The demise of Macro Wholefoods shouldn’t go unremarked on this site.

Macro was an icon at Bondi. Many years ago it was at the forefront of the organic movement, long before we people in the organic world became an “organic industry”.

Macro was emulated but the original store remained true to its roots. I remember going in there once and, cheekily (because I already knew), asking a staff member if they stocked meat. The young dreadlocked woman fixed me with a stare and very carefully indicated every corner of the store with large waves of her hand as she told me: “We don’t carry meat anywhere here in this store.” She was very adamant I understood this and I admired her for her passion, her belief and her earnestness about a healthy diet for body, planet and our fellow creatures.

That was Macro. It was a reasonably small store but one that just buzzed with energy and the cafe always seemed packed.

Then it was bought by Pierce Cody and Brett Blundy.

It changed tack. It grew. It became part of an organic industry, where overall value was measured in dollars and the whole was washed in various shades of green. That wasn’t necessarily bad but Pierce Cody was constantly ready to tell everyone who’d listen that this strategy was the only way forward. At the same time he promised the bright and easy future of organic retailing, he denigrated the “spotty-fruited, hippy past”, whose work over many decades in fact provided him with the point from which he was jumping off.

My friend Barbara Murray, who died last Xmas Eve after a long battle with cancer, owned, with husband John, a wonderful store in Crows Nest called Annabel’s. It stood valiantly against the sudden Macro onslaught across the road but couldn’t survive more than a few weeks.

Now Macro itself has failed, it seems a pity so much was lost along the way and all for naught. Cody never realised organic retailing isn’t as easy as he was making out and that a lot of what he attempted was on the shoulders of people who’d done the hard yards before him and whose efforts he failed to recognize or acknowledge. When the brand-new Concord store failed after just weeks, he blamed the local populace for being not the right demographic. Hubris became the word that occured to me every time I thought about Macro.

There was none of the original spirit of Macro left. It was merely a name grafted onto something different. Struggling quietly and denying rumours of a sellout, Macro kept its doors open until the behemoth Woolworths came along. The massive national supermarket chain gobbled up the struggling Macro a few months ago to acquire sites for the expansion of its Thomas Dux branded stores. As a competitor organic retailer, I was saddened to see the demise of Macro but it was already far from its roots.

As of writing (Macro closed entirely last weekend), their website is still functioning, promising stores far and wide. Full of bluster, no-one ever went back to gauge the reality against the promises. The flashing website now seems like a tatty plastic bag caught in the branches of a tree. One day soon, someone at Woolies will flick off the switch and then Macro will be no more than a memory.

When you’re in London, you must visit the Borough Market next to Southwark Cathedral.

As you know, I love markets and visit food markets whenever I get the chance. Just off the plane two weeks ago, I realised that if I didn’t go “right this minute”, I’d miss out because my time in London was so short. So dog-tired, I went off to Southwark.

This was my second or third trip to the market there and it is as good as ever. Tiredness is banished when I’m surrounded by beautiful food. With a 250 year plus history, they’ve had time to get it right. You can check out their website at http://www.boroughmarket.org.uk/

With food ethics and seasonality firmly on the agenda in the United Kingdom, you aren’t regarded as strange for asking where something comes from or how it’s been grown. While there might still be places in the UK where you can only find fried foods to eat, London is well-served with good food and it doesn’t seem to be as expensive as it used to be.

Tomatoes from the Isle of Wight and Kent, pork pies from Cumbria and fantastic cheeses from France and Spain, Germany and Switzerland. And unlike most of Sydney’s supposed “growers’ markets”, here you can really talk to the growers and find out how they grow the food and why they farm.

To see the best British cheeses, visit Neal’s Yard Dairy at 6 Park Street, alongside the markets. Neal’s Yard specialises in the best British farmhouse cheeses: the service is friendly and knowledgeable, the displays beautiful and unlike many places, they were entirely happy for me to take some pictures. Their comment was “take as many as you like and tell all your friends”, a very refreshing change from a lot of food stores.

Even if you’re staying in a hotel, you can get a smidgen of a variety of cheeses, some Orkney oat cakes and enjoy the flavours of Britain. Check out Neal’s Yard’s website at http://www.nealsyarddairy.co.uk/

So pop along, pick up something for later, enjoy the incredible food that’s on offer and add London to your foodie experience.

Sometimes something really special appears in store. Let me introduce you to Alf and Lee Sorbello’s magnificent heirloom tomatoes. Heirloom tomatoes are those that grow true from seed and can be passed from one generation to another. They are gold. Today most growers will choose hybrid varieties that give them the highest yield and can be tumbled into a box and transported vast distances. Taste, quality and beauty are secondary. Many varieties have entirely disappeared: a blow to our culinary heritage.

Alf and Lee have decades of tomato growing experience and what’s more, they are absolutely passionate about tomatoes! That’s why they grow dozens and dozens of varieties of tomatoes with poetic names like Black Krim, Green Zebra and Yellow Pear. You’re unlikely to find most of them anywhere else in Australia. In fact with their years spent collecting tomato varieties, you’d be hard-pressed to find their selection anywhere else in the world outside a tomato seed bank.

Now you know how much I bang on about seasonality. It’s important to understand what grows locally and when. A local diet means less energy spent on transport and fresher produce on your table. Seasonality can be affected by many things: weather, greenhouses, storage and even the expertise of the grower.

There’s no doubt tomatoes are a real taste of summer. Their delicious flavour was something you had to wait until the warmer months to enjoy. In the past you ate tomatoes through the colder months from cans: in rich pasta sauces and stews for example. So much so that many people don’t realize that tomatoes only appear in the Sydney region at Christmas when they’re grown outdoors.

Alf and Lee’s expertise allows them to grow their fruit all year round. Yes tomatoes are a fruit! Grown undercover just across Galston Gorge at Middle Dural, Alf and Lee represent a vital but disappearing part of Sydney’s food production heritage. They minimize or entirely avoid the cocktail of unwelcome chemicals many conventional growers use. Their investment in covers for their crop allows them to reliably turn out dozens of varieties right through the winter when other tomatoes are trucked in from far north Queensland, thousands of kilometres away.

The tomatoes Alf and Lee grow are magnificent. Full of flavour and beautiful to look at, don’t be caught out thinking that they all have to turn red. Some of them stay yellow, some black, some green even. When they give under slight pressure, they’re ready to enjoy. For a beautiful and special Sunday brunch, try slicing some perfectly ripe tomatoes of various colours on a platter, drizzle them with quality olive oil and a little balsamic vinegar and finish off with a generous grind of salt and pepper. And don’t forget to toast the growers for all their hard work!

What goes around ...

Attention all you gardeners out there!

Sydney’s LNS (Leafy North Shore) is awash with summer’s bounty: our LNS deciduous trees have almost entirely dropped their leaves. Each one is a tiny packet of nutrition from the surrounding soil, drawn up by the tree’s roots and converted with the help of summer sunshine into a single-season, solar panel. They’re designed to drop to the ground, break down and enrich the soil anew, the ultimate in sustainable recycling. So why are all the wheelie bins full of them? Why are these bins called “green waste” anyway? It’s not waste.

These brown leaves, crisp and brittle when dry and eddying around in the gutters and on nature strips, are perfect for your compost. Don’t forget to collect them from errant neighbours and add them to your compost pile. Amazingly, those neighbours, standing in their impoverished gardens, may even thank you for your theft of their garden’s valuable nutrients! In fact if they were simply going to go into their “green waste” bins and be carted off inside a noisy, polluting truck, you’re doing the world a favour.