A reader of Rohan Anderson’s blog, Whole Larder Love, left a comment at the bottom of his most recent post saying, “The way you live your life – and share it – is a gift to us all. Thank you.” That says, simply and beautifully, what Rohan does. He loves his family, respects the earth, embraces the seasons and aspires to live a simpler, more self-sufficient life. By documenting it, he inspires others to do the same.
Whole Larder Love is like a breath of fresh country air. The imagery is so spectacular that you barely even have to read the words to want to be where Rohan is, doing what he’s doing; seeing things the way he sees them. But you would miss out if you didn’t read the words because Rohan’s writing is down-to-earth but beautifully garnished; conversational, funny and wise.
Whole Larder Love originated from a blog Rohan started in 2006. Since then he’s worked a bunch of corporate jobs and for the Department for Sustainability and Environment, before taking a redundancy and moving with his family to country Victoria, near Daylesford, a year ago. Those jobs “showed me what I didn’t want to do”, Rohan says. His dream, still in progress, is to not go back to having a day job; to live completely off the land and from his own projects. If that means living with less, then so be it: “It means I’ll leave with less. I don’t own a lot of things and I don’t want to, because that’s just more things for me to worry about.” Hear hear.
I was lucky enough to chat to Rohan about his life, his blog, his book, his veggie box delivery service and his overarching philosophy, and share it with you as the next post in our “Follow Your Dreams” series.
What inspired you to start Whole Larder Life?
I didn’t really have any singular direction of where I wanted to take the blog. It turned into what I was documenting on a generalist’s journey. It’s not a food blog … the underlying thing is food and self-sufficiency and minimising your impact on the environment, but there’s the little steps to [reaching] that which I am documenting.
It happened organically and that’s pretty much my approach to life. The older I get, the less I tend to be strategic about things. If it’s right, it works out, if it’s not, it doesn’t.
How did the book, Whole Larder Love, come about, and what was the process of writing it?
I never wanted to write a book. A publishing company in Brooklyn, NY, had been reading my blog and asked me if I’d like to write a book. That’s how the ball started rolling. I thought it was spam so actually deleted the email! A couple of days later my wife said, “Maybe you should check on them,” so I looked them up. They published some really cool, more obscure books. I’m not a mainstream person so I was pretty happy with that. I contacted them and said, “Sorry, I thought you were spam; give me some more details.” It took about six months of toing and froing and I started to write the book.
The process of writing the book was pretty much the same as the blog – just pictures and words really. The problem was the way that I cook is by feel. [For the book] I had to start writing measurements of what I was putting in the dishes … It’s not master chef cooking where appearances is everything. This is very basic cooking.
I started writing recipes in a notebook. I saw a bit of a pattern emerging in terms of the ingredients. My big push was that people should have a better understanding of where their food comes from. Food doesn’t just come from a supermarket; it comes from farms and growers.
Is that your overriding passion, making people understand where food comes from?
Yes – if we all grew our own food, people would have a much better appreciation for the food that they get. Unfortunately we get a lot of our food in supermarkets, you can buy tomatoes in Australia in July, for example: there’s so much that’s wrong with that. There’s the carbon from the truck that brings them to you from Queensland. They’re flavourless.
It’s very exciting as a person who’s trying to live self-sufficiently, you get very excited about that season or that produce. I am excited about moving into autumn. Nuts come to the fore, then it’s wild mushroom season and then in the cooler months we grow things like pumpkins and beans and crush hundreds of kilos of tomatoes. In winter we survive on the stuff we’ve grown in the summer. We tend to eat a lot of the same peasant dishes, so we end up eating a lot more hunted and fished food.
Living off the land just feels so right. It’s becoming more and more normal for me to go out the back and grab something. It’s still a novelty to put a seed in the ground and eat something from it.
What does a typical day look like for you?
There’s a lot of normality, in regards to school pick-ups and drop-offs. There’s always maintenance, daily chores like feeding and watering the chickens, washing the poo off the eggs. Checking the sprinklers on the veggie gardens, turning them on, walking the dog, hunting, preparing the meals together, washing vegetables, asking the girls to go pick the herbs. With the girls there’s a lot of cooking. Rolling out the sourdough. Chopping wood, bringing it in to the fireplace. Training the tomatoes up the pole, staking the beans. You put the effort into your veggie garden, you put a little bit in each week.
The rest of the time is to reply to emails, to comments. Write articles, do interviews, go do cooking demonstrations. Go do talks. That’s an interesting thing to do. Then somewhere in there something will be on my mind, a basic idea and I’ll put that on the blog. I just do it when the idea comes to me. Sometimes I’ll put two posts in one day.
How did you go about building your audience and promoting the blog?
I didn’t. Other people found it; the online community thought it was worth talking about. You have do things for the right reasons, and then good stuff happens.
How do you balance the things you want to do with financial considerations?
School fees are minimal. Food is not very much part of our budget; we spend money on staples or really good cheese. We run off rainwater and bore water. We only use gas for the hot water service and the stove. In winter we use kerosene lamps and candles, and we don’t own a television. We buy a lot of clothes from op shops – Kate [Rohan's wife] is always finding little gems for the girls. We spend good money on footwear because the cheap stuff never lasts.
How is your veggie box project coming along?
It will cover our costs. We’ll be able to make a fairly humble living if we can get a certain number of boxes delivered each week. But it’s never going to make us a lot of money. It’s really really small scale. It’s very much about providing a link between our farmer that lives a couple of kilometres away and grows his organic vegetabls and people who live an hour away and don’t know the farmer. We’re the facility now … We’re bring back the green grocer but bringing it back on wheels.
What five tips would you give someone who wants to follow their dreams?
1. Jump over the fence to get to the greener grass: My ex-wife used to say I thought the grass was greener on the other side of the fence. It is always greener on the other side of the fence, and you’ve got to jump over that fence. I want a particular lifestyle and I will keep working towards it.
2. Never give up. I’m not really a quitter.
3. Ignore the naysayers. My brother said to me, “What’s with this ecogatherer hunter trip; who do you think you are, Bear Grills?” A lot of people have said, “Why are you leaving your job? You’re crazy.” It’s not the people I don’t know; it’s some family and friends who have said, “You’re mad.” Well, don’t listen to what those people say.
4. Maintain the right people. Angelo Pellegrini [author of The Unprejudiced Palate] inspires me. It’s not about idols, but to be inspired by someone. If there’s one book that inspires you, keep reading it over and over again.
5. Take baby steps. I built a log cabin last year as a smokehouse [see Smith Journal's documentary of it here]. It was a prototype for a bigger log cabin for my house. What better idea to practise on building a smokehouse as a smaller version of what I want to live in? It taught me a lot of things about when working with wood be patient, step back.
On a roll, Rohan offered two more gems of advice.
6. Start small. When planting, start with one tomato plant for the first summer. And some basil. Don’t dig up your garden all in one go.
7. Don’t waste the time you have. When you lie down in bed can you say, “I kicked arse with that!”? If I don’t achieve anything for the day, it’s a day wasted.
(Written by Julia)
*Images courtesy of Whole Larder Love