Healthy cows give healthy milk

We are asked for raw milk several times a week. Whereas raw goats’ milk is legal to produce and sell for human consumption, cows’ milk is not. Regulations against its sale for human consumption are clear and our government has determined that its ingestion is potentially dangerous. We sell both types of milk here, though we must advise you that only raw goats’ milk is suitable for human consumption. The raw cows’ milk we sell is only for bathing. One suitable use might be to swirl no more than 1 -2 tablespoons under the running water as the bath is filling. This makes its use very economical, especially with its reputed skin-softening properties.

It’s been pointed out before that the human race existed long before Louis Pasteur was around. You can find a lot of information about raw versus pasteurized milk online, including Food Standards Australia/New Zealand’s working papers. Interestingly, despite working jointly on almost all food regulations, New Zealand is parting ways with Australia on this issue and is set to allow the production of all raw milk cheeses. It is not clear however that they will allow raw milk sales. Australia’s proposal is to possibly allow the production of hard cheeses using raw milk but stopping well short of permitting the manufacture and sale of soft cheeses or raw milk for human consumption.

Drink up

Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, was recently in Australia. He reported having dinner with the Minister for Agriculture in Western Australia and pointed out that the cheese they were eating was made with raw milk in Europe and then imported. “Are Australians to be protected against the “dangers” of raw cheese made by Australians but okay eating raw cheese from Europe?” he asked. If you’d like to see Carlo Petrini’s speech at the Sydney Opera House in October, click here.

If you are interested in the issue of raw milk and raw cheese, you may like to sign the online petition organised by Slow Food Australia, which is being conducted by pioneering, beyond-organic farmer Michael Croft.

You can also find out more about this subject from Real Milk Australia, advocates of raw milk.

Note that the views expressed by Real Milk Australia are not necessarily those of Granny Smith Natural Food Market. We most certainly do not condone the consumption of raw cows’ milk.

Please, please, please remember that we do not advocate that you or any of your family drink raw cows’ milk. It is clearly sold as a bath milk only and you should be very careful to avoid getting any on or near your face when you’ve put it into your bathwater. Please be careful!

Last night I was invited to attend a panel discussion on the rights of farmworkers here in San Francisco. The four panelists were all experts in their fields and highlighted some of the deplorable situations under which many farmworkers in America labour.

While there’s been tremendous growth in the availability of quality food in wealthy countries these past few years, the politics of bringing it to the table has often been glossed over.

In Slow Food’s call for food that is “good, clean and fair”, there is an implicit acknowledgement of the rights of the people who bring us our food. Panelists at last night’s discussion pointed out that even local and organic food here in California doesn’t necessarily mean that labour standards for farm workers are what we might expect.

The true cost of good food includes labour

Farm workers in the US are so often illegal immigrants that they have no rights to start with. The ability to complain about poor and abusive work practices, when even their presence in the country is illegal means they live in fear. This constant fear has led to some shocking examples, including actual modern day slavery. See more about this here. Illegal labourers living in trailers subsist on diets of instant ramen noodles and Pepsi. They’re picking quality fruits and vegetables that keep the well-to-do in cities alive. Is this fair?

Child labour laws in the US exempt farm work, so while “it is legal today for a 12 year old to perform back-breaking work in 100-degree weather for 10-12 hours a day, the law will not allow that child to work in an air-conditioned office for two hours a day.” (Children in the Fields campaign) Many struggling farm labourers’ children work alongside their parents in fields all over the US, performing activities such as tomato, blueberry and squash picking. The labour component of a punnet of blueberries is consequently insignificant.

If you’ve ever wondered why canned tomatoes from Italy are so cheap, wonder no longer. Several years ago a documentary on SBS highlighted the plight of African workers labouring the tomato fields of southern Italy. Find out more in a European Parliament report or the original journalist’s investigation.

In addition to such brutal farmworker practices as outlined in these reports, you must also remember that food in Europe operates in a shockingly distorted economic environment so the true price of a single item like a can of tomatoes is impossible to determine. The alternate Australian can of tomatoes is not nearly as mired in labour misery and industry economic rewards. The price you see on the shelf of the domestic product represents pretty accurately the following: the land, the tomato plant, the growing time, the labour to pick it paid at award wages, the can itself, the label, the packing and handling, the transport and distribution and the retail margin. Trying to get those same components squeezed into the consumer price of a can of 99 cent Italian tomatoes is like getting camels to disappear through the eye of a needle. Imagining the price difference is just “economic size and efficiency” is ignoring the obvious.

A new book highlights farmworker rights

I often hear people who’ve been to the US and to Europe, or who visit from those places, comment on the relative expense of fresh food in Australia. I had often suspected that a huge component of this apparent difference, in addition to our seemingly-eternal drought, is the price we pay for labour in this country and the more research I do, the more convinced I am of this.

You may not be aware that the Australian agricultural industry relies very significantly on backpackers for labour. Fruit and vegetable picking by backpackers is something that tends not to rate in the news (with the exception of the backpacker hostel fire in Childers, Queensland some years ago when 15 young backpackers died).

Quite simple, we do not have the “luxury” in Australia of an endless pool of cheap, exploitable labour, as exists in North America and Europe. Young backpackers from wealthy first-world countries, having extended vacations in Australia, are not so easily taken advantage of. Conditions, while not what these young people would want to work under for the rest of their lives, are not generally poor. Pay and conditions are well-regulated, the workers know they have rights, they’re left time to socialize at night and their ability to leave should the situation be onerous means exploitative work practices on farms are very limited.

I certainly don’t think Australians wouldn’t take advantage of the ability to employ cheap, illegal labour on a wide scale if it were possible. However our geography has saved us from having to make such choices.

We might pay more for Australian food by not directly abutting the third world but we’re also very fortunate in our isolation in not having nasty alternatives to tempt us.

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.

A century ago, in the wealthy countries of the world, a significant proportion of people went to bed hungry every night.

There are still many hungry “First World” people. But decades after the Green Revolution and with heavy agricultural subsidies in North America, the EU and many other countries, the main problem we now have with food is that too many of us are over-nourished. (more…)

‘You are what you eat’, they say.

Most Granny Smith customers are committed organic customers and you each have your own reasons for choosing organic: health, environmental, nutritional, superior taste and even social reasons. It’s a complicated field when it comes to what to eat and what to feed our families.

Focusing on the environmental aspect of organic foods for a moment gives pause to consider some of the wider ramifications of how we eat. Within the social and environmental what-to-eat check boxes is the issue of how far our food has travelled to get from the farm to our forks. Why? Because ‘food miles’ are costly. With fuel prices rising ever higher, organics’ advantage in terms of less artificial fertilisers and pesticides (which use fossil fuels to manufacture them) need to be balanced by the amount of fuel needed to transport the products to market. (more…)