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Mark Ferguson from neXtgen Agri brings you the latest in livestock, genetics, innovation and technology. We focus on sheep and beef farming in Australia and New Zealand and the people doing great things in those industries.
Head Shepherd
What's for Dinner? Exploring Food Production with Jill Griffiths
Are we aware of where our food comes from? What about the subtle complexities in our food production systems? Join us as we get a fresh perspective on this and more from Jill Griffiths, a science writer, journalist, and author.
Her recently launched book, "What's for Dinner?", dives into how our food is grown and our role as food-eaters. With a mix of science, history, and personal stories, she takes us on a fascinating journey to meet the plants, animals, and people who make our meals possible.
But what inspired Jill to write this book in the first place?
"I've been a science writer in ag and environment for a long time and, before that, I studied biology and journalism. I grew up in the country and then lived a lot of my life in the city, so I came to the whole question of "food and farming" from various viewpoints. What I was hearing from researchers and farmers didn't always match up with what I was hearing in the public discourse and from my city-based friends. So I went looking for where the answers to some of those questions lay."
Jill says it was an eye-opening journey that gave her access to unique people and places she otherwise might not have experienced. And what did Jill discover?
Well, firstly, our food supply isn't as diverse as you might think. Jill shines a spotlight on how limited our choices are. We rely heavily on just a few species for our meals.
"75% of the world's food comes from 12 species of plant and five species of animal. But within those species, there's a narrow range of breeds. 90% of the dairy herd in Australia are Holstein Friesian. So, from that one species, not even the whole genetic range of that species is present in our food chain. I'm not sure that that's a good point."
Mark and Jill also cover the nutrient density of food.
"We often hear that that modern food is lower in nutrient density and there's a grain of truth in that," says Jill. "The grain of truth is that in increasing yield, we have increased water and starch content, so there is a dilution factor that happens with minerals and nutrients as starch and water increase." But, Jill explains there is so much variation during a season that the argument of modern food being less nutrient dense "just gets shot in the water really quickly."
And finally, we cover the 'eat local’ slogan - and it’s not as simple as it sounds.
"It's a difficult thing to sit in an agricultural exporting country, as you and I both are, and say we should all eat local because our farmers rely on us exporting a certain amount of agricultural products, so the people that are eating that aren't eating local."
Beyond sourcing and eating, we also confront the reality of food insecurity. By the end of this conversation, you’ll be left with a deeper understanding of the agricultural industry and the importance of knowing our food sources, and you'll never look at a can of tomatoes the same way again!
Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited. We help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best: info@nextgenagri.com.
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Welcome back to Head Shepherd. This week we've got another author on Welcome, Jill Griffiths.
Jill Griffiths:Thanks, mark, good to be here.
Mark Ferguson:So, jewel, you're a writer, journalist, author. Obviously words are your thing. And I guess what? Yeah, this is interesting to be on the other side of one of these interviews.
Jill Griffiths:Normally you've asked me a few questions for an article You're writing, or I think we've sat on the opposite sides of this desk at least three times, if I've thought So, yeah.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, so it's good to be here.
Jill Griffiths:It's interesting to change the language for me there.
Mark Ferguson:That's good for me to be firing questions back And luckily I don't have to write things down, I can just use the audio.
Jill Griffiths:But yeah, it's I hope it was always nice to be here.
Mark Ferguson:You're actually very nice to be here. If you know me well enough, i don't. You wouldn't have got back on here if you had a bit of a mean to me. But yeah, it's always good to be on the other side as well, because you write well and you get the story across, and that's obviously very clear in your recently released book What's for Dinner? Yeah, it must be A Hell of a Labor of Love getting a book out there.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, I suppose it is. I don't think you'd do it if you didn't want to do it. Let's say that. But I did actually thoroughly enjoy the process and it enabled me to answer some questions that I had in my own mind. I guess it's in many ways that the book is a bit of a quest, me going on a search for answers to questions that were playing in my mind for quite some time.
