As a new arrival to Melbourne, I am also a recent convert to seasonal eating, ethical food and hence the Fair Food organic food box delivery scheme. And yes, I have noticed that organic produce does go off more rapidly than the chemical-rich, irradiated varieties I use to pick up from the large retail monopolies. In discussing this issue with my colleagues, I realised that educating myself, and hopefully providing some useful tips on keeping your F&V fresh was going to be far less resource intensive than individually bagging carrots into plastic for you. I exaggerate about the individual part, but the point still stands!

We want to provide you with the best quality organic produce in Melbourne, but with the least amount of impact on the environment. We don’t think you’d appreciate it if we went around cryovacing everything. So the following might help bridge the divide, make us happy eaters, without upsetting the best of all our eco inclinations.

What Fair Food does to keep your C’s crisp and P’s plump?

CERES Fair Food has a low food mileage policy, meaning we source organic produce exclusively from local suppliers. This makes our organic fruit & veg boxes fresher because local seasonal food travels the least, from seed to plate.

We pack your organic fruit and vegetables the morning we deliver to your Hosts, ensuring your food box has spent as little time as possible waiting for you.

We pack  produce at different stages of maturity, with as much variety as possible, so the contents of your organic food box are ready to eat at different times, minimising loss and wasteage.

What you can do to ensure your ethically sourced grub remains good until the next delivery day?

Get them into the cold (but not too cold): make sure you pick them up on time and get them into the fridge as soon as possible. Ensure your fridge is not turned up too high because this can “cold burn” them. Place your organic F&V into the crisper drawer, which is designed to keep moisture in and air out. This wards off “droop,” keeping your celeries, capsicums, lettuces nice and perky!

Prioritize: eat the fruit and veg most likely to go off first. Items that are ripe and ready, lettuce & leafy greens.

Keep moisture in & oxygen out: place vulnerable items into recyclable airtight containers. This is particularly important for items such as carrots, which may turn black or go “rubbery” if you don’t protect the more fragile of the otherwise robust root veg family.

Preserve: Got some stone fruit about to turn en masse into liquified goo? It’s amazing what cutting them up, sprinkling them with a little sugar and squeezing some citrus on them will do. A scoop of the mix with yoghurt makes for a very easy & healthy afternoon snack. Plus it will give your tastebuds an extra buzz as the fruit mascerates and naturally sweetens.

If you got herbs this week, put them in some water. Or if you know you’re not going to get to them in time, consider freeze drying your chives, oven drying your basil, tarragon, lemon balm & mints, or simply air drying the sturdier varieties such as sage, thyme, dill, bay leaves, oregano, rosemary and marjoram. You can even steep them in oil for a great way to infuse your cooking long-term. Instructions are everywhere on the web. Here’s one post on Wiki How.

Pre-serve… slowly: A slow cooker is an amazing invention. You dump a bunch of vegetables with stock, salt and pepper and some herbs, set the timer and come home to the best cooked stew of your life. I make large scale curries like this, particularly in winter, when there is a natural glut of root veggies and onions. Not only do I not have to cook after a long day at work, but these seasonal vegetables are great for freezing, as they maintain their structural integrity and flavour. So not only can I get away with not cooking during the working week, this one is a great trick for preserving the contents of my organic fruit & veggie box for when I need it.

Any nifty tricks up your sleeve? We’d love to hear them.

The following public holidays will affect deliveries

Australia Day – Thurs 26th Jan – NO DELIVERIES
Melbourne Cup – Tues 6th Nov – DELIVERY DATE CHANGED TO WEDS 7th
Christmas – Tues 25th & Thurs 27th Dec – NO DELIVERIES
New Year’s Day 2013 – Tues 1st Jan – NO DELIVERIES

You have three options if you’d like to continue receiving awesome, affordable, eco-friendly fruit and vegetable deliveries:

a) Change to an alternate Host before the cut off day for THAT delivery week  and change it back BEFORE the cut off day of the following week (Sundays @ midnight for Tuesday deliveries & Tuesday @ midnight for Thursdays).

You can change your Food Host on your account profile page: https://members.ceresfairfood.org.au/profile

b) Make arrangements to buy in person from the CERES Shop & Market that week. Visit www.ceres.org.au/marketandshop for location details, opening hours and special market day events.

c) Go dumpster diving with alley cats!

Questions & Answers

What happens when you change my Food Host’s delivery day (i.e. for Melbourne Cup)?
No need to change your host if you are happy to pick your order up on the alternative delivery day. The day change happens automatically from our end. Order as per usual if you can pick up on the Weds.
If you cannot pick up on the Weds nor change to a Thurs host, cancel & recreate order for the following week.

What happens if I can’t change Host?
If you don’t change Food Host, our system will automatically cancel any outstanding orders.

What happens if I’ve paid in advance for orders?
Can’t change Food Host but have paid for orders in advance? There’s no need to do anything. That weeks’ order will be automatically cancelled and your account credited for future purchases.

