'Practiculture' starts in the backyard and heads online

'I had medical issues from the food I was eating from supermarkets,' says Rohan Anderson. 'I had a diet of very highly processed food. I became very unhealthy from that and that was one of the light bulb moments. I became very concerned with the food I was feeding my daughters. I was feeding them chicken nuggets from the supermarket.'

Anderson, like many Australians, lived in an urban centre, worked long hours and struggled to put healthy food on the table. His doctor hit him with some hard truths.

'He confirmed I was morbidly obese. I had hyper-tension, anxiety and depression.'

The doctor told Anderson he could die if he didn't change his lifestyle. That was all the motivation he needed.

The first change was moving to regional Victoria. The next was planting a vegetable garden and committing to eating only what could be sourced locally, and only when it was in season. Then he had to convince the kids.

'My youngest daughter is still very young and hasn't really noticed the difference. She's always had the weird dad who lives in the country and eats a particular type of food,' he says.

'My eldest daughter was a slow progression and it took a bit of determination to work with her to get her to move from processed food. Processed food is engineered to be quite tasty, to make us want more, whether it has salt or sugar in it.

'It's been quite a journey to get her to appreciate good food. She's 10 years old and now she's asking me for certain dishes. "Can you cook the broad bean risotto, Dad? Can you cook the beetroot pappardelle?"

'A little bit of perseverance with children can actually work. I mean, we are the parents—we get to decide what they eat.'

Read more: Local larder—grow, gather, hunt, cook

Anderson has found it's not just children who can be sceptical. It was an incredulous adult who first gave him the idea for 'practiculture'—the name he gives to his dietary approach and lifestyle.

'I was running a workshop teaching people how skin rabbits one day and a bloke said to me, "Everything you do is really practical, you don't do activities that are based on folly, everything you do has some sort of practical outcome."

'He said it's a very practical culture, he said "practiculture". The guy worked in marketing and I said, "I'm going to use that, it's a fantastic way to describe what I do."'

Anderson doesn't want people to interpret the lifestyle as non-stop hard work. Many people already engage in the activities required for a more sustainable diet recreationally: gardening, fishing and hunting.

'We need to change the idea that all hunters are rednecks,' he says. 'There is whole movement, there is a groundswell of people questioning the current system and saying, "Look I'm not really happy about people working on 457 visas and working in challenging conditions, I'm not happy about the pigs being treated in factory farms, I'm not happy about the road miles my food has."

'The beauty of social media is that people are communicating with one another and sharing stories and I think that's going to make the biggest impact.

'If I just remained living in the hills and not communicating with anyone or sharing my story, I wouldn't make any difference. By communicating the story of living this particular lifestyle, it's aspirational.'

Anderson insists the changes necessary for the 'practiculture' lifestyle are achievable in an average Australian backyard. Anderson was able to grow 24 kilograms of tomatoes one winter in a small 9 x 9 metre Ballarat garden. He says the average Australian backyard of 12 x 14 metres is more than adequate for the bulk of a family's food.

According to Anderson, finding the time to hunt, garden, forage, trade and prepare is just a matter of habit tinkering.

'It's all about how you choose to spend your time. In my old life I would watch three or four hours of television a night. I got rid of my TV.

'At night time in summer I'll be stringing beans on wire to dry them out or spending a bit of time in the garden. It comes down to choice. We only get one life, and I've decided to utilise my time as practically as possible.'

Blueprint for Living is a weekly rummage through the essential cultural ingredients—design, architecture, food, travel, fashion—for a good life.