His petri-dish patty will be made from a mixture of fat and cow muscle grown from stem cells in a culture of foetal calf serum (that’s blood plasma without the clotting agents) – a technology trialled in February. It may sound less appetising than a Big Mac – but it could bring huge environmental benefits. Producing beef this way results in a 96% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to rearing animals, and uses 45% of the energy, 1% of the land and 4% of the water associated with conventional beef production.

and

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth

My most distinct memory of The Space Merchants (last read back in 1996) was the test-tube grown meat “Chicken Little”.

And what of the world traveller, the woman who’s now lived in 5 different countries?

I am so very glad to regularly lay myself down in this, our most beautiful bed. It’s comfortably soft and firm at the same time and layered with a bedspread I bought from a tiny old lady in Sapa, Vietnam several years ago.

The map reminds me of the places I’ll be and the places I’ll go – but most days I’m very happy to be at home. I really like the small city feel of Linz and I’m beginning to reach out tendrils of personal growth into the opportunity of this place.

I’m slowly documenting my making and doing a little more, primarily to make myself feel more productive but also to prepare a portfolio. It’s strange, but in these days of craft and cooking blogs it can often feel like you’ve done nothing until it’s been documented publicly.

For example:

Cloning a Kombucha Scoby

I’m not much of a soft drink consumer, though I do love carbonated spring water and “gespritzte” juices. I have enjoyed Kombucha, but spending 3€ per bottle on fermented tea seems like a waste when I can follow a tutorial and make it myself.

I’m hoping that the Scoby mother will grow – so far there’s a pleasant cider vinegarish smell which is meant to be a good sign.  Apparently it’s also good to anthropomorphise your scoby “mother” and give it a name. Since I used Yorkshire Tea and raw Demerara sugar in the mix it seems that Mrs Rochester will be appropriate.

There’s something about cloning a mass of microbes (yeast and bacteria) which is strangely compelling.  I’m hoping that we’ll have a batch of Kombucha ready for the public mushroom growing workshop of Time’s Up‘s Non-Green Gardening residency.

Picking Wild Foods

Living in Berlin put a bit of a dampener on picking wild foods, something which I’d done in Finland, Adelaide and during my short time in Sheffield. Despite collecting some blackberries in Gorlitzer Park, the ubiquity of dogs and their waste meant I was reluctant to pick nettles.

So the presence of wild and urban food sources around Linz is quite lovely. There are more backyards for fruit trees to escape from and there’s a healthy continuing tradition of collecting wild foods. Many of my urban finds are being tracked in Boskoi and I’ve got a lovely book that I’m slowly learning to understand.

Bärlauch / wild garlic (Allium ursinum) is in season now and Vicy, Theresa, Lisa and I went picking a couple of weeks ago after a quick tutorial on how to recognised the leaves.  If nothing else the smell of garlic helps you identify the bärlauch from its poisonous and perfumed doppelgänger Maiglöckchen / lily of the valley.

I’ve frozen some chopped leaves and have several jars of pesto (with almonds and sunflower seeds) that are awaiting consumption.  Unfortunately the stored pesto coincides with me trying to manage my carbohydrate intake, so I’ve not been eating nearly as much pasta as I’d like. Nor are bärlauchsemmelknödel (wild garlic bread dumplings) especially low on the GI scale… Oh but they’re delicious!

Travelling on Handbuilt Boats

Recognising bärlauch came in handy just before Easter when we started the second journey* of the Control of the Commons (CoC) project and began travelling down the Danube on a Frankenboat. In short we only managed to camp for one night before our trip was halted due to being an unidentifiable watercraft.

We made our camp near Wallsee on an old section of the Danube that was bypassed when a hydroelectric weir was installed.   The highlight was being camped next to a forest of bärlauch and young nettles, both of which made it into that evening’s risotto.

As much as I love the CoC project, camping in Austria in early April is not such a good idea for the ill-prepared. We almost reached hypothermia as a result of being too tired to layer up properly in our sleeping bags on a -2°C night, so our camping experience was not amazing.

Yet another reason to be grateful to return to our lovely bed.

*See, I really should be blogging more – not only have I not mentioned our wedding at all I also neglected to talk about travelling down the Murray River for 3 weeks on another weird boat.  Another time… I promise.

It’s been a lovely couple of weeks here in Berlin. From the first day of April the sun started shining and people started smiling. Then the most amazing thing happened, the horse chestnut tree (Rosskastaniene) in the courtyard (hof) began to change from branches with buds to a tree with leaves. Sure, trees get leaves every spring, but from my regular typing place by the kitchen window I finally could pay attention to the process.

