Land use questions will be fraught. How do we make space to let nature heal soil, regenerate native forests to clean our waterways and sequester carbon? Where will we grow food (by which the beef and bainne brigade mean grass)? Globally land is being lost to fire, floods and soil erosion. And we cannot continue to commodify food production.
American cattle feedlots show us the hellish reality of sentient, gentle animals eating corn in lines of sheds on dusty brown emptiness, systematic animal abuse that is barely comprehensible.
But this year in Melbourne, another food system popped up in the city’s Fed Square, a cultural area beside a business district (think Dublin’s Grand Canal Square down under). Designer Joost Bakker built a beautiful zero-waste, self-sustaining house with tonnes of soil on the roof holding it in place. The Future Food System project grew food and fish, cycling water and nutrients through its carefully designed ecosystem. One of the funkiest features was a mushroom wall in the entrance hallway. A galaxy of fungi flowered in a glass wall thanks to the steam vented from the shower room.
Mushrooms are magic in many ways. Plants have formed beneficial relationships with fungi for hundreds of millions of years. The mycelium, or networks of fungal threads, form the “wood wide web” that we learned about from scientist Suzanne Simard’s experiments showing how trees shared nutrients through these fungal networks.
The other magic of mushrooms is that they are the most efficient use of land known to agriculture. A mushroom farm produces more protein per unit of land than any other kind of farming. They are a low-cost, zero-cruelty protein source.
Oyster mushrooms
Revolution Ragu hit my local grocer recently. It's made by chef Paddy Arnold with oyster mushrooms that are grown in Dublin by his social enterprise The UpCycle Farm, co-founded with James Egan. It's hyper-local urban farming but that's not even the best thing. They grow these mushrooms in spent coffee grounds, collected from coffee shops. The oyster mushrooms feed on the nutrients left in the coffee grounds and the result is a richly delicious vegan sauce that can be spooned over pasta or a baked potato or stirred through a simple tomato sauce to add a mushroom savouriness.
There are plans to upscale to a shipping container and they’ve started composting their own spent grounds and woodchip substrate using compost worms. It’s proper circular use of the rich resource that is coffee. Growing food where it’s eaten and using food waste to do it has so much potential. We can heal depleted land, cut food emissions from waste and transport and inputs. It’s a delicious revolution.
Catherine Cleary is co-founder of Pocket Forests