What about standing/repeating orders?
Standing orders will resume the following week when the Food Host reopens.

GOT A QUESTION?
EMAIL INFO@CERESFAIRFOOD.ORG.AU

CERES Aquaponics from CERES Fair Food on Vimeo.

Over the past few months we have been producing some short videos about our farmers, growers and suppliers. We want to give our members the story behind their food, how and who produced it. We kick things off with a short video all about the CERES Aquaponic system, which is right next door to the Fair Food warehouse here in Northcote. The CERES Aquaponic system was designed and built by Green Technology Designer Stephen Mushin and Biologist Dr Wilson Lennard. Aquaponics is a water efficient method of growing of fish and vegetables (mostly herbs in this case) side-by-side in a closed system. Essentially the nutrient-rich effluent from the fish is put to good use by fertilising the plants and the water is recycled continuously. The Aquaponic system is fully functional and providing most of the beautiful herbs in the Fair Food boxes each week.

In the following weeks you’ll be seeing South Gippsland farmer, Paul Haar’s feijoas appearing in your box – these delicious egg sized fruits are in season for the next 6 weeks and are relatives of the guava family. The fruit, which is very popular in New Zealand, is usually eaten by cutting it in half, then scooping out the pulp with a spoon. The fruit has a juicy, sweet seed pulp and slightly gritty flesh nearer the skin. If the utensils needed to eat it this way are not available, the feijoa may be torn or bitten in half, and the contents squeezed out and consumed. An alternative method is to bite the end off and then tear the fruit in half length ways, exposing a larger surface with less curvature and using one’s teeth to scrape the pulp out closer to the skin.

A feijoa may be used as an interesting addition to a fruit smoothie, and may be used to make wine or cider and feijoa-infused vodka. The flavour is aromatic, very strong and complex, inviting comparison with guava, strawberry, pineapple, and often containing a faint wintergreen-like aftertaste. It also may be cooked and used in dishes where one would use stewed fruit. It is a popular ingredient in chutney.

Fruit maturity is not always apparent visually, as the fruits remain the same shade of green until they are overripe or rotting. One usually may sense ripeness, however, by giving the fruit a soft squeeze; a ripe feijoa will yield to pressure somewhat like a just-ripe banana.

Enjoy your feijoa

Melbourne Market by Chris Grose of Scout Films

Market day is an early start. 2am wake-up for a 3am meet up with Chris Ennis in Brunswick. Chris is the main fruit & veg buyer at CERES and he’s offered to take me along on one his bi (sometimes tri) weekly visits to Melbourne Market.

The streets are refreshingly empty and the morning mild as we make our way down to West Melbourne. When we arrrive at Footscray Road we line up at the gates with other trucks from Fruit & Veg shops around Melbourne. There’s already a buzz of activity inside the markets. The complex includes the Fruit & Veg, Flower & Seafood markets and most stock is delivered overnight ready for the buyers who come in the morning.

As the gates open the procession of trucks and vans make their way in and enter the chaos of the market. I’m told that this is a “quiet” morning but to my eyes the place is teaming with activity. There’s a sort of organised chaos that goes on – forklifts whipping around, trucks being parked, trolleys pushed through gaps – almost like being in a big city in China or India. As we park the truck and enter the market I’m taken aback by the activity but soon learn to slip into the flow of traffic as we walk around.

Chris goes and visits some suppliers, checking on orders that he’s placed the previous days and organising for produce to be loaded on the CERES truck. Some days can take longer than others. Certain fruit or veg can be unavailable and Chris has to source from other suppliers at the market but today everything’s here. It gives us a chance to walk around and talk to some suppliers. I have a chat with Joe, an organic grower from Hastings and regular supplier to CERES. He’s brought apples, tomatoes and corn to market today though he’s just started planting his winter crops like broccoli back at the farm. We talk about the changing season, the difficulties in finding reliable labour come harvest time, the long days at market and the pending move to Epping.

The move is a hot topic at the market and comes up in most of the conversations I have that morning. The government is currently building a new complex in Epping, around 35km from the current site via Citylink. Most aren’t looking forward to relocating, nor having to travel the extra distance, but accept that the decision is out of their hands. I later do some research online and find out that the market in it’s various manifestations has moved twice in the past (originally in the CBD, than to the Queen Vic, than out to West Melbourne). Interestingly, the MMA website states that there was “significant controversy” when it moved from the Queen Vic to Footscray Road, “with many believing the market would fail because it was too far away.” Similar concerns arise today but there isn’t time to dwell on the unchangeable – there’s work to do.

I find Chris again and we pick up some tomatoes from Joe, and capsicums and mushrooms from other suppliers. We mainly stick to the cluster of organic and biodynamic suppliers in one corner of the market – birds of a feather flock together – but later I walk around the entire site visiting several of the coffee shops along the way. I’m amazed by the sheer amount of produce as we walk around. The market itself is massive – think of an inside space the size of 3-4 football grounds – and everyday enormous volumes of fruit & veg go through the place to all the independent fruit & veg shops around Melbourne (I’m told Coles and Woolies have their own Distribution Centres and so aren’t often seen at the market). I enjoy a brief respite when I duck over to the flower market. No forklifts or motorised vehicles allowed during trading hours. There’s even some classical music playing as I walk around and look at the array of cut flowers and potted indoor plants destined for florists around the city.

