

MD: And so with that not knowing what’s going to happen next and that lack of a clear path, how does that impact you? I’m sure it would change day-to-day, or even hour-by-hour, but maybe physically, or even mentally, what does that do to you?

ME: We’re really lucky in that we have productive work. We have a reason to get up every morning. So every morning I get up and I milk our dairy cow and I bring the milk back to the house and I scoop off the cream and bottle some of the milk to put on our cereal or use in coffee, that kind of thing, and that routine is the same, and has been the same, for years and years. And then I have other jobs to do on the farm, like feeding pigs, or weeding the garden, or moving cows, or fixing some fencing, maybe cooking. 

And those things haven’t changed because we still live on our productive property, so we have productive work, which is really, really great because we have 70 acres that we can walk around, which is just our little patch that we need to actually walk around every day and we have productive work.

But I think what I realised is that I feel a little paralysed because the reason we were growing food was for a single purpose, which was to serve it on-site and to bring strangers from all around Australia and all around the world and put them very close together and get them to share food and break bread and tell stories and build humanity and build culture, and that is not possible at the moment.

So I feel that we’ve got productive work, but I feel some of the work has lost its meaning and I think, personally, I’m going through this big realignment in how I value the work that we do on the farm because it no longer has the meaning that it had only five or six weeks ago.

MD: It’s so interesting because I think, a lot of the time, I might speak to someone who’s already passed that feeling of the frozenness, or the stuckness, and has the benefit of hindsight to share how they’ve got through it, but so many of us are in the midst of the stuckness right now and there is no clear path, and that’s almost the real root of it. What do we do when we don’t know what to do?

ME: Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. I feel slightly paralysed in that the things that I used to be able to do, and not just the growing and cooking of food, but I guess some of the other things around talking about it and being able to serve it to people and being able to take people on a walk around our property, they’ve all been stripped away and I’ve got lots of ideas, but I don’t seem to be able to sit very comfortably with any of those ideas at the moment.

When we had a lot of fires threatening us last year, I found the same thing. I didn’t know what to do, except I guess to keep up with the immediacy of what was happening around us. But when you’re in the middle of a two week period where there’s fires nearby, there’s lots of really boring downtime and, really, I should’ve probably been playing Angry Birds or learning Italian or teach myself to knit or spin wool or something. And I never taught myself a new anything. I just felt paralysed for that period.

And I see it happening again now. These things, these externalised pressures and things that are outside my control, mean that I don’t have the ability to make the decisions that I need to make and to live my best life.

MD: I think so many of us are feeling that pressure of I should be learning a new language or a new skill, but in the reality, they’re actually summoning whatever it is that you need to do that is so difficult now, and how sometimes it is about waiting for the muse to come, but how that’s actually tied a lot to physical wellbeing and an emotional journey of itself. How do you think the muse ties into what we’re experiencing now?

ME: I think it’s really interesting. I think there’s going to be an incredible creative productivity out of this because I think any time there’s anything particularly challenging or particularly threatening or particularly big, bold, great, in a positive sense or in a negative sense, I think that really feeds creativity. So I think what a lot of us are doing, and a lot of people who are incredibly talented writers and musicians and comedians and artists, are probably absorbing a lot of information, a lot of previously unfilled emotions, and are storing those up and then they will be expressed at a later point.

Personally, because I’m not a very literary writer, I write, but I think all of us are, through the food you cook or the clothes you sew or the watercolours you paint, even if it’s just for yourself, will absorb a lot of different things from this time because it’s unexpected and unexplored territory for humankind to be in. And I think we’ll express all those emotions differently when we come out of it, and I think it’s great to think that lots of people are sitting at home and maybe learning a new skill, but, really, I think what’s happened to me is I’ve always thought oh, if I have enough time on my hands, I’ll write the great Australian novel, or I’ll learn Russian, or I’ll become a sculpture, or something. 

