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

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Hawkesbury Harvest

Some of you may remember our offering of magnificently-flavoured heirloom apples at the end of our first summer way back in 2003.

Having only been open for a few months, we were reviewed by ‘Good Living’ in The Sydney Morning Herald. The review was seen by Borry and Gaye Gartrell, heirloom fruit orchardists and winemakers who farm the slopes of Mt Canobolas outside Orange at an altitude of 1000 metres. My experience of community-supported agriculture, mentioned in the article, encouraged them to bring us some of their fabulous apple varieties and everyone raved about the beautiful, varying flavours of the fruit.

The vineyards running down the slopes of Mt Canobolas towards the lake

Nowadays, most apples are picked as early as possible. This gets them to market when the prices are higher and minimises potential for damage: the longer they hang on the trees, the more chances they’ll be eaten by birds and bats or made worthless by inclement weather. The trouble with the early harvesting approach though is that it doesn’t allow the fruit to develop its best flavour. Apples won’t ripen further once picked so leaving them on the tree is the only way to allow the fruit to develop its full potential.

In addition, like most fruits and vegetables, true heirloom varieties rarely make it to market. They were not bred with transport and cold storage uppermost in mind. While many, including the Granny Smith, were valued for their ability to be shipped long distances (sending apples to the UK out of season went on even a hundred years and more ago), their essential values were flavour. But when they’re picked under-ripe, that flavour profile is seriously compromised. In spite of the name of this business, Granny Smith apples were never my favourite apple variety, often being tart with a pale green, under-ripe flesh. But many years ago I tried a honey-core Granny Smith apple. Allowed to remain on the tree until early May, this was sensational. The core had turned an almost amber colour and was dripping when the apple was cut. The sweetness in the centre was balanced by the famous tartness nearer the skin, making a perfect balance. This was an apple that deserved a podium position. Unfortunately, with premiums generally only available for new season, as opposed to late season fruit, producing such standouts is not commercially viable.

I’ve been intending to go to Orange each year to get some more of this amazing fruit but being so busy, it never happened. That is, until last week, when I drove to Borry and Gaye’s specifically to get some of these apples for you. Though the main apple season is now mostly behind us, the last of the late season fruit is still on the trees, having grown slowly through the warmer months and now fully flavoured. I helped Borry pick three late season varieties: Democrats, Roman Beauties and King Davids. While the plums have all lost their leaves, the apples and cherries were still dressed in their summer outfits and a few of the apple trees stood out like Christmas trees, weighed down with great, red clusters of fruit. We headed along the row to these trees and picked them in the golden light of late afternoon, quickly filling a dozen or more boxes. Borry was a lot more judicious in discarding any apples that appeared “already visited” while I thought that any with just a small worm-hole or two could be used for cooking. When you’re getting these at the shop, blame me for any of these and remember that even a small hole or two indicates a desirable apple.

Almost the last of the season's apples

Borry and Gaye now focus on wine grapes. The apples and plums are just left to look after themselves, receiving no chemicals and only a prune every couple of years. Even so, Borry’s knowledge of apple and plum growing is extraordinary and while he’s maintaining the varieties, others, who should know better, have given up. When the Department of Agriculture decided to sell off some of the agricultural research station land at Bathurst a few years ago, on which a huge collection of heirloom plums had been established, Borry rescued as many as he could. Alas the department’s urgency meant that because of the time of the year, only cuttings from late season varieties could be rescued and many others were lost. In all the haste “to save taxpayers’ money”, some of our fruit heritage is now gone. Seems almost criminal to me. In countries like the US and the UK, heirloom fruits and vegetables are making a comeback but here in Australia, there is little apparent respect and demand for varieties that were cherished for generations.

While on the subject of the modern fruit supply and in an aside, let me tell you something about the things done to make fruit more available, in this example NSW cherries. Extending the cherry season, exporting the largest cherries possible and getting fruit to market first have encouraged the development of a cherry industry around Narromine in NSW.  This would traditionally be seen as a marginal cherry landscape. As the region is so warm, the trees need to be fooled into dormancy by spraying them with a defoliant so they drop their leaves in May and then spraying the trees with a white coating to reflect the winter warmth and keep the trees cooler. Then come end of winter they’re given another chemical dousing to encourage budding. It’s a very risky business but the rewards are great. Just when the planes stop flying from Los Angeles to Sydney laden with Washington and Oregon cherries, they start going back in the other direction laden with our fruit. As Borry said, “Get 31 mm cherries to Dubai and the world’s your oyster.”

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be heading back up to Orange for the last of Borrodell on the Mount’s Granny Smiths. By then, with any luck and a few frosts, they should have developed a honey core. I’ll be sure to let you know when they come in.

