In Praise of Modern Hunting and Gathering

The magic question, hobbies, and the delight of sourcing food.

Hey friend,

“What do you do for fun?” 

I asked this question to a few friends on a rare night out for dinner. It’s magic. It’s become my go-to question. It rarely fails. Each woman lit up as she described baking sourdough, dancing, running, or getting stronger in the gym. Friend, you know I nominated words. Poetry feels like play. 

But it occurred to me after dinner that I also love sourcing food. It’s not really a hobby, right? It seems more like a chore. Let me explain, it’s not the type of food shopping that involves pushing my trolley around Woolworths. That whole experience feels like the noonday devil is stalking me.  

Supermarkets are beige. Sterile. I feel constrained. Everything is wrapped in plastic. The music is the same in every shop. The food never changes with the seasons. To bite into a tomato-shaped orb is to bite into disappointment. Apples taste like the death of dreams. Carrots are merely orange sticks with no peppery sweetness, no aroma at all. I’ve never seen mulberries there or broad beans.

I’m grateful to the giants of homogeneity, that I can get groceries delivered in crazy seasons. But all the pleasure of hunting and gathering is gone. I wonder, is it just me? This whole system is designed for my convenience, and yet I feel like I have lost something I never had.

I recently came across the word anemoia, from

Freya India

, which means nostalgia for a time one has never known. Freya was talking about the Gen Z grief for a childhood without screens. But my Millennial heart is nostalgic for markets. 

This is Stacey’s bread. It’s fancy.

One rainy afternoon, my friend Stacey asked if I had any eggs. I have five industrial-bred chickens that each lay an egg every day for three years and die. I am drowning in eggs. Stacey has actual chickens who rest from laying eggs during the winter (as chickens should do). She offered me sourdough bread in exchange. 

And so it was, on a drizzling, overcast Tuesday, Stacey pulled up in my driveway with two kids in the car on her way to pick up her older kids from school. George was clipped into his car seat ready for our own school run. I handed Stacey half a dozen eggs and two Grolsch bottles filled with homemade lime cordial. 

I happened to have lime cordial because my friend Michelle passed on a bag bursting with limes from their tree. The weekend before I saw Stacey, I stood in the kitchen with my boys, juicing limes and weighing them. I remembered my mother-in-law’s admonition to add the same amount of sugar to the juice, “You’ll be tempted to reduce the sugar, but that’s what preserves it. It’s not as sweet as shop-bought cordial, but if you’re worried you can just use less cordial.”

Stacey gave me a loaf of warm sourdough wrapped in a faded sage tea-towel. I hugged it to my very pregnant belly, nestled it like the baby that was coming, relishing in the warmth as rain started to mist my hair. 

To be fair, it’s hard to pinpoint the exact period of history for which I’m nostalgic. My great grandparents on my Mum’s side lived through World War II and the Spanish Civil War. I can only imagine sourcing food was difficult. My Spanish grandparents immigrated to Australia when my Mum was six years old. 

My Nanny worked full-time as a cleaner in a hospital. She told my Mum, “Don’t ever work full-time.” But Mum wanted to move to a better area and enrol us in a private school. So she worked full-time. But she told me, “Work hard in school so you won’t have to work full-time when you have kids.” Nanny and Mum certainly did not have time to shop at the market. 

They show their love through acts of service. When I lived at home, I never ironed a shirt, never turned on a washing machine, never cooked a meal. I never had to. In exchange, I studied hard. I was the first person in my family, on both sides, to go to university. The first one to get a Bachelor's degree, an Honours degree, and a Masters degree. But when I left home, I had no idea how to cook or source food.

My mother-in-law gave me her mother’s vacola. I use it when our summer garden groans under a glut of cucumbers and zucchinis. I have fond memories of manically slicing buckets of cucumbers and zucchinis one December with my friend Tinson. To this day, I cannot remember why, in amongst all the chaos that is December, we thought making pickles was a good idea, but every few days we got together to chop cucumbers and zucchinis from both our gardens. 