But I’m still the same person, even with lots of time on my hands. And I’m a bit rubbish at some of those things and I’ll never be good at other things, but where I can express myself and where I do get joy are the things that I’ve always found joy in, which is family, sharing meals around a table, being able to cook for people, and share the joy and love that I have for creating something from the ground up and putting it on the plate, and being able to share that with the people around me. And that is no different under lockdown than it is more generally.

MD: What a good thing to recognise. I think we can beat ourselves up for all the things that we’re not getting around to, but maybe it’s just nice to be like, well, maybe that’s not for me in this lifetime, to write the great Australian novel, or whatever it might be.

ME: Yeah, I mean, I’m sure there’s people sitting at home going oh my god, I’m going to learn how to make sourdough, and I’m going to become so much better at yoga, and teach myself to sing, and signed up to all sorts of online courses, and there will be a bit of that. 

But, at the end of it, we’re all just the same people with the same motivations and the same insecurities and the same wants and the same loves that we had before we had to stay at home so much, and so I think what will happen is we’ll probably find the things that are our muse, the things that inspire us, that form the backbone of our beliefs or forming our creative outlets, they won’t have changed. They’ll probably be the same, but we might express them in a different way because we’ve had this different experience. 

MD: Love that frame. So I guess given that you’re still the same person with the same values and drives, could you take us a little bit more through your day? You mentioned that a lot of it is unchanged because you work on a productive farm, but I imagine you’re getting up quite early and maybe you could take us through what your tasks look like?

ME: There’s some basic routines in my day, but there’s a whole bunch of time that’s different every day. So I milk a cow every day. I do that before breakfast then I come back and have breakfast, then I tend to head off and do some general things, like we have pigs on our farm so I go and check the pigs and make sure they’re all fed and watered and that all their babies are safe and their houses are good and all that sort of thing, then I go and check our other livestock, the cows, and make sure they’re comfortable and they’ve got what they need.

I’m not as hands-on in the garden as my wife. My wife is the market gardener, so she spends the majority of her days there, but I’ll go down and see what she needs. Then I end up in the kitchen, we have a commercial kitchen on-site, and we still have someone working in there, helping to preserve stuff, and we do boxes of what we call ration packs for our community, where we take all our vegetables and cook some things and put them in these boxes and distribute them around the neighbourhood.

So when I get there, we’ll talk about what we’ll do with the produce, I’ll maybe make some clotted cream, or experiment with some things, or make some things to put in the packs. Interspersed in that is looking after our son. Sadie, my partner, and I have a ten-year-old, so in the middle of that, he’s been at home for about four weeks now, we are trying to keep him amused and entertained without living him on a screen, so he does farm chores with us, but, you know, he’s ten-years-old. They’re not the most exciting thing in the world.

So we spend a lot of time with him, so at the moment I’m reading The Lord of the Rings, which I can tell you, you can spend a lot of hours in the day reading Lord of the Rings and still not chip away much of the book. So I think it’s a really good thing during this time. We read it a few years ago, but he’s keen for me to read it again. And we make puzzles and play games and do all those sorts of things to entertain him. At the end of the day when we’re closing up the garden, checking the animals again, closing up the kitchen, and bedding down for the night.

Our days aren’t necessarily hugely long at the moment. If anything, with winter coming, slightly shorter because there’s less to do on the farm, but they’re very full days. If you’re not doing something, you should be.

MD: Yes, and I think it’s interesting that for any creative or artist, there is that idea of if you’re not doing something, you should be, because there’s always more to do, and I imagine that would be incredibly explicit on a farm. That’s there’s not enough hours in the day to get all the jobs done. So how has that been for you? This idea that the to-do list just keeps growing?

ME: Well, the to-do is always there, which is really interesting. I’ve been living on farms for about 11 years now and a few years ago I was chatting to this young fellow who milks cows, and then he turns that milk into ice cream that he sells at markets, and he milks two cows or something. It was this beautiful little micro-business and I really loved seeing it.

