Just like the fresh vegetables it espouses, the farm-to-table concept is firmly rooting itself in the world’s food culture.
More an unyielding fixture than a fad in global dining, the rise in farm-to-table dining habits signifies a new way of thinking about food; a new attitude towards sustainability. People are focusing as much on brilliant produce as they are on brilliant cuisine. The movement’s having a moment, and it’s an international one. From India to Australia, farm-to-table restaurants can be found in nearly every major city – some even gaining a cult following, and filtering through from big-restaurant menus to tiny cafés.
Closer home, the Australian chef Troy Payne is trying his best to win people over to this vision, and change the way the UAE eats. Where he grew up in Melbourne, with its clear-cut seasons, the only time he’d eat something was when it was available. This early lesson on the benefits of seasonal eating meant a life lived in awe and respect of Nature: “We grew up learning about the ingredients around us, whether it was Dad cooking on peat moss or wrapping things in eucalyptus barks and leaves.”
Years later, he’s nostalgic for back-to-basics cooking of that ilk. “Before, you’d go to the fishmonger for fish, the butcher for meat, the fruit and veg mart. You didn’t walk into one shop just to make it easy. You didn’t say, ‘I want it diced this way, and it has to come from Spain’. Your suburbs had a vegetable patch and everyone ate from it. Which means you’d not only have a healthier life in your hands, there was less wastage as you were only growing what you needed within that space.”
He’s now brought that philosophy to the UAE, and over the past few years has been cultivating long-standing relations with farmers, channelling a seasonal menu into the recently launched restaurant The Pangolin at Els Club, with restaurateur Sergio Lopez.
“The UAE has seasons too, it’s not just divided into hot and not hot. The people of the UAE adapted to its weather centuries ago - understanding how they survived in those times can teach us a lot about good eating. We did a dish with salted dry mackerel, and remember an Emirati man come up and say it was amazing to see, and that his father still did it.”
It doesn’t make it an easy journey when the sandy path from farm-to-table is strewn with misconceptions in the UAE. “Everyone thinks tomato, pepper, lettuces and a few herbs are the only produce that can grow in the UAE. But just the Emirates Bio Farm has something like 15 different types of tomatoes… and there’s lots of farms like that. There’s so many types of chillies. There’s beetroot, kale, leeks, okra, strawberries, parsley, mint, potatoes... the list goes on. There’s way more than what’s spoken about.”
Add in fish and meat to the mix, and you have an entire meal on your plate that’s local. “It’s not just your vegetable farms, there are fish farms here that help with temperatures, because in the summers it’s so hot here that you could pull a fish out of the ocean and it’ll already be deteriorating due to the heat… fish straight from water can be very soft, and you need a fish farm. But come winter and the fish are just beautiful.”
And Troy’s not using farm-to-table and sustainability as just jargon – he’s strongly committed. There’s a solid focus on home-grown foods and made-from-scratch foods. “We make vinegar, sausages, pasta, bread, cheese with local goat milk. We buy mustard seeds and make our own mustard. We make vinegars out of dates – pick them when they’re ripe and ferment them. That’s as local as you can get. If I can’t have something, I’m not importing it.”
If you’re still wondering why your purchasing power should be channelled towards farm-to-table dining, gulfnews.com asked Payne to give us six reasons why.
Reason 1: Do it for the environment
Saving the world might sound intimidating, but it actually doesn’t need a colossal step; starting with just buying local and minimising our carbon footprint helps. Farms are a key aspect of this ethos - maximum yield, minimum impact.
“You get everything from fish and chicken to veggies, herbs and flowers in the UAE here,” Troy says. “Take Thai basil - we can grow basil here that’s almost like Thai basil due to the heat here; a local basil that gives you a different texture and flavour than the usual one. You can go into little places that do hydroponics and vertical growing, so you can branch out even more. Even getting in produce from Lebanon, Tunisia, Syria is great. It’s still not coming on a plane, it’s coming from close by.
“We’re destroying the world, but we can do simple things to make a difference, like not eating food that arrived through flight then boat then car. Wouldn’t you rather have something from 40km instead of 4,000?”
Reason 2: Do it for the farmers
Bypassing middlemen, a characteristic of farm to table dining where corporates and major chains are eliminated, benefits farmers massively, and it goes beyond the money.
