FROM the Fort Worth branch of the Texas food store group Central Market: ‘I am a brown paper bag. More than likely I will end up under your kitchen sink with a few of my friends. I might get cut up and wrapped around an old textbook, or just stuck under something messy. It would be nice if someone made me into a kite. I’d like to be a kite. But whatever happens, I will never forget the day I carried groceries home from Central Market.’
You may remember that we had a delightful surprise at the end of Granny Smith Natural Food Market’s first summer of trading when we received a generous haul of heirloom apples from Orange. In 2003 our store was reviewed in The Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Good Living’ guide. The review was seen by Borry and Gaye Gartrell, heirloom fruit orchardists and winemakers, who farm some magnificent country on the slopes of Mount Canobolas near Orange in central western NSW. My experience of community-supported agriculture, mentioned in the article, encouraged them to bring me some of their fabulous apple varieties. Everyone raved about the beautiful, developed flavours of the fruit. Like most fruits and vegetables, true heirloom varieties rarely make it to market. With more than 170 varieties of apples growing at an altitude of 1000 metres, Borry knows them all. Some are perfect for apple sauce, some for drying, some for eating fresh, some for cider. Some are super-early, ripening in January, and some – like Granny Smiths – can still be on the trees when the first snow falls on Mount Canobolas in May.
I’ve been intending to go up there each year to get some more of this amazing fruit but, being busy, it never happened. That is, until late March 2011, when I drove to Orange. Though the apple season was mostly behind us, the next-to-last of late season fruit was still on the trees, having grown slowly through the warmer months to become fully-flavoured. I helped Borry pick three late season varieties: Democrats, Roman Beauties and King Davids.
A few weeks later I returned for the last of the Cox’s Orange Pippins – the world’s finest dessert apple, Lord Lambourne, Lady of the Snows, the superb Carrington, and Buncombe. By this time – late in March – some of the Borrodell apples had developed a honey core: golden and juicy through the centre, like honey comb, the hallmark of intense flavour development in fruit still on the tree.
Lord Lambourne is described on authoritative website orangepippin.com as one of the earliest of the season’s English-style dessert apples. Carrington ‘Early’ is described by a Tasmanian orchardist as a ‘Christmas apple’, small, red and with bland white flesh. This is not how I would rate the Carrington picked from Borry’s orchard this autumn past. Beautifully crisp much after Christmas, it was superb. Buncombe – also known in North America as Red Winter Permain or Red Fall Pippin – is thought to have been raised in North Carolina in the 1800s. It is described as a high quality dessert apple.
We’ve been very pleased at Granny Smith’s to enjoy a wonderful response from customers to our stocking – albeit for a short season – these heritage apples from Orange. One customer ordered a case of Bramley’s Seedling. She was overjoyed to find that someone not too far from Sydney was growing this quintessential English cooking apple. The intense acidity of Bramley’s guarantees, when cooked, ‘the lightest and fluffiest of purees’, according to orangepippin.com. England remains the only place in the world where a distinction is made between ‘eaters’ and ‘cookers’ among varieties of apple. Bramley’s is undoubtedly the perfect ‘cooker’.
Links
Borry and Gaye Gartrell’s Borrodell on the Mount heritage apple orchard
Heirloom apple authoritative website orangepippin.com
Sydney's Seasonal Food, a Slow Food guide.
We’ve been very happy to see our farmers’ Sydney Sustainable Markets at Taylor Square support Slow Food’s Sydney’s Seasonal Food guide, released late in 2010. ‘For the first time ever,’ says the markets’ website, ‘a resource is available to assist in answering the question: ‘What’s in season now in Sydney?’ We’d recommend the guide to anyone who’s ever asked that question.’
Slow Food Sydney’s John Newton and I compiled the guide to help Sydneysiders to re-establish connection with our food supply. It is also another means of supporting Sydney region farmers and fishermen.
If we bow to the dictates of Australia’s two major food grocery chains – which care only about price – we’ll end up bypassing smaller, local growers in favour of larger, more industrial producers and imports. Larger growers often can produce food more cheaply, but smaller growers can produce a more diverse range of crops and get them to market faster.