Anyway, he lives at the property with his father, who grows vegetables and has [inaudible 18:15] and stuff, and I’m chatting to the son, the father walks past, I’ll wave, how you going, mate? And he says yeah, good, only two years behind. And he walks off proudly, and I was like what? Ooh, it’s okay, when you farm, it’s okay to be two years behind. Five years behind? Well, that ain’t so good. So instead of looking at everyday at the list of things that you didn’t get to and the things you failed to achieve, you have to prioritise every day and do the most important things. And I think that’s really nice to know that being two years behind is absolutely normal. And that, when you have a lot to look after, that’s what’s going to happen. 

I think what happens though, especially when you’re looking after animals, but similarly with plants, is [19:07] we try our best to do the best every day, but sometimes we’re just not good enough, there’s just not enough of us, and being able to accept that and accept your limitations and know that there is only so much one human can do in a day and you still have to maintain your relationships and you still have to pay your mortgage and be able to repay your car and all that kind of stuff, like everybody else, I think when you can accept that, that’s a beautiful moment.

I do feel that, with the farm, I can accept that I can’t get everything done, or even close to done, every day, every week, every month, every year. And that’s absolutely fine. That’s a very normal human condition when you’re growing food.

MD: Yeah. I’m just going to apply that to being okay with the fact that I’m three years behind on writing a book.

ME: Oh, writing a book, you’re supposed to be three years behind, aren’t you? That’s the nature of it.

MD: As you mentioned, it’s been 11 years now of living on the farm, but I would like to go back to what you called a brain snap after spending ten years as a food reviewer, and then you really got interested in gardening and rediscovered your ambitions to live closer to the land. Could you describe what it means to have a brain snap and how you make such a big shift in your life?

ME: Aw, it was this very weird thing when I turned 40 and I suddenly got interested in gardening and not just in a loose sense that I’d like to have a little plot and I’d like to be able to grow something, which I’d been sort of trying to do very half-heartedly in places that I’d lived the previous 20 years or so of adult life, but actually seriously. Like how can I grow stuff, and can I grow enough food to be able to make myself a meal fairly regularly at the table? 

And that was a very strange thing to happen, but I think I was at a point in my life where I was very lucky. I became a chef and then I was very lucky to become a restaurant critic, so I got to eat in really good restaurants, but I also felt that being a chef and being interested in why some food tastes better than others, I started to wonder about the source of food, and also to wonder about how restaurants always have this reputation for serving the best food, but do they? Is that actually the case? 

I started to question whether these really expensive restaurants which had teams of tens of chefs, access to really good produce, whether you were actually getting the best food in Australia when you sat in those restaurants, because actually, when you eat in those restaurants ten times a week like I used to do, that’s a lot of eating out, and I can tell you, your body doesn’t feel great when you eat out that much.

So I also wondered, is there something inherently about restaurant food that’s not necessarily good for you, in a sense of longevity? Because restaurants are supposed to be an exceptional place. You go there occasionally, and you go there to celebrate, and you go there to have something that you wouldn’t have at home, so it’s generally higher in salt and higher in fat and higher in sugar. It’s generally been handled a lot more.

So I started to wonder if really great food, maybe, is simpler and whether great food is eating closer to the source. And what I discovered was probably the best food in Australia has been grown by someone that will never be in the media, would never let the media near them, who probably grows it outside their backdoor, carries it into their kitchen, cooks it, and eats it within minutes of it coming out of the garden. Because they can care more about their soil, more about the animals in their care, they can eat it fresher and better than any restaurant could ever serve.

And I thought, wouldn’t that be nice to have a little bit of that in my life? Because I did find people like that who were growing incredible produce, but just for their own kitchen, and I thought, well, I’ve always been interested in gardening, so couldn’t I do that? Couldn’t I put that on my plate?

MD: Yeah. What a wonderful experiment that you carried through. It’s incredible to watch. What has that been like, having a film crew document your life for the last decade?

ME: It’s been so good and yet sort of odd at the same time. Originally, I was single when I’d bought my first farm, but by the time we’d finished filming, Sadie had moved in, my partner, and we had a child. So by the time we finished filming that first series, ten episodes, we already had a little baby. So it was a very odd scenario to have film crew around, but saying well, you have to pretend that this partner and child don’t exist because it doesn’t make sense. And also, it’s our privacy. We’d never lived together. We didn’t want that on television. 