Let me tell you something fascinating, trees burst into leaf from the bottom up.  Over three days I could effectively see the sap flowing up the trunk and along the branches.  From hour to hour different leaves had opened and I kinda forgot to take photos of the process because I kept on saying to my flatmate “Can you see that? It’s like a switch has been turned on or something!”

It was pretty exciting.

Here’s a photo from today, two weeks after the leaves unfurled:

The season actually appeared to burst from tree branch, bulb, seed and sun. I guess that’s why it’s called spring?

I needed to live in Europe before I understood that in my part of Australia, the seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter are Euro-centric ideas laid on top of a vastly different climate.  Even though it would make more sense to acknowledge traditional indigenous seasons, we persist in describing Australian weather with concepts that don’t adequately describe the actual seasonal patterns. I feel that one of the reasons discussions about climate change fail to influence people, is because a large part of the developed (and emitting) world’s population is semantically isolated from what is normal for their region.

Because of the ways in which language and culture are transmitted, the experience of being an Austrlian in Europe (and more specifically Britain) is that of normality: birds whistle familiar sounding melodies, trees are the shape of picture book trees and some houses are actually shaped like childrens’ generic house drawings. It may be ‘normal’ here, but however lovely Berlin in Spring may be, thinking about the contrasts makes me miss and desire the strange shapes, sounds and smells of South Australia, the experiences that I grew up in.

I think the black and white local magpies (Eltern) with their kleptomanic tendencies and dark blue flash of wing are quite beautiful, but there’s something about the sound of Australian magpies which makes up for their more violent tendency to swoop and attack while nesting [mp3].

by Dave – aka Emptybelly

The thing I most heartwrenchingly miss has always been the rainbow lorikeet, its swooping flash of colour as it flies through my favourite park and the chatter a flock of them make around dusk [the latter third of this mp3]. When I lived in Finland and made my garden wall, I painted a lorikeet to live in the plants.  If I could be reborn as an animal I’d be a lorikeet.

I had intended this to be more of a post about how marvellous the weather has been, rather than a meditation on climate, language, postcolonialism and the strange experience of being a European (Australian) “other” in Europe. Inevitably though, the feelings associated with new locations, travel and identity lead to a specific feeling of missing what is first known and familiar.

There are the usual “Aussie Tucker” suspects of Vegemite, meat pies, pavlova, lamingtons, spag bog and Anzac biscuits. But in comparison to people who’ve come from most other countries (Canada and USA are probably the other exceptions) we can’t really identify distinct food cultures and rely instead on a few recipes and a salty, yeasty brand name. Our national identity is defined by events taking place during a little over two centuries of (primarily European) migration, and doesn’t really reflect a cohesive culture.

So I’ve thought and I’ve thought about this concept of food and national identity. Historically the French, the Italians, the Finns, the Spanish, the Germans, the Chinese, the Indians were not nations of people, they were many smaller regional and cultural groups who just happened to live within more recent borders. Migration, globalisation, the media, supermarkets, freezers and microwaves didn’t exist for thousands of years and so regional food cultures evolved out of eating seasonal, local foods.

Where people seem to have gone wrong in identifying Australian food culture is by looking for one food culture to rule them all rather than letting many smaller, localised food cultures emerge. Even the true food cultures of the Indigenous Australians seem to have been reduced down to a “bush tucker” of witchetty grubs and wattle seed, quandong, honey ants, lemon myrtle and kangaroo, ignoring the full spectrum of groups living on foods specific to the coast, rainforest, arid grasslands and bush.

Other people have probably come around to this idea before, but I’ve only just articulated this thought: As Australians we should be looking to our immediate bioregions as a way of identifying the seasonal foods which will then shape a plurality of culinary cultures. We should be taking pride in our local brands, environment and farmers, recognising the layers of food cultures, both indigenous and immigrated and working out what grows best where and when. Once we know what plants and animals are best suited to our local regions we can learn how to cook and eat the foods that make up our food culture.

Currently I can identify only one type of edible wild mushroom and teeny tiny native cherries, but part of my longer term garden plan is to plant a couple of areas with indigenous plants including those suitable for food. In the meantime I’ll be feeding my summer guests Vietnamese cold rolls with seasonal vegetables (some coming from my garden), suggesting they drink Coopers’ beers, Bickford cordials and local wines to be be followed by Haighs’ chocolates and local fruits.

Maybe in two hundred years my descendants will be able to say with more certainty what dishes make up the contemporary Tandanya bioregional food culture, but right now I’ll just have to play it by taste.

