“If you come to our farm, you're not going to be served poison.”
After dining at Brae and chatting with head chef and owner Dan Hunter at length, it’s this statement about poison that lingers with me. Last year, the restaurant came second to Azurmendi in Spain in the World’s 50 Best Sustainable Restaurant Awards. More recently, Brae was awarded Regional Restaurant of the Year at the 2020 Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Awards. Given the benchmark Dan has set with Brae, his comment seems utterly sarcastic. That Brae has a strict no-poison policy doesn’t seem like anything to write home about. Surely, at a bare minimum, we expect restaurants not to serve poison?
Yet in the modern world, we are constantly dished out processed foodlike products, while most fresh produce has been grown on chemically intensive farms using pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers. In short, most of our food has been poisoned. We’ve consumed artificial, industrial food for so long that it’s now almost unrelated to the real thing. If you ever find yourself, like me, lost in a supermarket aisle, look around. You’re looking at a whole lot of processed foods, 53 percent of which aren’t considered to be core foods that should make up the bulk of our diet.
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