And then the other thing that happens that makes it a little bit odd is if you were to be sensible and buy a piece of land in the suburbs where you have a little garden, or a big piece of land like a farm, what you would sensibly do is move there and then see what happens over 12 months, over the seasons, and work out a plan of action. So what you’d like to do with it, how you would do it, and then plan it really carefully.

When the television crews hang around saying, “What’s happening next? What’s happening next?”, every morning you just make up and they go, “You said you wanted a dairy cow, why don’t you buy a dairy cow?” And so you rush out and buy a dairy cow without being very organised or having thought about it properly.

[Inaudible 24:49] in a way, but what it did for me is it made me act quicker. I had to make decisions on the hop, and most of the time it was great because it actually forced you to do things that you might put off because you might go, oh, actually, I’d rather have a couple of hours off today, or I’d rather not do that, or I’m not ready. 

Occasionally it was too quick and we might overgraze the property or it would become a problem, but most of the time it was really good to be pushed a little bit, to do what you said you were going to do, and have someone holding you to account.

MD: Yeah, that’s the ultimate accountability. What have you learned about learning curves in general?

ME: That’s an interesting question. I’ve never really thought about the learning curves, or not for a while. I think when I first started, the immediacy of it, when you plant a [inaudible 25:55], it has to be watered and it has to be weeded and it has to be tended and it has to be protected, so you just do it. You have to get on with it and do it. You don’t really know what you’re doing, but you have to do it.

And that pattern repeated over and over and over again, so you get a dairy cow, well, you’ve got to milk it, so you better learn really quickly how to milk it. So you just do. And I don’t think you realise at the time how much you’re learning. A lot of people ask me quite often about, oh, what can you recommend in terms of the research and moving to the country and having a little farm? What should I do?

My attitude is always to research a little bit, but don’t get bogged down in trying to know everything because you’ll never know everything. Research enough that you don’t make the big mistakes, and then you’ll learn everything else on the job. That’s because growing food, just like cooking food, one lifetime is never enough to know everything there is about growing food in your particular area of the world, let alone in different areas of the world. One lifetime is not enough to know how to cook every dish really well from the ingredients that you find in your part of the world. So don’t get bogged down in what can go wrong. Just rejoice in the things that you can do that you’ll get right. 

What’s happened over the years is, even having no clue what we’re doing, just launching ourselves into project after project after project and thinking, well, that sounds good, why don’t we do this? 95% of the time, things work out really well. And the 5% of the time you learn an awful lot about yourself, about your community, about your values, and about farming.

At some point, you have to launch in. At some point, you just have to give it a crack. And I think that’s, when we did the show, me making mistakes on the show was always a part of it because the only people who don’t make mistakes are the people who don’t make anything. So it’s really important that, if you want to have a go at something, that you just have a go because 95% of the time, you’re going to come out having learned something by succeeding, and occasionally you might fail, but you never progress unless you open yourself up to a little bit of failure.

MD: Absolutely, and I think that’s the same for any creative process, again, the parallels are lovely because you can get stuck in that research, procrastination phase. I’m curious to hear whether these kinds of lessons and these parallels have changed or impacted your writing process?

ME: My writing process has changed a lot over the years, and a lot of it’s to do with the style of what I’m writing. What I really like to do now is describe this piece of land and our experience of this piece of land in a way that people can, in their own lives, to understand where they live and how they live to be able to put good food on their table.

I think when I read things from the Lake District in the UK, or from Ireland, or from Canada, or from New Zealand, I really want a sense of place, and I think that’s really important and I think that’s really nice. The creative process as an Australian writer is trying to give a sense of this place, of this little corner of the world, because it’s no better or worse than any other corner of the world, but it is specific to this place. The sites, the sounds, the smells, and the feel. And any time that you can capture that is a beautiful moment. It’s the capturing that’s the hard bit.

MD: Do you mean in terms of writers’ block, or getting it all on the page? Or what kind of bumps do you encounter?