“Communication between cooks and farmers is key, and it’s two-way,” Payne said. “Going to farms, talking to farmers, understanding the way they work… and in return helping farmers here understand there are cooks here who want their food. Which is why the farmer’s market has been amazing as it’s gotten the public introduced to them.”
Payne loves using zucchini flowers as an example. “For the longest time, chefs have been importing zucchini flowers from Italy or France. It costs a fortune, not to mention all the packaging. When we visited UAE farms and said we’d take the flowers along with the zucchini, we met with quite some surprise from farmers – they didn’t know flowers could be useful for anything. We sent them pictures to show them, and since then they’ve started taking the flowers to the market.
“You can’t be a cook and go ‘I need a tomato, someone get it for me’. To cook it properly you need to know when it’s best, if you pick it early in the morning or under the hot sun? When I first went to a farm and asked for carrots, they pulled it out of the sand and it tasted salty. I talked to the farmers and they were fermenting fish with water and using that as fertiliser but using too much salt, which made it like a pre-seasoned carrot. If I’d used a middle man, I’d probably not have known that.”
Reason 3: Do it for your body
Understanding provenance is key because when it’s farm-to-table, you know nothing else has gone into it.
“If you’re buying from a chicken farm, you know it’s not being pumped with anything,” says Payne. “Even something as simple as a potato – a lot of people don’t know that the older the potato the more sugar is in it, and a lot of times when you try do a fry chip they’ll still be soggy or extra dark brown as sugar’s coming out and caramelising too quickly. That’s because half the produce in supermarkets has been in a big fridge for a while and treated, which means some potatoes could be up to a year old.
“So your supermarket tomato disintegrates fast, your banana turns bad, your lettuce starts going mouldy, because it’s put in a closed environment and is suddenly brought out and has oxygen.”
In short, the best food comes from a fruit and veg market, not a packet on a shelf.
And it’s not just all about your chicken and veggies; when bread-making at home hit new heights during the pandemic last year, Payne was overjoyed. “A lot of people probably don’t even have a gluten intolerance, they’re probably just intolerant to all the chemicals in the bread that’s sold in supermarkets. There’s a lot of things that build up in people’s bodies that they don’t know about.”
Reason 4: Do it so there’s less packaging involved
If you’re buying from farmers, you’ll go away with your produce in a cardboard box. If you’re buying from supermarkets, you’ll leave with plastic inside plastic. “A banana has a nature-given package already – why does it need another plastic covering?” asks Payne. “You can even buy a plastic tube into which your banana goes. Baby carrots come in packaging within packaging. Vegetable and fruit sections have reels of plastic that you pull out, and you won’t put just one clove of garlic in, you’ll be tempted to buy more just because the plastic bag’s so big.”
Reason 5: Do it so less ends up in landfills
The numbers on a global scale are mind boggling, but just in the UAE Food Bank officials have stated food waste costs the country Dh13 billion annually.
“People say cooking at home is expensive - it’s not,” Payne said. “The shopping is expensive. There’s a reason why, and it involves brainwashing of customers.”
He uses garlic as an example. “You have your loose garlic lying around in supermarkets but it looks messy. Next to it is a neatly packaged packet with four while garlic bulbs in a row, and everyone goes ‘oh it looks good’. But does anybody eat four heads of garlic in a couple of days? The minute the green bit comes out people throw it in the bin. We need to buy what we need and not what a supermarket wants us to, or the amount of food that goes into landfills is going to turn into one massive problem."
Reason 6: Do it for the local economy
Farm to table benefits us in a beautiful cycle. The farmer in the UAE gets your money. Buying from them means they employ someone else to help grow produce. Then they pay someone locally to deliver it. The money chain stays local.
It also helps keep restaurants afloat. “There’s a huge demand for French chickens in the UAE,” Payne said. “But local chicken that hasn’t been frozen and is fresh from the farm can help restaurants price competitively and survive as a business, because then it’ll be a Dh10, not a Dh60 price tag.”
“The market is very demanding, and everyone wants everything now and fast and cheap and unique. When you step back and think about it, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed immediately.”
Read on for four recipes from Chef Troy - Pangolin dome stuffed omelette filled with smoky sausage and mushroom stew, beetroot kebabs, Chicken heart kebabs and Andalusian style adobo
Do you want us to cover a food topic? Write to us at food@gulfnews.com
