Turning the tables on meat
Foodies’ biggest buzzword right now is ‘plant-based’. Sarah Catherall talks to a chef who has ditched meat from his menu.
Asher Boote’s fingers fly as he chops a bunch of leafy kale and tosses it into a bowl. A 7kg marrow lies on his restaurant kitchen bench which will be turned into something delicious.
It has come from the chef’s quarter-acre market garden, Saibai, in Shannon, where he grows much of the produce he serves at his Wellington eatery, Hillside Downtown.
At the tiny 22-seat restaurant, Bootemade vegetables the star of the show when he took meat off the menu three years ago – it was a brave and unusual move. Hillside had just won gongs for its meat dishes in the Beef & Lamb awards and it had a Cuisine hat.
‘‘People warned it would be the end of us,’’ Boote says. ‘‘But the more I looked at going meatless, the more it made a lot of sense. If you pick a peach off a tree it will taste delicious, you can’t do the same with a piece of meat. I’m all about enhancing an ingredient and using whole vegetables rather than trying to manipulate something.’’
The 35-year-old chef is part of a global movement towards plant-based cuisine. Internationally, one of New York’s top restaurants, Eleven Madison Park, recently announced it would reopen in June with a plant-based menu.
Diners paying US$335 to eat at the fine-dining restaurant will be served up vegetables and anything classified as coming from a plant rather than dishes like suckling pig, sea urchin and glazed duck.
Considered a trend-setter in American dining, the three-star Michelin restaurant’s head chef, Daniel Humm, said: ‘‘The current food system is simply not sustainable, in so many ways.’’
What has also shifted since Boote converted to a vegetarian-based menu three years back is the language around this dietary concept.
Terms like vegan and vegetarian can carry a stigma, seen ‘‘as a bit leftie’’, according to Auckland University senior marketing lecturer Bodo Lang.
Today, the more palatable term is ‘‘plant-based eating’’.
‘‘Concern about the environment and the impact of farming is driving the move to eat less meat,’’ Lang says. ‘‘But the word vegan can be seen as being a bit out there. Using a term like plantbased is much more socially acceptable. You’re getting rid of the baggage around veganism whereas talking about plant-based food feels like a massive step towards social acceptance.’’
He talks about a carton of ‘‘plant-based milk’’ he saw for sale that morning. ‘‘If it was called vegan milk that immediately excludes a lot of people,’’ he says.
At Hillside, Boote says at least half the diners do eat meat but they’re prepared to eat less of it.
‘‘It is a bit freer as a concept than being a vegan or vegetarian,’’ Boote says. ‘‘The greatest rise is of people who eat meat, but eat less and they’re more open to not having meat as the centrepiece. My job is to eliminate the stigma that there is no meat served here. We’ve had people come in and say at the end, ‘Oh, there was no meat’.’’
Each week, Boote goes up to his organic market garden and grows what he needs: radishes, tomatillos, cloves of garlic and the kale he chops today.
A compost bucket on his kitchen bench is piled with scraps of food. The chef pulls out a black pen – the only one all the staff share. In his quest to be socially and environmentally responsible, he avoids packaged supplies from his small range of suppliers, instead asking businesses to bring them in bulk and pour them into Hillside’s own buckets.
He’s so passionate about creating minimum waste that once he challenged staff to fill less than one rubbish bag in a week, and they did it.
‘‘It’s about thinking: do we need this thing that might be wasted? I believe being a good chef is about doing a thousand little things really well.’’
Boote hasn’t rejected meat in his own diet but will eat only ethically farmed meat from sources he knows. Ironically, he grew up on a 3000-hectare sheep and beef farm on the top of the Whanganui River, where breakfast was typically a plate of mutton chops.
Meat was the basis of every meal: whether it was the pet lamb they had raised since they were kids or something his father had hunted, fished or shot. The family also had a huge vegetable garden they all tended. There was rarely a need to go to the supermarket.
‘‘I naturally had a relationship with the land. We learned to really live on the land and we were in touch with nature,’’ he says.
Caring for the environment and avoiding commercialised food production is part of his motivation for what and how he cooks today: the rivers he swam in as a kid are now polluted and the paddocks along roadsides are yellowing from too much spray.
‘‘It’s just the idea that you can’t just jump in a river now and have to think: is this one safe? That makes me sad.’’
His restaurant is small so a huge profit is not his motive. However, there’s big money to be made in the fashionable plant-based food category, which Bodo Lang expects will grow.
Fast food giants and food producers are replacing meat with plant-based faux meat alternatives to attract consumers who are concerned about the environment, animal welfare and nutrition.
My Food Bag has a plant-based option using vegan ingredients. Inghams Foods has introduced a range of plant-based nuggets, tenders and burgers under its ‘‘Let’s Eat’’ brand.
In the United States, Beyond Meat, financially backed by Leonardo DiCaprio, had a meteoric sharemarket debut when it launched earlier this year. Burger King has a new ‘‘plant-based’’ Whopper burger, which uses Beyond Meat’s pea protein patty.
McDonald’s is trialling its ‘‘McPlant’’ burger in its Scandinavian outlets and New Zealand outlets are watching with interest, according to a spokesman.
Boote is concerned about these faux meat options, saying they’re another form of processed food. However, Lang says some meat-eaters prefer to eat something which mimics meat as it makes their choice feel socially acceptable.
‘‘There’s absolutely a commercial opportunity for big food companies to be creating these plantbased options. If they’re caught snoozing they could miss out on what I expect will be a growing trend,’’ he says.
He thinks that chefs like Boote and others jumping on the plant-based food truck will lead a growing change in our cuisine. But it might take time to convert traditional meat-eaters who typically pull in at a pie shop or opt for a burger – and who are often ruled by taste and price.
‘‘If you can show that plant-based options are tasty or even tastier than the meat option, then the battle will be won,’’ says Lang.