ME: I’ve got access to the words that someone in London has to describe place, so to be able to describe our little corner of the world in a way that isn’t derivative or isn’t cliched and has resonance and relevance, I think, is the hard bit. It’s easy to describe things in very basic terms, and what you say, what you hear, but to give that a feeling, I think, is the hard bit. To draw people into a place or an idea.

MD: So does it come through in a lot of self-editing? A lot of sitting at a screen trying to think of words? How have you refined that over the years?

ME: There’s a lot of talk with kids about boredom, how great boredom is, and I think there are two times when I feel most creative, and I could sit at the computer and try to write something and have an idea and try to craft something, but the times when I find my brain is most comfortable with the creative process are when I’m walking around the farm and I don’t have headphones in and I’m not listening to an audiobook or Spotify or whatever. I’m just out in the world and all I’ve got is my own thoughts and nature around me.

And the other time, and I think this is a blowback to when I was a restaurant critic, is when I’m alone in a boisterous, loud café or restaurant and I always feel energised by that [inaudible 31:47] humanity and everyone having a really great time. Often times, people feel like someone should feel sorry for you because you’re out to eat on your own. I feel so energised by going out to eat and listening to other people enjoy themselves, and I find that quite a creative time.

So those two times are when ideas, or ways to express ideas, solidify, and then I’ve got to try to remember, so I’ve got to write them down at the time or get back to a piece of paper or a computer to be able to actually record them. Just so I haven’t had this brilliant idea, like I’m sure you have, most people probably have it. 

I write my best stuff in the middle of the night. I wake up and I’ve thought of something absolutely amazing in that insomniac 20 minutes at four in the morning, but I don’t write it down, so the next morning I don’t know. Was it brilliant or not? It’s gone. I haven’t formed the words in the same way. Whereas if I just come inside from being on the farm and having a great thought, I can record it straight away and it usually does stand the test of time.

MD: There is such beauty in boredom. Thank you. I thought we could return a little bit to your book On Eating Meat and it does explore how all of us can make better choices and tread lighter on the Earth, and I was wondering if you could share some of the ways that we can be more thoughtful about what we eat?

ME: Yeah. The book was trying to answer my dilemmas about eating meat. I guess a lot of us feel conflicted about knowing that an animal has died for us to eat meat. I wanted to look at my own contradictions in this and look at the evidence around whether we should eat meat or not eat meat. What’s really lovely is that, at the end of the book, I felt really comfortable with my own decisions about eating meat, and really comfortable that I have no interest in converting anyone else to eat meat or not eat meat. 

But what I really want, and I guess it reaffirmed a lot of my life’s work, which is that it’s not whether you eat meat or don’t eat meat, it’s whether you care about what you eat, because there is meat that’s better produced than other meat, there are grains that are produced in a way that’s terribly harmful to animals and the environment, and there is grain that is produced in a way that’s sympathetic to animals and the environment. And so every time we eat something, if we are more conscious of what we eat, then we can walk gentler on the Earth.

I think the big thing that came home to me with researching a meat book was that Australia is… well, we trade places with the US every couple of years, but we are the biggest meat-eaters in the world most years, or second to the US. 110 kilos of meat per person per year. We eat an astonishing amount of meat, and that means an astonishing amount of animals die, and most of those animals, by far the most animals, because they’re small, are chickens. 650 million chickens are killed every year for Australians to eat meat.

And so if you could do one thing, if you could do one thing to make the world a slightly better place, it would be probably to eat less meat. But certainly if you’re going to eat meat, eat meat from animals that you feel comfortable about the way they’ve been reared. If you have the ability to buy a free-range chicken and not an intensively farmed, shredded chicken, then that animal would probably have lived a better life.

It might cost a bit more, but maybe you’ll eat 20% less of it and be able to spend 20% more on it, so I advocate that, if you’re going to eat meat, eat less meat and better meat, for your average Australian because we do eat an enormous amount and it has consequences. Not only the animals that are farmed and the environment on which they’re farmed, but on the people who farm.