Mark Ferguson:And that's, as I already admitted, pretty sure I haven't read the whole thing, but it's very evident in the bits I have read that you went in with a very open mind into every situation, or at least that's how you've written it. Whether your mind was open at some time or not, i don't know, but that's very much how it comes across as trying to, i guess, not go in with a preconceived idea about what you were likely to find.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, well, i hope I did that. I certainly intended to go in with an open mind, i suppose. Just a little bit of background about why I did Wright's book.
Jill Griffiths:As you know, i've sort of been a science writer in sort of ag and environment for a long time, let's say let's call it three decades, and before that I studied biology and journalism. So I came to it from and I grew up in a country and then lived a lot of my life in the city. So I sort of came to the whole question of food and farming from various viewpoints And the things that I was hearing from researchers and farmers didn't always match up to what I was hearing in the public discourse and from my city-based friends, and so I guess I went looking for where the answers to some of those questions lay. I mean, we hear things that livestock's bad, for example, and yet then you hear farmers say, particularly in some aspects of farming, that the more diverse a farm is, the more resilient it is. So I just wanted to get to the bottom of some of those questions.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, and I guess one of the joys of me doing this podcast is that I get into conversations that I wouldn't otherwise, And obviously you've already outlined that was one of the joys of the book as well. And now would you have gave your reason to bring up people, visit people and really ask people questions that you sort of couldn't normally do? Yeah, absolutely.
Jill Griffiths:I mean I walked through Piggarees and I saw chicken abattoirs and I saw sheep abattoir and went to many farms and spoke to a lot of researchers with sort of that. I spoke to a lot of people who aren't included in the book, but then there's a lot of people who are included in the book as well. So it enabled me to, as you say, having that I'm writing a book gave me access to people that wouldn't necessarily have wouldn't have just answered the find if I'd just run up and said, hey, i want to know about this.
Mark Ferguson:Excellent. So can you remember when you decided that you're going to write a book? Was it a flash of inspiration or was it sort of a slow?
Jill Griffiths:Yeah. So I actually wrote another manuscript before I wrote this book and I've been trying to pitch it around to get it. It's also a narrative nonfiction and I've been trying to get that published and I can see now that it wasn't really quite there. And then I had this idea that I was going to look at the whole food, farming and environment scenario And I didn't really know quite how I was going to do it. I started playing around with ideas for that and started pitching that as well And in fact the Thames and Hudson, who are my publisher, picked it up straight away and they actually believed in the concept of it and in my ability to do it, Probably more than I did in the early days of it. And so that deal with Thames and Hudson was done about 18 months ago And at that stage I had probably three draft chapters and a rough outline of what I wanted to do, Plus years and years of thinking about it Generally And a lot of background research had been done in some ways through my previous work talking to people.
Mark Ferguson:I do work with Still a big job to turn it.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, 12 months of writing a thousand words a day, basically, and then cutting it and editing Yeah take it 85,000 polished words in the ink.
Mark Ferguson:Excellent. 85,000 a day cool, yeah, i guess the I mean the book's going to appeal to everyone, as far as I can tell. So Farmers going to enjoy your critical lens or not critical, but a lens over the production system and, i guess, thinking about it in a different way and moving up and down the value chain as the book does, and but equally, a consumer is going to love sort of, i guess, living or seeing some of the things you saw through your eyes written down in the book so they can understand a bit more about where they're sourcing food and fiber from. The one of the challenges. I suppose you walk into a supermarket and you have no idea, which is like I read a bit of the tomato chapter and I'm the same as you. I stand there in front of the aisle of canned tomatoes and and work out which ones you're going to buy on a given day and try to make it.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, i've been sitting here for the other day of the tomato aisle in the shop and she said I've never stood here for so long before.
Jill Griffiths:Thanks, so helpful.
