Category 5

Food That Connects

food-connect

Why does a tomato plucked straight off the bush in your own backyard taste so much better than one from the supermarket? Why does an egg laid moments ago by Henrietta just outside your kitchen window look, taste and even feel better than one from a carton of supermarket eggs?

Beyond the romance and deep pleasures of hands in soil, and the joy of sweet red orbs grown from tiny seeds that you thumbed into your garden beds and nurtured daily, freshness clearly also plays a part.

A supermarket tomato can be weeks old before it makes it onto your chopping board. And, because of that time between harvest and table, the fruit is picked unripe to survive its long journey to a household, through countless refrigerated storage points: chiller to truck, to chiller, to truck, to supermarket shelf, to bag, to home.

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Putting The ‘Culture’ Back Into Agriculture

culture

An excerpt from Fair Food: Stories from a Movement Changing the World (edited by Nick Rose, UQP, 2015)

Food Connect works in the vein of the ‘small is beautiful’ philosophy or what others like to call ‘economies of community’ rather than the old model of ‘economies of scale’. What we’ve seen and experienced over the last 50 years or so is the slow death of small industries serving their regions.

Towns all over Australia have lost their local bakeries, abattoirs, creameries, butter factories, grain mills and greengrocers. Our culture is the poorer for it – everything has a ‘homogenised’ look, feel and taste to it. The implication is that we are also homogenising our brains.

[When I started Food Connect] I knew that distribution was where most of the inequities were in the food system, and localising a food system would address many of them. I figured if Food Connect could demonstrate the ‘how’, then we would have achieved a lot in terms of rebuilding the lost infrastructure – both physical and social – that once served our communities so well.

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Su Dennett

su-dennett

The honey dripped off my sourdough toast and I licked it off my wrist. The honey is from bees pollinating the fruit trees in the orchard, and the flour is milled from grain from an organic farm, eighteen kilometres away. The bread is baked in an oven f ired with wood from the trees around the property; any leftover scraps go to the chooks, who provide eggs in return. This is closed-loop eating, and it’s all about good permaculture design – having the right things in the right place.

Su Dennett has been sourcing, cooking and serving fair food for three decades. Su’s kitchen is at the core of the Melliodora Permaculture Farm, Hepburn Victoria, and feeds up to twelve people on a normal day; and dozens more when the house is open for public tours. Her deep commitment to ‘being the change’ means that much of the food she serves travels just a few metres to her kitchen, making ‘food miles’ almost irrelevant.

Every food source is considered, including weeds and trees on public land, and every opportunity is taken: Su can do things with food that most permies throw away – carrot tops are part of the salad, and dried broad beans are a staple. When the parrots learned to get the walnuts before they were ripe, Su organised a team to pick them green for pickling.

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Aboriginal Traditional Foods And An Alternative Australian History

traditional-aboriginal-foods

What would happen if we taught our children that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people planted crops, tilled them, irrigated them, stored and preserved surpluses, built houses and sewed their clothes? Would the sky fall in? And why would we teach them such things? Because that’s what the explorers saw.

Charles Sturt’s exploration party of 1844 was saved from death when it chanced upon four hundred Aboriginal people harvesting grain on the Warburton River (South Australia), in what was to become known as Sturt’s Stony Desert. Sturt and his men were revived with cool well-water, roast duck and the best cakes Sturt had ever tasted. Once recovered, the party was offered a new house in the orderly town that lined the bank of the river.

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Build Your Own Coolroom

coolroom

When we bought our 1.2 hectares in Old Warburton, east of Melbourne, Victoria, our aim was to grow the majority of our vegetables and fruit, enabling us to eat fresh food in season and to preserve our requirements for the rest of the year. In recent years production reached our target. Quality, quantities and food miles were under control, but storage became an issue. We had been using the laundry cupboards, supplemented by recycled cupboards removed from an old house, for storage.

We needed a coolroom: a space designed to store fresh and processed products to eat later. We selected a site under the existing insulated back verandah, incorporating an existing light fixture and using the thermal mass of the rear mudbrick wall of our ownerbuilt house. The walls of our coolroom are non-load bearing. The internal shelves are built sturdily.

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