MD: I think that’s probably one of the biggest questions or barriers that people have, is that I can’t afford to pay for the more expensive quality produce, but I guess what you’ve just outlined there is making the adjustment to the quantity so that you can pay for the quality.

ME: Yeah, exactly. One of the things that people often say is, well, what can we do better? Well, we cannot throw food away. That would be great. Something like 40% of what Australia produces is chucked in the bin, in terms of food. It’s such, such an insult to mother nature and to the farms and the farmed, to throw away so much of our food. And that includes meat.

One of the really interesting things about human nature is the cheaper we make meat, the more we waste of it because we don’t value it. So if you have to spend a few extra dollars on some grass-fed beef, beef that hasn’t come through the feedlot system, if you have to spend a little bit more on it, you actually value it more and you are much less likely to waste it. Which is a really interesting tick in human nature.

So, for me, the first thing everybody should do is look at what goes in the bin, or what goes to the chuck bucket or, in our case, it’d be fed to the dog or the bin or the compost or whatever. And how can we cut that waste down? What’s the best way we can use every bit of every animal, but also every bit of every plant? 

In a farming sense, plants and animals are all part of a working farming ecosystem, so if you’re going to grow food, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s plants or animals, don’t waste it. Get the most out of it. And if you feel guilty about something you bought, you’ve probably bought the wrong thing. But it is okay to eat meat, but it probably helps if you know the farming system it’s come from, so you’re comfortable with that. So was the pig allowed to walk through pastures? Or were they kept in a concrete shed? Do the chickens get room to dust bathe and look for grubs and wander in the sunlight? Or are they kept in a shed their whole life?

Once you’ve made a decision about that, it doesn’t matter whether you’re eating meat or not, there are better choices we can all make about our eating to make the world not only a better place, but more sustainable and maybe even regenerate the landscapes around us through the choices we make when we go to put dinner on the table.

MD: Exactly. I’m wondering, what are you enjoying eating at the moment? What would be a typical breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if there is such a thing?

ME: It’s nothing typical. We just had the last eggplant and I think, oh my god, I cooked this eggplant and it was just really thinly sliced and chargrilled with a bit of olive oil, and some fried leek and tomato on top, and for some reason it was the best eggplant of the season. Maybe because it was the last one until maybe February next year.

What am I loving at the moment? Oh, porridge. We’ve been making clotted cream. Clotted cream is when you take the thickest of the cream, and we’ve got a Jersey cow so we get really beautiful, thick cream, and you put it in a very shallow tray and you put it in either a low oven or the edge of a wood cooker if you’ve got one, that’s what they used to do in the old days, or on the edge of your AGA or whatever.

And the cream slightly cultures, it goes ever so slightly sour as it sits there, and eventually it starts to reduce and it gets this beautiful crust on top. It’s got this slightly soured cream flavour, it’s really rich, and putting a dob of that on my porridge in the morning with brown sugar? Oh my god. It’s so early in the day, you think that the day can’t get better than that. Most days it does, but it’s still pretty amazing. It’s still pretty wonderful.

MD: It sounds delicious.

ME: What else are we eating? Ah, the last of the corn. We’re about to go into winter, so it’ll be kale, kale, cabbage, kale and turnips for a while in Tassie now, which I love for a while but there will be a moment where we’ll be pretty excited to see the first asparagus and broad beans in spring. Or the last of the tomatoes. We have yellow, orange, red, and green tomatoes. All different colours and flavours and textures, and so that’s pretty special. Just eating those lightly dressed with olive oil and salt and pepper and a little bit of homemade feta with that, or a little bit of goat’s cheese with that, is pretty sublime. And with sourdough.

And I have to say, we’ve been making our own bread, and I can make sourdough bread, we make bread all the time, but I really can’t wait till the bakery reopens near us because there’s a reason by bakers are bakers and the rest of us buy their bread, because bakers are really good at what they do.

