Lucy Ridge gives readers a glimpse of life with sustainable and small food producers in her book Fed Up. Photo: Supplied.
Are you fed up with feeling powerless when it comes to finding ethical, sustainable food production where care for the environment dominates and farmers and customers aren’t ripped off in the process?
Recovering chef Lucy Ridge has spent the better part of the past six years travelling the country exploring the role of women in food production, and her resulting book will have readers thinking more deeply about the people, and country, responsible for our dinner.
“Eating is a political act … you have a huge amount of political power in how you choose to engage in that system,” she said.
“You can use food sovereignty to improve the lives of the people around you and the environment.”
Lucy trained as a chef but, along the way, became disillusioned with the barked orders, long hours, and inappropriate comments in a male-dominated hospitality industry.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, she began to think about how she could change the trajectory of her life.
“I knew I still loved food, so I wondered how I could reignite that spark without returning full-time to the kitchen,” Lucy said.
She remembered her time as a 15-year-old work experience kid in an almost all-female kitchen, led by her first mentor and “chef mama”, and wondered how many women were leading the way in the food and farming industries.
Lucy started writing a list of what she wanted to discover and the places across Australia where she could find the answers.
“And I put in very, very small letters at the bottom — ‘Maybe I could turn this into a book one day’,” she said.
Her kitchen sojourn ended up taking her across the country: wild-harvesting bush foods with an Indigenous Elder in Broome, cheese-making in country New South Wales, butchering pasture-raised pigs in Victoria, stomping grapes in Tasmania and shucking oysters near Jervis Bay.
As well as learning many new food production skills, Lucy discovered how these small producers fit into the larger industry and the need to support them.
“Broad-acre agriculture still dominates Australian farming, but ‘Go big, or go home’ isn’t the only way, or even the best way, to do business,” she said.
“Throughout this culinary journey, I got to work with some amazing women who are proving that there is a better way to feed people.
“It’s not just idealism, or hobby farming: these are viable businesses that are growing and making food for people in their communities, not for shareholders.”
As Lucy developed a more meaningful relationship with food and where it all comes from — learning how to grow, make and harvest, all with ethical food production at the centre — she found herself transformed.
She wondered at how Australia could be exporting so much of its food when so many people were experiencing food insecurity on our shores.
“I think that form of agriculture is actually leaving a lot of people behind.”
Lucy hopes readers of her book will gain a better understanding of where a wide variety of food actually comes from, and more confidence and agency to make radical decisions when at the checkout.
“The more we can shorten the chain between the eater and the farmer, the better outcomes everybody has,” she said.
“That’s for people’s health, for farmers’ income, the local economy and better environmental outcomes.”
In the opening pages, Lucy herself invites the reader to discover the properties, businesses and homes that transformed the way she views food and how she interacts with the land she lives on.
“I won’t be including any exact recipes I learnt for cheese, gin or bush remedy ointments: these remain the intellectual property of the women who taught me. But I can open the door to their world and show you a little of what it’s like to walk in their shoes.
“I hope that in reading this book you will find new ways to connect with the people who make the food we eat, understand the food system a little better and perhaps even give yourself permission to change the way you live your own life.
“Come with me.”
Fed Up goes on sale on 1 March through Monash University Publishing, with pre-orders now open.