Jill Griffiths:I go into the whole question of you know whether we should be buying the local, local food, locally grown canned tomatoes, or whether we know whether the Italian ones really are better, and just a little bit about that life cycle analysis of those sorts of things, which is incredibly complicated when you drill down into it. And I guess that's that's one of the things I wanted to display in the book that the simple answers that we hear in you know, slogans and media headlines don't allow for the nuance that some of these issues have. And that's one of the things I hope that comes across in the book, particularly for non-farmers, i'd have to say, because I think that it's very easy to say things like, you know, topical one here at the moment life-sheep, life-sheep export should be banned, and yet that doesn't take into account the nuance of that argument and what flows through to farmers who rely on that trade and what that means for their farm businesses and the associated businesses, even right through to, potentially, the wool supply, you know. So it's those nuances, well, one of the things I wanted to be able to get across.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, exactly, And the subtitle of the book is our food, our choices, our planet. And obviously you navigate through through carbon, through welfare, human impacts, So the whole gamut of all the things that kind of need to be considered when we are making those choices. Yet often we'll yeah, we all have it. And I think you talk about like, yeah, your decisions around which animals you'll eat you'll eat a sheep, but you won't eat a dog and lots of people the same Like, we all make these calls about what we, where we draw the line, and that changes over time as we learn more or get have less money. So we just don't make it. We make what. Our choices change depending on where our life stage is and and our situation. But, yeah, it's an interesting, interesting thing. If you actually knew all the things about everything was produced, you wouldn't have any time to do anything else. So it's a, it's a careful balance between knowing enough.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, I guess I I don't think.
Jill Griffiths:Like you know, i answered a lot of my own questions through the book, but they came up with more questions And I mean you know, you'd know this from from any sort of research for every question you answer, you raise three or four more that you haven't gotten the answer for just yet. So I think that it left me with an inquiring mind about about how whole food system and the farming system that puts it there. But also, i think one of the greatest things that that the whole sort of research and writing and book left me with was a deep sense of gratitude to farmers, and I always had that to some extent. But but it it changed through more. I think, like it's it's really deep within me now that that that sense of gratitude Because you know, we're an increasingly urban population world over.
Jill Griffiths:2007 is the year that that the world tipped over to being more, having more people living in urban areas than rural areas And with that, change means more and more people are relying on fewer and fewer people to produce our food. I think that's a point that we all need to take take to heart.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, i guess we're spoiling. Yeah, i mean more and more. I guess I live in a world where I spend most of my time either talking to the farmer or on a farm and and and get to get to see the toil and the and the effort and the passion and the and the absolute dedication to doing great things, and we all yeah, i mean any any industry has bad actors in it and and lots of amazingly good actors, but the it is a. It is a great industry. I think what? yeah, again, that was probably harping on it, but the way the book is written as a really it's a very much well, i feel.
Mark Ferguson:I feel like a very fair sort of not not trying to over-rose color, like I mean, some, some things get written about agriculture from an agriculture perspective, very defensive and and kind of don't even attempt to understand the other side of the value chain and they're all about the consumer. And then, equally, there's a lot of consumers who have no understanding of agriculture and make make those hasty decision or hasty calls or partial decisions or whatever. So, yeah, i think the, the tightrope you walked you did exceptionally well And and I think it's it'll be. If there's lots of consumers read it, it'll be, it'll be. It'll be a. It'll be a great thing for for people to sort of get immersed in in ag, in a in a way that's sort of easy to easy to digest if we can stick with the food thing.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, thanks. I'm glad you you saw it like that. I guess what I tried to do was not be an advocate or a an activist.
Jill Griffiths:So I didn't want to be an advocate for for necessarily, but I also didn't want to be an activist for consumers, so I wanted to take more of a I guess more of a a traditional journalistic approach to it. That, but from a from a very personal viewpoint of you know. Okay, so what does all this mean and where do we sit in all this and what exactly is it that we're eating? Because I it's. It's actually one of the things that alarms me about our food supply is the lack of diversity in it. You know that, which perhaps harps back to my early training as a biologist, where, you know, diversity is resilience and, and you know, we diverse systems are resilient systems, but our food system is very reliant on, on very few species, and I'm not sure that's a great thing.
