CERES Food Connect is live and ready to take orders from customers in 3 key suburbs in Melbourne, with many more to follow in the coming weeks. Right now we have City Cousins Pick-up Points in the following locations:

Coburg (Tuesday delivery, between 5pm to 8pm)
Brunswick West (Tuesday delivery, between 5pm to 8pm)
Thornbury (Thursday delivery, between 4pm to 7pm)

Don’t know what a City Cousin is? then see here

How do you become a member?
Simply join online here, choose a City Cousin, order some grub and pay using your credit or debit card.

Please note, that we have set a maximum number of customers per City Cousin to 25 on a first come first served basis.  If the City Cousin you choose is full then you will be put on a waiting list and notified when there is either another City Cousin nearby opening or there is a space free.

Feel free to send us feedback about our service, good or bad, we are all ears and want to make sure we are providing you with the best service possible.

Enjoy and thank you for becoming part of the Fair Food Movement!

The CERES Food Connect team

Heres a link to a fantastic article by Michael Pollan (writer of Omnivores Dillema etc..) about the rise of the global food movement  – I really recommend this article as it gives a great insight into whats going on in food at the moment and why its so important to get involved, check out The Food Movement, Rising.

Sow Stalls, legal in Australia.

Recently I was chatting to a bunch of seemingly well informed people about Food Inc the movie. One of the comments made was that the film was about industrial agricultural in the USA, so wasn’t ‘relevant’ to Australians. It’s interesting to see how very little we actually know about where our food comes from, how it’s produced and how we are willing to believe that it ‘couldn’t happen here’.  The truth is often obscured because it’s ugly and bad for business.

Take Sow Stalls for instance. Until 20 minutes ago I wasn’t familiar with the term, reading that they are being phased-out in Tasmania brought it to my attention.  A quick search in Google returned 254,000 results and after reading a report by the RSPCA in Victoria and others, I can see that this is an extremely barbaric practice – essentially battery farming for pigs – that should be banned immediately (as it has been in the UK and soon the rest of Europe).

The point here is that sadly, as consumers we are intentionally kept in the dark.  Should we have the right to know how our food is being produced? Would it make a difference if we did? I think that if we were better informed it would make a huge difference in what we buy and what we feed our families. I expect that like myself, most people would be horrified to know that sow stalls are a perfectly legal and ‘normal’ practice here in Australia and if they did know the facts they would give more consideration to what meat they purchase (or at least make an informed choice one way or the other).

I am no vegetarian, but it seems to me that if we are going to eat our animal friends then we should at least provide them with a natural, stress-free habitat, making sure they are healthy and well looked after.  As Joel Salatin points out in Food Inc. “A culture that just uses a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human can foist on that critter, will probably view individuals within its community, and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentalities.”

Unfortunately, there are many problems with intensive meat production and animal welfare is just one of them (check out the environmental cost here).  However, we can make a difference by considering what we choose to buy and who from. Ask your butcher where they source their meat, how the animals were raised, always insist on organic, free range meat and be happy to wear the extra cost.

DF

Happy pig doing what pigs like to do.