Get to Know the Soil Through Your Stomach

Matthew Evans, The Gourmet Farmer, was once Australia’s “most feared restaurant critic.” What he savours most down under nowadays is the soil that grows the food on his family’s Fat Pig Farm. You might think a connoisseur of cuisine turned farmer would be a soil snob. But the Gourmet Farmer speaks with true wonder about soil, pondering the many ways it is the very source of life and food that sustains us. He treats the earth beneath our feet as an ongoing discovery, offering down-to-earth advice on getting to know where food comes from – finding the natural connection of what he calls “soil to stomach.”

A chef by trade, Matthew sees dinner in the paddock. He wants other people to have the same experience of knowing their food – from growing to eating it. But he also knows many people have trouble enough just tracking down dinner in the fridge, much less reading labels. Still, even he doesn’t feel the need to be perfect in the messy quest for the right food. For him, it starts with the sheer joy of using your senses to discover the flavour of real food that comes from good soil. And the sense to pass over the kind of fare that’s been bred to be bland. His advice: if you can’t smell the fragrance of a strawberry, don’t buy it! Whatever food you pick, pick as close to the original source as you can.