Mark Ferguson:So, yeah, so talk us through 75, 12, 5, the yeah.
Jill Griffiths:Okay, so 75, 12, 5, which is the. The first section of the book refers to the fact that 75% of our food, our food by the, the world's food, comes from 12 species of plant and five species of animal. And then if you look it's cheaper. One of those five. So you know, you're, you're, you're out there in the. In fact they're the, they're the fifth, the fifth one on the list that I did do. I did give them a chapter in the book because you know I, kind of like sheep, must have a long time writing about them. So it seems we would think to do. But even within those, those species, there's a narrow range of breeds that account for most of the most of the, the first five. So you know, 90% of the neary herd in Australia is is whole-stain for Asians. So you know, from that one species you get it's not even the whole genetic range of of that species that is present in our food chain. I'm not sure that that's a good point.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, And I guess that's.
Jill Griffiths:I can give you the list. They're in the book.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, I guess I hadn't really considered among the animals. Among are more obvious to me, but yeah, the truth around the plants as well as is obvious for a sort of end up.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, so the animals are cattle. Cattle, you know, let me think cattle, chickens, pigs, goats and chickens. Chickens are actually the most important agricultural animal on the planet. There's more. There's more chickens than anything else in the world, any other animal in the world.
Mark Ferguson:That'd be, that'd be freaking simply right now. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it was tough for me as well.
Jill Griffiths:So I like to say, and every opportunity I get, because it's it's about three at any time. There's about three chucks for every person on the planet, yeah Right. Yeah 25 billion chucks is a little worry, yeah, at any time, and a lot of them will only live this week because they meet chucks, and that's about as long as most of them live.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah So seven weeks.
Jill Griffiths:So the turnover in sheer numbers of billions over the year is phenomenal.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, exactly, yeah, i mean, that's an amazing fact. But what was the, i guess, the most surprising thing you found in researching the book or writing the book?
Jill Griffiths:Well, i think one of the most surprising things for me personally, right, like, probably the facts I found out around around chucks were the most startling numbers, but the most surprising thing for me in writing, it was how I felt when I went to some of the places that I expected to find really confronting. So I expect I went to an abattoir and I expected, like friends said to me, oh, you're never going to shoot again once you've gone there, you know you never, you'll never, you'll never enjoy a rest land again. No-transcript, i just in fact I found that quite like there was a certain amount of reference and sort of it was a workplace and death was actually a very small part of it. You know, yes, the sheep came in and they died, obviously, but that was a small part of the work of the abattoir and that surprised the hell out of me.
Jill Griffiths:Like I just I didn't, i didn't find that confronting. I went to a piggory and I saw thousands of stalls and it wasn't as awful as I thought it would be. Yeah, no, it just so. Some of those sorts of things I found they were the most surprising things for me.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, yeah.
Mark Ferguson:And they're both positive experience or positive what you thought. You thought about it better than you thought it was going to be. Is there equal things that were worse than you thought they were going to be, like things that you kind of thought were all kosher or were all okay but were less so?
Jill Griffiths:No, I don't think so.
Jill Griffiths:I hadn't actually thought about it in that context before. No, i can't honestly say that there was anything that surprised me in the way that I thought it was much worse than I thought it would be. Yeah, there really wasn't it. I didn't get to go to some places that I would have liked to Like. I didn't go to a really huge chickens shed. I did stand at the door of a shed that had 4,000 laying hands in it. It's quite something when 4,000 chooks all turn around and look at you. Again, it wasn't awful, it didn't stink, it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't at all confronting in that one.