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 pasteurised 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.

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 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.

San Francisco store window

Same nutrition as squeezed from your own garden's oranges!

Three continents of growers, another continent to pack it

prov.e.nance

noun

the place of origin or earliest known history of something: a carpet of Persian provenance

• the beginning of something’s existence: something’s origin: they try to understand the whole universe, its provenance and fate.
• a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality: the manuscript has a distinguished provenance.

Provenance refers to the important element of recognising something’s origins as a distinct value. There are many works of art that have been copied all over the place; it’s the original, with an attested provenance that has true value. So too with food. Merely looking at food as a collection of measurable nutritional values assumes several things:

1. that we are clever enough to measure everything that is of nutritional value. Given that nutrition is an ever-developing science, this assumption is clearly not correct. There are nutritional elements that have only been discovered in the last few years, take GI value, for example. A human requires much more than merely a collection of vitamins, minerals, fibre and so on to maintain health.

2. that we ignore entirely the greater values embodied in food, values we all recognise that may not be scientifically “measurable”. You’re in hospital, for example, and your elderly granny, at great personal effort, bakes your favourite cake for the first time in years and brings it in to you, beautifully wrapped and with a card wishing you a speedy recovery. Someone else brings you in a sponge roll from the supermarket. Granny may never have even been the best cook but which cake means more to you in your recovery? They’re both identical in terms of fibre (probably nil) and other scientific nutrients but if you’re talking about what’s going to make you get better, it’s obvious.

Sunday lunch surrounded by your favourite family and friends, looking out at a beautiful view, sun shining … or the exact equal nutritional values manifested in a frozen, reheated meal cramped alone on board an aeroplane? Food is obviously so much more than just a collection of nutrients and many of us value quite highly the values of how a food is grown (organic or biodynamic over conventional) and where it’s from (my backyard or Peru).

Following a questionable study on organic food out of the UK last week, the report of which had the flippant headline “Organic food is no better – but at least it’s expensive” (Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 31st July, 2009), I wrote a published reply:

Once again, a study reduces organic food to a measurable collection of nutrients with a high price tag. Such studies miss the vital point: organic food is a farming and food production method, not a nutritional value. The nutrient outcome may or may not be higher, but the values that food represents are equally important.

Organic food supports production methods that put soil health and land-care methods centre stage. With salinity and with rivers bled dry to produce cheap food and fibre, land health is vital to our long-term ability to feed ourselves. For many organic food supporters (I am a certified organic retailer), the amount of vitamin A in different units of food is irrelevant.

Society devalues food as we allocate less and less of our budget to it. This puts producers in the difficult position of producing similar ‘‘output’’ under constant pressure. Cramming more chickens into sheds leads to equal nutritional output, at better value to the consumer, but does nothing for the chickens, or for our sense of living reasonably and humanely. Such examples permeate our expectations of ‘‘cheap’’ food and explain why topsoil is rapidly disappearing while food insecurity rises for billions.

How I buy everything determines how I want society to be. Do I buy the cheapest clothes, knowing they come from sweat shops in Asia, or do I seek out more expensive, Australian-made clothes, knowing that keeps a fellow Australian employed? Do I buy Chinese pet food (much better value) or seek an Australian product?

If food is merely combinations of vitamins, minerals, fibre, GI value and so on, wrapped up in kilojoules, you might as well swallow a pill. For those of us who value food, such studies are odious. The implicit reasoning behind them suggests that obtaining daily nutrition should be run only through the filter of ‘‘economic value’’.

Peter Kenyon Turramurra (SMH, Saturday, 1st August)

The SMH summarized my letter with yet another flippant headline: “Organic food a lifestyle, not nutritional, choice”. Well at least they published it. The person who came up with the headline would seem to have not read my letter at all. “Lifestyle choice” is generally used in a pretty disparaging way to describe someone’s unjustifiable excesses which can’t be sustained with any logical explanation. It reveals, yet again, the mindset of the person for whom food is merely a collection of nutrients obtained at cheapest personal financial cost. There’s a distinct tendency (for some Australians in particular?) to want to “save” those of us into “organic lifestyles” from ourselves by pointing out that we’re being ripped off.

I wonder why those same people don’t run up at the traffic lights to every driver of a Mercedes, BMW or other luxury car and tell them that they’re also being ripped off. After all, a Merc costs considerably more than a Daihatsu and they can both get you reliably from A to B. What about a home with a view compared to a home without one? An iPhone over the cheapest mobile phone? It’s very likely those of you reading this already value food highly. Thanks.