Children ran in and out of the house, slamming doors, seemingly immune to our squawking about the flies. We stood over the stove in the blistering 40 degree heat and boiled the pickling liquid. We poured it over the zucchinis and cucumbers in glass pickling jars. I feel sweaty just thinking about how we lugged the massive metal pot from the shed, put it on the stove, put six glass jars in the pot at a time, filled it with water, and boiled the jars until they were sealed. 

Usually, some time around January, when time is hazy and schedules haven’t kicked off yet, my husband or I will look at each other and say, “I’m thinking of making some passata.” Whoever calls chicken and suggests the idea is the one who has to head to the fruit and veggie shop on the highway and lug home boxes of tomatoes. 

We stand opposite each other at the jarrah table his Dad made for our wedding, chop tomatoes and chat. The geriatric air con breathes on us like an old man with emphysema while we simmer the tomatoes down into a thick passata. 

Whenever I go out into the Little Shed to shop before dinner, I see rows of pickles and passata. Of course it’s quicker and easier to buy pickles and passata at the shop, but there is more to life than quick and easy. 

When I moved out of home, I learned to cook through trial and error. I Googled banana muffin recipes when I did not understand any of the basic principles of baking. This meant that when I baked for Zac’s cricket team, the following week he declined my offer to bring something and said he would make sandwiches instead. Another time, I made a tagine in a slow-cooker, invited my parents over for lunch the next day, then went out for the night and completely forgot about the tagine (fun fact: slow cookers have a safety setting that turns themselves off at 16 hours). 

But I persevered with cooking, particularly because Zac and I were broke students for many years. And so, surprisingly, I have come to love cooking. When I’m nestled in the kitchen, listening to the sizzle of onions while my kids play outside, it doesn’t feel like a chore. Lately, I find myself even rejoicing in the simple silence of doing dishes.

As a result of this love, my heart has expanded to love food shopping. I’ve absorbed the words of Tamar Adler, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver, and Michael Pollan about food sourcing into my heart. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall said, “I must admit that for me, food shopping is something of a hobby.” 

Slowly, I am wrestling back food from the supermarket. There’s the trip every few months up the hill to the honey man to buy a 15kg tub of local honey for our kitchen counter (it’s $5 cheaper per kilo than the supermarket!) There’s the cash in the letterbox situation for a tin of extra virgin olive oil from Gingin to be delivered to our door. 

Here’s my mother-in-law pulling trays of apricots and cooler bags of lamb from her car to give to me from her brother’s farm. Here’s my brother passing on homemade salami he made with an Italian family we grew up with, our neighbours for ten years. 

Kalamata olives are slowly growing on the trees in our front yard. I have schemes to harvest and cure them myself, using a method I snagged from an old colleague who used to give me jars of Sicilian olives on random Saturdays (and, of course, I plan to trade them for more salami and sourdough). 

I know I’ll never escape the supermarket. I’m grateful for it—I’ve got no desire to live a completely off-grid existence. Sourcing food this way takes longer, but when life gets too busy, I don’t have time to shop at five different places and anhedonia strikes. 

Acedia infests my food sourcing with depressing tapping at pixelated vegetables that I can neither smell or touch. Why does efficiency need to be the number one goal of my life? What am I supposed to do with all the extra time I have saved?

I love, “Shaking the hand that feeds me,” like Michael Pollan says, rather than the sprawling, impersonal global supply chain. I love knowing where my food comes from. I relish the reminder that we are embodied creatures.

We need, we depend on each other, and we do not feed ourselves. The convoluted web of swaps and doorstep haggles brings an unexpected richness to my days. Food is neither quick nor easy, but there is deep joy to be had in sourcing it. 

Next time someone asks me what I do for fun, I’m ready. I’m gonna tell them I love hunting and gathering. 

Tell me in the comments (or hit reply to this email):

1. Do you have a chore that you enjoy?

2. What do you do for fun?

3. Is there something that you do deliberately slow or the old fashioned way, just for the fun of it?

4. What things do you stop doing when you get too busy?