Jill Griffiths:I didn't get to go to one of the huge, huge places where they raise meat chooks. That was largely because of biosecurity and COVID was rife at the time. The chicken meat industry, as you know, was sort of really caught up in that. They had some terrible outbreaks in processing facilities, with COVID, with shutting down supply chains and problems like that. I took the lack of willingness to let me into those places on face value That it was about biosecurity, it was about COVID, it was about other issues. Then there was foot and mouth scaring Indonesia at the same time as I was trying to get into some of these places. I took that at face value and other people said to me oh, they were just trying to keep you out, they just didn't want you to go in.
Jill Griffiths:I don't quite buy that, because I think that biosecurity it's a real concern, i was prepared to say, okay, that's real, that's a biosecurity issue. It's not keeping the pesky journalists out.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, maybe I'm being serious. I like to believe we're careful Yeah. I think we know there's good people out there. I think that one thing that often you think about is no one gets up and tries to be incompetent and make a bad job of producing food for us. I mean, there are some people who do it less well than others, but they all do it, the right way Yeah.
Jill Griffiths:I suppose, in fairness, the farmers who I did speak to, i spoke to people who were doing a good job. I didn't speak to people who were not doing a good job, partly, i think, because it's the leading farmers who are the ones who are prepared to throw their gates open and say come and have a look at what we do, and people who aren't doing such a great job don't necessarily want to do that. But I still maintain that the majority of farmers do a great job.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah.
Jill Griffiths:Those that raise animals care about their animals. Those that raise plants care about the issues that go along with plants. People don't really want to. I think people really want to be pouring a whole heap of poisons into the environment if they can get away with it and produce goods at the price that people are prepared to pay them for them. if they don't have to, So I just yeah, I'm a pats off to farmers really.
Mark Ferguson:A quick interruption here to remind you of Head Shepherd Premium and our consulting services at Next to Niagara International. If you love this podcast and want to hear more of them, visit thehubnextanagrycom and sign up for Head Shepherd Premium and get an extra podcast each week. If you're listening to this and thinking you really do want to maximise the genetic gain of your livestock and feel more confident around the decisions you're making on farm, then send me an email at mark at nextanagrycom and we'll get in touch and see where that takes us. One of the opportunities of doing the kind of research you've just done is you'll sort of have a bit of a feel for a bit of crystal ball grazing maybe, about what the future of food looks like. I mean, i guess one of the things you do is try Again.
Mark Ferguson:I've only read a few chapters and one of them was the tomato one, so I will focus on that. But that concept of how many tomato plants you did in your backyard to preserve enough tomatoes, and would that be? if you're an award-winning writer, would you be better spending your time growing tomatoes or writing scientific articles on science And that sort of. I guess that concept of we can all calculate the food miles and everything of our food, but still We still may be most efficient growing tomatoes where tomatoes grow well, and here in Canterbury. Then whatever likes wet, cold stuff will grow well. There's different areas of the globe that do things well, and so it's not necessary that our backyard will always be best for every produce. I don't know where I'm going with that question, but just generally. Yeah, interest in your thoughts around where you got to, on whether you should be buying local or adding that to local when it's most efficient but external when it's not, or how that came together in your head.
Jill Griffiths:It came together very slowly because I did come from the viewpoint that eat local was a great slogan and that's what we should be doing, because clearly it makes sense. That was my viewpoint and I was surprised at how complex the question was when I dug into it. There's one study that I looked at that was looking at it investigated fresh tomatoes sold at one market in Sydney and it looked at whether they were better, whether they had lower environmental impact if they came from local areas or if they were shipped down from Queensland Even that, and they looked at carbon and they looked at water, because they did two parameters that are relatively easy to look at and the play on people's mind, but which was better, depending on the time of year, the way the tomatoes were grown and whether you were looking at carbon or water. There was no. Oh, you must. If you're in Sydney and buying tomatoes from here, you must always buy these ones because they're best.