MD: I think I might go out and get a loaf after this. But I am wondering, I suppose people could watch Gourmet Farmer or hear you describe your daily life and think, oh, how wholesome and pure and wonderful, but I was wondering if there’s any sort of bad habits, for a lack of a better word, or maybe hedonistic traces from your past, sort of big city life, that kind of… what would people be shocked to hear, perhaps?

ME: Aw, look, we’re human. People think we’re trying to be self-sufficient, and we’re not. We are [inaudible 40:58]. Grow what you can, and that’s why I love what do and [inaudible 41:03] because if you’re in Brunswick, you might just have some parsley and mint or whatever growing in a pot plant that you can harvest to put in your meals, and that’s what you do with your space. And if you’ve got a bigger garden, you might grow a few vegetables like cucumbers and zucchini or whatever.

But we’re lucky, we’ve got a massive space. But we’re not trying to be self-sufficient, so I don’t grow pinot noir, and I bloody love a good [inaudible 41:29] Tasmanian pinot noir, so that’s why they invented money, so that we can actually go and buy someone else’s stuff.

But I’d have to say, the other day I was having a discussion with someone about fake meat, the meat substitutes, and I find them an abomination. They have no sense, no soul, no sense of place. They’re processed food. If vegans want to eat processed foods, and vegetarians want to eat more processed food, great. Good luck to them. And I was talking to a friend about this, and the next day my son looked at me and he said, “Dad, you’re a total hypocrite” and thought it was great, brutal honesty from a ten-year-old.

And I said oh, what about? I mean, there’s lots of things I’m a total hypocrite about. And he said, “You were banging on about processed food, right? And you just went and bought a Magnum.”

MD: [Gasps].

ME: And I’m like, ooh. Now, Hedley, our son, he and I make ice cream together. I’ve got some in the fridge at the moment. It’s cinnamon and golden syrup ice cream. We’ve made the custard, we’ve just gotta put it through the churn. We’ve got a home churn and we can make ice cream at home. And you know what? I still go and buy a Magnum. That’s very normal.

I think if we substitute most of our diet with processed food, that’s a problem. Because processed food has done nothing for our culture, nothing for our waistlines, and nothing for our bank balance. But it doesn’t mean you just go, well, I’m never going to have another Magnum or never have another corn chip, or whatever. It just means that it shouldn’t form the bulk of your diet. 

I’m like anyone else. I love a Tim Tam. I’ll have a Magnum when I’m out and about, even though I know my own ice cream tastes better and is better in terms of its ingredient list. So, I mean, I think that’s just normal. We’re all a bunch of contradictions, and it doesn’t really matter what you do 10% of the time, it’s what you do 90% of the time that counts, and that’s why, if you feel bad or guilty about what you put on the plate, everybody loses. 

So if you’re going to choose to put fake meat on the plate, you’ve got to feel really good about it because there’s just no point in serving things for yourself, things to nourish yourself and your family and friends, unless you feel good about it. And that’s probably the most important thing, because we all lose if you’re feeling anxious and guilty about what you put on the plate.

MD: Yeah. So it’s a cheeky Magnum. We know the truth now. But I’m wondering…

ME: Almond.

MD: Almond, oh yeah, delicious.

I love going behind the scenes and hearing about someone’s own personal contradictions, like this almond Magnum that Matthew is talking about. 

I think a lot of people at the moment might be separated by distance from the people that they love, be that a partner or family, and with the story of how you met Sadie and how there was that element of long-distance at the beginning, I was wondering if you had any advice to share on that note?

ME: Oh, I’m the worst person to recommend a long-distance relationship. I failed at two of them, and then Sadie and I had actually broken up for a while because the long-distance thing was so difficult. 

Obviously when you’re in an intimate relationship, the worst bit is all the commitment and separation, and the best bit is the intimacy, and when you’re sharing those really close moments, emotionally and physically, and at the moment you can only share those moments emotionally and for a lot of us, for me in particular, I find technology doesn’t create the sense of intimacy that you can have when you’re actually with someone, talking to them over the dinner table, or sitting next to them on the couch watching telly.

