Tammi Jonas
About
Former vegetarian academic Tammi Jonas is resident Mistress Meatsmith at Jonai Farms, where she and her family of ‘ethicurean’ farmers raise pastured rare breed Large Black pigs and cattle on 69 acres of volcanic paddocks just outside Daylesford, Victoria.
Tammi has been writing about food since 2006 at her blog, Tammi Jonas: Food Ethics, and has been widely published in both academic and popular texts, including a recent chapter detailing her journey from mindless industrial eater to vegetarian to ethical omnivore and mindful meatsmith in the anthology Fair Food: stories of a movement changing the world, published by UQP in 2015.
She is also the current President of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) where she advocates for everybody’s right to access nutritious and culturally-appropriate food grown in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and their right to democratically determine their own food and agriculture systems.
Respecting what their friend and farming hero Joel Salatin has dubbed ‘the pigness of the pig’ is paramount to the Jonai, and they work hard to ensure their farming practices are fair from ‘soil to stomach’. Tammi does whole-carcass butchering on the farm, and crafts a range of artisanal smallgoods and charcuterie, and she also teaches regular butchery and charcuterie workshops.
She is speaking at Slow Food International’s Salone del Gusto at Terra Madre in Italy this year on the topic of ‘slow meat’, whose mantra is ‘eat better meat, less’.