Jill Griffiths:It just didn't work out like that. It was much more complicated and so that's just one fresh product in one market. When you multiply that over the range of things that we want to eat, the questions get a little, i think, local and seasonal, and it is probably the key, because if you're growing tomatoes in a heated greenhouse, then it's probably in most cases it's going to be better if you can track them a little distance from somewhere where they're growing in an open field. But even that is not going to be the case all the time. So if you can grow tomatoes in your backyard, and that's probably going to be a good thing, but if, like some summers in Perth and I wrote the book Living in Perth and some summers in Perth you have to pour so much water onto it tomorrow, to make it grow.
Jill Griffiths:I would sort of think, okay, is this efficient water usage? or if someone is growing them in a larger area with a bit of shade cloth over them, doing a much better job than what I'm doing here. So, it's an incredibly complex question and the slogan eat local just doesn't cover the amount of nuance in that simple question. So yeah, Yeah, yeah.
Jill Griffiths:I still haven't really answered that. I think local and seasonal for most fruit and veggies and perhaps some of the things that we really like we have to. well, maybe we forego them at certain times here, but that said, it's a difficult thing to sit in an agricultural exporting country, as you and I both are, and say we should just all eat local because our farmers, our balanced payments, relies on us exporting a certain amount of agricultural products, And so the people that are eating that aren't eating local.
Mark Ferguson:No.
Jill Griffiths:They're eating stuff that was made in Australia and New Zealand, so we can't have it all both ways, yeah yeah, no, exactly Like I said it's a nuance, yeah.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, and it makes, i guess, the one thing that will not annoy me. It's always a little bit frustrating. I like you, i enjoy time out in the garden and growing stuff. Last year I let my daughter decide what we grew and that was a complete disaster. So that's not happening this year.
Mark Ferguson:But the but, but just a range of things we've worked on that I grow was more the issue that the. Anyway, we won't get into the detail there, but the. What is always a little bit frustrating is when, when my corn is ripe, corn's worth nothing in the supermarket, and when my tomatoes are ripe, tomatoes worth nothing in the supermarket, and you've always got the, i guess.
Jill Griffiths:Or even worse, as you're waiting. You're waiting for that green tomato to just finish workening and it's going to be delicious, and you're hanging out and meanwhile they're dollar a kilo.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, i've worked out the ones that are high value, like snow peas and stuff, so I focused on the stuff that retains its value regardless of the time of season, as herbs and snow peas and anyway.
Jill Griffiths:Oh yeah, i was, i was, i was, i was growing.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, yeah.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, and they're ridiculously cheap, but they're ripe anyway.
Mark Ferguson:And that's all good. Another thing you cover is at which we hear what depends on how much you hear about food density or nutrient density of food, and again there's this sort of undercurrent that somehow farmers are purposefully making where factory farms are making our food less nutrient dense, and I think some of your stats around that were really interesting. That, like, the variation is just insane and and it can vary between time and year And so it's not necessarily trending all one way.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, some of the the. actually that was probably some of the numbers that did surprise me And I wish I could reel them all off the top of my head, but I but I can't. But they, there's a.
Jill Griffiths:we're often we hear that so often that modern food is lower in nutrient density, and to a set. there's a grain of truth in that, and the grain of truth is that in growing plumper and and and sort of more increasing yield, we have increased water content and starch content of a lot of fruit and vegetables, which gives higher yield But and so there's a dilution factor. that happens with other minerals and nutrients as, as you know, to starch and water increases. So if you look at the actual numbers and the true variation you know there's. there's one study that I quote about copper levels and the copper levels naturally have variation in the thousands of percent And the the best estimate for documented yeah, for actual change in level is is in the, is in the. you know percentage points rather than the thousands of percent. So the, the actual variation over time, is completely insignificant in comparison to the natural variation throughout a year. So that that argument just gets shot in the water really quickly.
Jill Griffiths:The other problem with that that lack of nutrient density argument is that it's very hard to make comparisons because there's not comparable data sets over time. So you can't go back and say well, you know, when great grandma was, you know, growing tomatoes, they had this amount of nutrient density because it was never measured. Yeah, so we don't. we don't know what those tomatoes had, so we don't, we don't, we, we don't have the data set to measure it. It's, it's one of the biggest problems.
