31 min.
Mutton was once a 'gratuitous by-product', so how did lamb become one of our most cherished national foods? Life Matters - Separate stories podcast
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- Relaties
When colonial settlers arrived on the first fleet, they brought sheep with them, and sheep grazing expanded so rapidly that ‘mutton was cheaper than bread’.
But it was the sheep’s wool that was of financial value and mutton seen as merely ‘the soil on which the wool could grow'.
So how did this lowly ‘by-product' become what historian Barbara Santich calls a 'cultural superfood'? How did the farming of this food forever alter the Australian landscape? And how are sheep farmers today trying to use their industry to heal the land and the planet?
When colonial settlers arrived on the first fleet, they brought sheep with them, and sheep grazing expanded so rapidly that ‘mutton was cheaper than bread’.
But it was the sheep’s wool that was of financial value and mutton seen as merely ‘the soil on which the wool could grow'.
So how did this lowly ‘by-product' become what historian Barbara Santich calls a 'cultural superfood'? How did the farming of this food forever alter the Australian landscape? And how are sheep farmers today trying to use their industry to heal the land and the planet?
31 min.