Search the heart of any culture and you’ll find breakfast. Today’s most common breakfast is toast and soggies — packaged, pre-cooked bland food that can be eaten on the run, on the go, busy, busy. (There is even a cardboard box in the supermarket aisles that claims to be a liquid breakfast — the list of ingredients on the side of the carton runs to about 20 components, very few of which sound much like food.)

Our food choices tell us who we are

All food choices are ultimately political decisions. English sweet biscuits needed colonies and slaves to provide the sugar. Tomatoes airfreighted from Israel, garlic from Mexico and snow peas from China mean we need an invasion of Iraq to ensure the oil that lubricates it all.

So this column is about food, the heart of my life — and yours. It’s a personal food manifesto. You might call it ‘How to be a Moral Omnivore’.

1. Place skull and cross bone symbols on all packs of frozen carrots.

I have never met a frozen carrot that I’ve liked, except in a frozen (home made) carrot cake. NOTHING makes frozen carrot taste good or even remotely like carrot, not even basting it with green tomato relish that performs miracles even on hunks of otherwise tasteless chilacaote melon and elderly chokos.

So how come they are sold, served and eaten when even apart from the total lack of sweet carrot flavour they have a weird rubbery and unpleasant texture? Why the vast frozen carrot profits?

Because as a society we have a low opinion of veg. Veg are a side dish, eaten just because they are healthy, not because they make us salivate, to accompany meat or rice or pasta. Serving frozen carrots to kids is especially heinous. Teach your kids what good food tastes like, so they never accept second best fast food — or frozen carrots — and know that if they don’t like boiled broccoli there are 1,000 other less sulphurous ways to eat it.

Life is too short to waste a calorie, especially on frozen carrots.

2. Learn to grow and cook vegies.

Wheat, rice, meat — the great world food staples — are responsible for most agricultural crimes as well, be it soil loss, agribusiness or pesticide use.

Vegies can be grown anywhere — in schools and preschools, along footpaths. Veg can be a niche crop — even though most are grown as broadacre ones. Most suburbs have quite enough space for enough veg to feed their inhabitants — once you get rid of lawns. Imagine a footpath lined with rows of silver beet, that everyone could pick (then wash) as they wanted. You can even grow veg by the windows in your office — try a window box of micro-greens or trail chokos down to the office below from a pot. You don’t even need to own land to grow vegies — try community gardens or sharecrop a neighbour’s large backyard. But also learn how to base meals on vegies — not just as a sauce for the pasta — onions baked in cider; potatoes slowly stewed with artichokes; leeks baked in oil and garlic; cubes of sweet potato fried with silver beet, garlic and ginger; eggplant tempura …

3. Plant at least three fruit trees a year — even if they are on the footpath or at the local school.

4. If you eat meat choose niche meat — never lot-fed or factory-raised meat, but meat from chooks fed on scraps, geese that graze your lawn or, even better, feral animals that need to be controlled — see below.

Most animals raised for meat in Western societies contribute to an ecological blight, especially anything lot-fed, like beef, industrialised hens or pigs, fish farms that need four tonnes of wild fish to produce one tonne of farmed fish … or even crocodiles farmed on chicken carcasses. But it doesn’t have to be that way — free range hens that scratch around the yard one minute, and are in the pot the next (if you are a very, very good chook dispatcher and plucker, anyhow) without even a second of fear.

Vegetarianism isn’t necessarily an ecological virtue — though eating much less — and different — meat certainly is. (Vegetarianism may be a spiritual or even a social virtue — but that’s different).

It often makes more sense ecologically to imitate peasant cultures, and raise hens, pigs, guinea pigs, rabbits, guinea fowl, goats or fish to dispose of weeds and waste, and provide small amounts of meat to be eaten as flavouring or on rare feast days.

5. Eat feral animals — because large hunks of our country are vanishing into feral gullets and under feral feet.

Twenty-five years ago our gorge was dry rainforest — a canopy of Backhousia trees, maidenhair ferns, sandpaper figs, tree ferns. And then a hobby farmer released his goats into the gorge — the price for goat meat had plummeted and he didn’t want to pay to take them to the market.

Now the once green gullies are orange desert. And the plague of goats is growing, changing the bush to parkland, all tall trees, the young ones nibbled to death, and then to bare eroded earth. And when the big trees die there will be none to replace them and the bush will die, just as the shrubs, the orchids and the hundreds of other species that have been lost to the goat’s browsing teeth.

And it’s happening right across Australia. Feral goats, pigs, rabbits, carp, cane toads — okay, I’m not advocating we eat cane toads (though maybe a frogs’, er, toads’ leg industry might be investigated) but they do make interesting leather.

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