Jill Griffiths:But the other thing is that as food becomes more plentiful and, let's face it, we, we, you know food. food is abundant in our society, even if some people struggle to to pay for it, and that's a. that's a whole other argument which I do touch on in book, but only only slightly. But food is so abundant that if you're not getting enough nutrients from your, your food, it's because you're eating the wrong things. You know. it's not, it's not the food's fault, it's, it's, it's your selection choices. That's the cold-hearted reality. Yeah, too many, too many chips and not enough, not enough brussel sprouts or whatever.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, Yeah, yeah, i already need to start, i guess, but the concept of the country is bigger Australia. The only food, or only mainstream food, we've contributed is macadamia nuts. It's interesting, yeah, yeah, so like 6,500,000 edible plants in Australia.
Jill Griffiths:I think it is. And yeah, macadamia is the only one that has created an industry. I think it's. I think $10 million is the benchmark of you know, to be a culturally significant industry, And also it is a species that's grown internationally.
Jill Griffiths:In fact they were called the Hawaiian plants for some time because they were first commercialized in Hawaii and not in Australia. We'll sort of ignore that fact from a moment. But even then there's other things that are kicking along in Australian cuisine about. You know, like lemon myrtle is something that's as condiments. Some things that are in cacodiplam chutney seems to be quite a problem, but cacodiplam is never going to rival apples as a part of our food supply.
Mark Ferguson:It's just not going to do it.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, for a whole gamut of reasons.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, just racking my brain, I don't think anything. New Zealand's contributed This, obviously. Chonetz-guzburi became a Kiwi fruit, but that wasn't from here, yeah, which is a bit like a way I remember that when you became a Hawaiian.
Jill Griffiths:it's a better story It was just called the National Areas for Australians, to tell.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, yeah.
Jill Griffiths:Well, most of our food supply comes from Europe, Asia and the Americas And that's a historic thing, you know. And the species that we farm tend to have spread over the globe with colonisation. That's the reality of how things have spread.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, Yeah, and it's interesting to Even bananas that I don't know how to go into bananas in detail in my book. They're our, one of the top 12 species that feed us, top 12 plant species that feed us. Bananas are sort of Southeast Asian in origin, but the Cavendish banana that is the one that we mostly buy in our supermarkets that was actually bred in England on the Cavendish estate and went around the world from England with colonisation And all of those Cavendish bananas they're not just the same as the other bananas, they're all cloned right here. They're all cloned because they're all grown from suckers.
Mark Ferguson:So the crop.
Jill Griffiths:Almost the entire worldwide commercial crop is genetically identical.
Mark Ferguson:Right.
Jill Griffiths:Now, i like bananas, though I'm not going to give up bananas.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, yeah, yeah It's interesting, and I guess you'll never be able to walk into a grain grower or supermarket again without questioning or seeing a whole different way You can't unsee or unheal things that you've learned.
Jill Griffiths:It's my kids that you should really feel sorry for. Yeah, yeah.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah.
Jill Griffiths:They don't live at home in the woods. Growing up, my daughter did send me a photo of the other man running in the shop and she said the man is actually in season at the moment. Can I buy this, yeah?
Mark Ferguson:And I'm sure that.
Jill Griffiths:I said yes, they are, Yeah, she's.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, excellent. So A cold hard plug for the book. How do our listeners get a copy of the book? Looks like it's by what you're tweeting. It's not to different bookstores around the place.
Jill Griffiths:It is, and I've had the gratifying experience in the last week.
Jill Griffiths:It's only been out a couple of weeks And I've had the gratifying experience in the last few days of getting photos of it on the shelf sent to me from all over the country. So it's at Brisbane International Airport and it's at National Portrait Gallery in in the readings in Glenfrey Road in Melbourne. It's in gimmicks in Abilene, i don't know. It seems to be everywhere. It's on Booktopia as well and Amazon. So, yeah, it's a little bit like local bookshop seems to seem to have it. And yeah, what's for dinner? That's some. Yeah, it seems to be out there.