But it’s worth the wait. And it’ll feel like forever. I think we were… I bought the farm and Sadie moved down about six, seven months after I’d moved in, it took ages to get her to move in, but she moved in and that time now seems like nothing. We can hardly remember that separation now. And so it seems long at the time.

It’s like having children. When we had a child, someone said to me, look, the minutes go really slowly, but the years go really quick. And I think it’s like that. When you’re yearning for someone, when you’re pining for that intimacy and that closeness, that physical closeness, and that can be a parent/child, like I miss my mother, like [inaudible 47:08] and I probably wouldn’t have seen her this month or for six months anyway, but you know, I miss her more than ever at the moment.

And it feels like the minutes or the hours or the days can drag, but actually, the time will pass relatively quickly and, in a lifetime, especially for those important relationships that last many years or a lifetime, then that time will be just a blip in the whole thing, really.

MD: Yeah, that’s a lovely reminder for these times. I hope it is a blip. You did sort of mention, when you described your ruts, that there’s been past times of feeling perhaps brokenhearted and they actually turned out to be useful touchpoints, and I know that you’ve mentioned that you’re not there yet with COVID, but do you have any advice to yourself or to others that is about that idea of using adversity as a motivational tool?

ME: Drink gin. Not too much.

MD: It’s the not too much that’s hard to define.

ME: Yeah, exactly, it’s different for everybody and hard to define depending on the time of day.

I think the creative process, and certainly I find there’s all this stuff I want to write at the moment and I’m not writing. My day, when you asked me to describe it earlier, I didn’t put writing in there because at the moment I’m not achieving anything when I sit at the computer to write, all I do is look up graphs and international news, which is not good for my mental health.

And so I’m tending not to write at the moment, but I’m saving up all these emotions and feelings, knowing that, at some point, they will gel into something that allows it to be written. Some people might find that it really helps to just blurt out what they’re feeling every day, get it down, get it written in diary form, jot point form, or whatever, and just put that down. 

But I think what has happened with me is the bigger the experience, the more profound the experience, the more I have looked within myself to find ways out, to describe ways out, or to spread joy, or to spread hope, or to spread love further afield. And so every time I’ve had a particularly hard time emotionally, it’s always led to a prolific time creatively, and that sometimes is at the stove where I just cook and come up with recipes or perfect recipes and cook them in a gentler way or a better way that makes them more enjoyable. 

Sometimes I find I’m able to care for my community around me better, I might use that creative time to cook for the community, and sometimes it ends up on paper, where I try to distil the essence of a moment, and what I might have got out of it and what I enjoyed out of it, and try to share that.

I think one of the reasons that I find it hard to write at the moment is I don’t feel particularly positive compared to most of the time, and I believe that most of the work I do, even when I was a critic, what I wanted was people to have pleasure in their life, to have joy in their life, so my aim has always been for people to eat better, to love better, to share better, to enjoy things more, to come together more, and to build culture, to build humanity. 

And I think I haven’t worked out how to do that in a really positive way at the moment, then my time is not best spent at the computer. My time is best spent caring for the land that feeds us. But all of that stuff that’s happening to me at the moment will hopefully come out as a way of trying to instil more hope in the world around me, whether it’s the people in my immediate vicinity or the people further afield.

MD: Speaking with Matthew Evans really reiterated this idea that there are shifts in seasons, in not only our lives, but our singular days. We are nowhere near perfect, be it our hypocrisies in reaching for that almond Magnum ice cream, or our shortcomings when it comes to our own consumption choices, or our creative work, or our relationships, or any component of our lives, really.

But as Matthew Evans puts it, there’s no use feeling guilty about it, about our hypocrisy or about our contradictions, because when you feel guilty, everybody loses.

Instead, maybe we can learn from the shifts in ourselves and our days. Knowing there’s a time for the ebb and the flow, the absorbing, and the acting.

In the words of Louisa May Alcott, “Have regular hours for work and play, make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well.”

We don’t grow from guilt. We grow from nurturing all sides of ourselves, so employ your time to do just that. Whatever that looks like on a given day, whether it be work, or whether it be play.