A couple of times a day I’ll hear it laughing and lately it’s taken to perching on the mandarin tree or the main electricity wire coming from the street. I’ve finally had a chance to observe the brown and white patterns on its chest, the size of its massive beak, the helmet like crest on its head and the slight turquoise markings on the wing which mark it as a member of the kingfisher family of birds.

Today when I went outside for a break from style sheets and cms wrangling, I saw the most amazing thing. The kookaburra was surveying the yard from the wire and suddenly its entire stance changed, a ripple seemed to pass through its chest as it tensed up. A few more seconds passed and I followed the kookaburra’s line of sight down to the grass near the path – I couldn’t see anything…

And then, not as fast as I thought it would, the kookaburra gracefully drifted down to the path and picked something up in its beak. As the kookaburra whipped it’s head around, I saw the shine of a skink’s belly and heard the actual crunch of the little lizard being consumed.

“Wow”, I realised, “my kookaburra just caught its own food, and I got to watch!”

I really like fast shiny new cars and cool old gas guzzling cars from the 50s, super polluting aeroplanes and even though the thought of ever riding one scares me half to death, big noisy motorbikes.

Apart from the obvious financial considerations to do with owning a car (registration, insurance, maintenance, parking, fuel etc) and the ethical and environmental issues involved with their domination of our society, the big reason why i don’t own a car is because I would drive far too much.

And I love flying, whether it be in light aircraft or a jumbo – there’s this fantastic unbelievable moment as you take off which makes my heart leap too – this big lump of metal is flying. Even just thinking about planes, such as the F-111s and F-18s that were being discussed on 4 Corners tonight, is pretty cool. My dad still owns his old Piper Comanche, so theoretically I could learn how to fly the plane we used to squeeze into for family holidays.

I am in awe of the engineering and power and design of vehicles, and that is why I try to avoid using them, as it prevents me from ever taking them for granted. When I do borrow a car for a day or two, or take an international flight and stay away from Australia for half a year at a time, I make sure that I am use those resources with as much respect as possible. But that isn’t to say that I won’t be enjoying my experience!

Earlier this winter I’d hopefully planted seeds primarily so I could use the nettles as a nitrogen rich green compost, but they didn’t grow very well, so I’ve been looking out for some wild plants to harvest from. I’d seen some nettle-like plants by the side of the road earlier in the week, but my tentative stroke of the leaves didn’t result in any stings – so yesterday I took a braver approach and put my hand flat onto the leaves which did confirm my suspicion that the plants were indeed nettles.

It’s not that painful. I figure that nettle stings are the discomfort equivalent of eating warhead lollies – some people are braver or have a higher tolerance than others – luckily for me the sting is bearable.

So I borrowed some rubber gloves (I’m not yet brave enough to enter a nettle patch with bare hands) and scissors and picked a bag full of prickly leaves, ready to be dried and made into tea.

What did seem really weird that it was just over a year ago, in Finland’s early summer that I helped Ninnu prepare nettles for tea. But temperature wise I figure that there’s not much difference between July in Australia and early June in Finland.

Now of course I’ve remembered that nettles can be added to soup (fresh and dried), risottos, pancakes and used as a hair tonic as well as being a tea for people and gardens.

Aliese, it looks like I’ll have to come over this weekend and do some “weeding” for you!

There’s something so meditative about weeding. You get to focus on a task over and over again, searching for things which shouldn’t be where they are, isolating their stems from the good plants, pulling them out of the ground, shaking the dirt off and adding them to a rapidly increasing pile. It’s physically demanding work, so you get exercise and there’s that pleasant feeling of destroying something for a purpose.

Soursobs and buffalo grass. They were my obsession last week. But today as I weeded near the broadbeans, I decided it was time to tackle the aloe ciliaris which had taken over a nearby tree.

Weeding is chilling me out and it’s giving me a new found respect for the plants I am trying to destroy.

This climbing aloe is such a very clever plant. It primarily spreads by sending out runners. But it doesn’t just send out runners, it also propagates through stem cuttings, and one of the features of the aloe ciliaris is its segmented stem. So, as I pulled at stems that had woven their way through the tree , the segments and leaves fell apart, allowing plenty of opportunities for new plants to grow. The very act of removing the plant could give it more opportunity to spread!

Oh, and ivy. It spreads in a similar way, the leaves will come off as you pull it from the ground or walls, and you can’t add it to a compost pile straight away it as it will magically grow from your compost!

It turns out that the solution is to place such tough plants into black plastic bags, and to leave them in a sunny area area until the heat kills the plants and they properly begin rot, and then months later, add them to a compost pile.

So, more procrastination – it’s off to the store to buy weed killing plastic bags and some food for the ANZAC Day breakfast.