A taste of sustainable paradise
JANET’S BRIGHTSIDE: CONFRONTING OUR NOT-SO-HEALTHY FOOD STANDARDS
Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own cities and their surrounds, curious to feel them out. This week she takes a walk on the Brightside.
There’s the dream (or is it a primal memory?) of being self-sufficient in terms of food. The basic human needs of food, shelter and sex are simple enough to meet except for ever-worsening conditions for satisfying the food one.
Cited has been bliss among apples, snakes and fig leaves but I am gazing at a Magaliesburg farm of paradise that also includes pomegranates, the figs themselves, quinces, radishes, shallots, pumpkins, nuts and berries, various chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, sheep and acorn-feeding boars, malabar spinach, mizuna leaves. Plus a thing called a gouda bean. It seems that whatever you desire to eat is available up to the horizon.
It is a food utopia that seems impossible. Yet, indomitable Janet Diack has proved it is possible to grow and rear good food. And then to grow and rear organically good food. And then to grow and rear completely sustainably good food. Brightside is her wonderwork, miraculously confronting our not-so-healthy food standards.
Tall, Cleopatra-eyed and blacktakkied, Janet strides her farm, Heather and I scampering on either side. She’s a vegetarian and the story of hiding under her bed when the sheep were taken for butchering must be old because now she does some of her own charcuterie, though Janet says it’s heart-rending when she has to select the animals for slaughter.
“People always joke about ‘happy animals’ but that sow is actually smiling – look. Like dogs sometimes smile.”
The baby boars, she points out, have watermelon stripes. She tickles a little squealing example.
Janet laughs about her “failed projects”, like ostriches, olives …
We’re in a glorious arbour, a real one, with a set table. This is where her chef son James was married, where we’re about to lunch. For a moment I wonder if James Diack’s becoming a chef came after the Brightside chicken or egg. But Janet says he long ago asked her about a salad he’d created at Coobs. “I said: Is this the best you can do? I should have kept my ruddy mouth shut!”
Alongside the arbour are bean beds. Janet allows plants to decide where they like to grow so it’s not that formal. She holds out one of the gouda beans on the vine. It’s a product of Jack’s giant Beanstalk, a pod about half a metre of plump, fresh greenness.
James Diack will know what to do with it at one of his four seasonal-ingredient restaurants.
Coobs (today) 011-447-0710