Local growers also look after the land around our cities and provide the attractive rural landscapes we so enjoy. Losing this connection to our food supply is dangerous to our health and our culture. Strong societies have always been built on agriculture. We cannot afford to lose ours to the tenuous promise of a more efficient ‘somewhere else’.
The guide includes lists of local, seasonally-produced food month by month and detailed comments about the availability of particular varieties.
The zone which we consider local is the Hawkesbury-Nepean floodplain farming region to the south-west and north-west of the city. When we can’t (find produce that’s local), then we specify New South Wales or, in some extreme cases, such as rare turkeys bred seasonally, we point the reader to a useful source, wherever it may be.
The guide also contains information about Sydney seafood and the breeding and raising of animals for meat, comprising beef, lamb, goat, pork and poultry, including game.
The guide is available for purchase at selected Sydney farmers’ markets, such as Everleigh and Taylor Square, and from retailers, including our own Granny Smith Natural Food Market. John and I also hope that chefs and independent grocers and butchers concerned about food diversity and seasonality will also stock the guide.
Buying the Guide
Sydney’s Seasonal Food – a 40-page soft cover publication – is available over the counter from Granny Smith Natural Food Market for $10.00. All proceeds aid Slow Food Sydney. You can call in and buy one from us at 6 Princes Street, Turramurra, or email or telephone Slow Food Sydney’s Syd Pemberton on 0415 737 631 and she can mail you one (with a small additional charge to cover postage). Interested re-sellers should also contact Syd to discuss wholesale purchases.
BEES pollinate up to 90 per cent of the world’s food crops. Without them, most of the foods we eat would disappear. Basically, we’d starve. So the ongoing issue about the dieback of bees in many countries should be ringing alarm bells loudly in our ears.
The increasing use of mobile telephones and the subsequent rise in the usage of this broadcast wavelength has been examined. Chemical use has been studied. Most fingers seem to point to the overuse of certain chemicals known as neonicotinoid pesticides and, with our very food supply at stake, erring on the side of caution in surely the only sensible route to take.
You can help by signing a web petition managed by Avaaz, an international, web-based, ‘people power’ organisation, to support a ban on the use of neonicotinoids in the European Union and the United States until independent research can prove conclusively that these are safe. Nearly one million concerned citizens have now signed it, urging legislators to act.
WITH a State Government slating great chunks of north-west and south-west Sydney for urban development, we are in trouble. How do we feed ourselves when the farmland is gone? There is an assumption upon which such development relies that there will always be food available from somewhere, even from abroad. Many are beginning to question the wisdom of basing our future food security on imported foods, however action may not come quickly enough to achieve any meaningful response.
Local governments in western Sydney are concerned about urban development across local farmland but State and Federal governments have been rather slower to acknowledge the problem. A spread of articles on the issue, published by the Sun Herald in 2010, includes an interactive map that demonstrates clearly the importance of the Sydney basin to various crops.
Many of Granny Smith Natural Food Market’s favourite suppliers feel pressure from such land development. Where will our beautiful tomatoes come from if they need to be brought in from more than 1000 kilometres away? Could they possibly be as fresh or taste as good as Alf and Lee Sorbello’s from just up the road? What about Michael Champion’s magnificent salad greens? Peter Clinch’s chickens? With more and more housing covering the Sydney basin and ever greater urban run-off, how long can we expect clean local oysters and fish to hold out?
Please take a few minutes to email Senator the Honourable Joe Ludwig, Federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, about your concerns.
To bring the matter to wider public attention, you can email the letters editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and email the letters editors of the Sun Herald.
Alternatively, please cut and paste the following if you prefer to not write your own email:
I write to you to express my concern about the disappearance of farmland around Sydney. Many of the products that are now grown locally, such as fresh fruits and vegetables and chicken, appear on my dinner table regularly. Where will they come from if farming in the Sydney Basin disappears?
We already have water issues in other parts of the country and transport costs are rising. I do not wish to have fresh vegetables grown overseas as my only option and with dietary-related health issues costing more each year, how does this protect our long-term health and food security?
I look to you to take action to protect Sydney’s remaining urban farmland in perpetuity. We cannot afford to lose this vital source of food to urban sprawl.
Please keep me appraised of the action you are taking.
Sincerely,
Your name
Links
Hawkesbury Harvest