Mark Ferguson:I like to tweet that you're getting jealous of where your book's traveling around, that you're you're sitting it out, sitting there in Denmark and it's. It's an old sort of exotic places.
Jill Griffiths:It's everywhere.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, I hope you'll get to follow it around at some point.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, that must be on the cards, it must be. some must be some sort of perks of writing a book.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, i am. I've done an event. I did an event in Perth last week which, i must say, was sold out, which was very, very gratifying, and I've got a couple more lined up over this side of the country and then in, probably in October, i'll go to Melbourne and and over and down around Tassie. Yeah, cool. Matthew Evans, who I think.
Jill Griffiths:I think I'm allowed to say this publicly Matthew Evans, who endorsed my book. He's actually invited me to Fat Pig Farm there in Tassie to do an event with him. So we're just we're just in the process of working out exactly what that will be, but it'll be sometime in October. Fantastic, excellent. I'm extra modern, happy to talk to people about about the book and, yeah, what I found out along the way.
Mark Ferguson:And when they can eat what?
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, yeah, i think that I do come back to the idea that, you know, the abundance that we live among, live amongst, is a privilege to us, and even even asking the question of what's for dinner in any context other than is there something for dinner, is a privilege of the modern age And it's it's not the way people have lived for most of human history as doing not the way a lot of people in the world live Money, and 10 people in the world is hungry. So you know there's, there's a lot to be thankful for. If you, if you're diving into the question of what we shouldn't eat and then pondering on these sort of difficult questions that I looked into, so I do. I do think the whole, the whole conversation is a is a privilege, really, as a privilege of being well fed.
Mark Ferguson:It is indeed a privilege. We've already had a discussion about what's for Christmas dinner in 2020 and if there's still six months away when we're recording this. So, indeed, that's a privilege and and somewhat crazy, but that's what. Yeah, in case the family member who said that was listening, i won't go into it in too much detail, but yeah, that's. It is interesting how much yeah we have. Yeah, we can almost access anything we want whenever we want, wherever we are, and that's it's very different to how it's ever been and very different to how it still is in lots of places. So, yeah, we are in a very much a privilege position.
Jill Griffiths:Yeah, just just one thing on that. I think that's like it's tempting for us to think that there's great diversity in our food system because we can access everything Anyway, but the what we can access is pretty much the same the world over. So the world over there's a reflection in the diversity of our food supply. At the same time, there's seemingly great abundance and great diversity in what's on our own supermarket shelves. There's a bit of a dichotomy happening there that I think is worth considering and worth thinking about.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, excellent, joe. Well, thanks very much for your time and congratulations again on on the book What's for Dinner. Yeah, definitely encourage people to us that out and find it will put links in the show notes so that they can find you in the book. But, yeah, very much appreciate it and great to have you on the other side of an interview for this for this podcast, and yeah, look forward to talking about some sides of sheep at some point in the future.
Jill Griffiths:Okay, yeah, thanks, thanks, mark. Thanks for inviting me along, and we'll stay in touch. It'd be interesting to see how it all plays out. We might bump into each other again at the sheep conference on one of these days.
Mark Ferguson:That's right. Yeah, thanks, Joe.
Jill Griffiths:Thank you.
Mark Ferguson:Thanks again to our mates in Honega who are proud world leaders in the manufacturing and supply professional sheep shearing and clipping equipment. They understand that their customers rely on the quality and performance of their products each and every day. Also, thanks to our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflix, the Alfa and Extensive Lifestyle product portfolio focused on animal health and management, all backed up by exceptional service. Both of these companies are wonderful supporters of the Australian and New Zealand livestock industries and we thank them for sponsoring the HEAP podcast.