I meet up with Chris again and we head back to the truck to start loading up. The sun is starting to peek and there’s a beautiful orange glow over the city. We back the truck out and a forklift loads several pallets of produce all destined for Fair Food and the CERES cafe. As we hit the road the market is noticeably more quiet than when we arrived – the nocturnal workers must have all gone home. We head back to CERES as the morning traffic starts bubbling onto the road. As most are probably waking up to start their day, we arrive back in Brunswick and Chris drops me off before heading for the Fair Food warehouse. Exhausted, I enter the house and get down to some important business – breakfast.

Eating alone doesn’t exactly conjure up pleasant connotations, and with the explosion of prepackaged frozen meals and society’s obsession with love stories, it’s no surprise that some associate solo-ness with hermits who have microwave addictions and eat cereal for dinner. However there are myriad of reasons that people cook and eat sans companions, some by personal choice and others by fate. But whatever the case, everyone has to eat and like the man who was chased up the tree by a lion then enjoyed the scenery, it’s best to make the most of your situation.

Sure, cooking for one can seem a little less fulfilling. But despite all the inevitable motivational hurdles, it’s an opportunity to get creative without having to cater to the culinary idiosyncrasies of other folk, or on the other hand, it can be a chance to reconnect with long lost friends (or make new ones) over food.

After a year or so of mostly solo meals I’ve had a chance to iron out some of the cereal-for-dinner creases. If you too find yourself in a solo situation but still want to make the most of your Fair Food box, I’ve compiled a few tips and hints to hopefully help you do the same.

1. Invest in good kitchen appliances.

Take the unnecessary labour out of cooking by purchasing some time saving appliances such a rice cooker, juicer and blender. I like making double batch smoothies and save a glass for the next morning or after work. Be sure to buy appliances with a high easy-and-quick-to-clean rating.

2. Buy small quantities of fresh produce

The ‘Mixed Small Fruit and Veg’ box is a good size for one person who cooks most days. However, if you have leftover fruit and vegetables lingering in your fridge at the end of the week, try making soups and freezing them or fruit crumble to share with friends. I like storing frozen soups in my work fridge as a back up meal incase I forget my lunch or run out of time to prepare something the night before. Freezing is also a good way to enjoy out of season produce.

3. Stock up on dried food and shop at bulk bins to save money.

Shop at stores that have bulk bins or pay-by-weigh products such as grains, dried fruit, nuts, coffee and sweets. Not only is this a good way to reduce your consumption of prepackaged goods (bring your own jars, bags, containers to use) but you also save money as you’re only buying what you need.

4. Start a food sharing system at your office.

Try getting a small group together and allocating days where one person makes lunch for the others. This can give you a ‘rest day’ from bringing your own packed lunch and is also a fun way to try other people’s recipes (especially if you’re always sniffin’ their lunch like I am). Since most recipes are designed for 2+ servings, it’s an opportunity to get innovate at home and try new dishes!

5. Enjoy your own company/ Spoil yourself

Sometimes when I come home from work all I feel like eating is toast or cereal. However, I’ve found that listening to music, putting on an apron and drinking a nice cuppa tea makes for a pleasant evening alone cooking. It is also the perfect excuse to indulge in expensive ingredients you’ve always wanted to try but would be too costly to share with others.

6. Get out more.

One of the best remedies for solo-dinner-blues is to share food with good company. Invite friends over for weekly meals and/or attend a social meet up with a focus on food. There are many established groups with an emphasis on food such as Food Not Bombs, which is a vegan soup kitchen that dishes up meals at various locations internationally. Check out http://www.foodnotbombs.net/contacts.html to find your local kitchen.

One of the best resources I’ve found is Meetup.com: A worldwide network of thousands of local meet up groups. Just search any keyword with your location and you’ll be surprised at how many options there are. Popular Australian groups include Veg for Animals and Eat With Me.

Happy Cooking!

On February 3rd Cyclone Yasi ripped through the farms of banana growers in Tully wiping out Australia’s main banana growing hub. Unlike Cyclone Larry this time banana growers had an idea of what to expect – by half slashing the banana plants and laying them on the ground, the hanging fruit was better protected from the worst of the winds. After Yasi hit growers harvested the fruit from the slashed plants and in the month since Yasi there has been a mini glut of bananas. During this time any retailer marking bananas prices up and blaming Cyclone Yasi was taking advantage of the situation – growers certainly weren’t getting the price rises. Now in mid-March this fruit has come to an end and overnight wholesale organic banana prices have quadrupled from as low as $30 a 13kg case to $120 a case this week. Banana production won’t be back to normal until around Christmas so it’s time to say goodbye to bananas in our boxes and spare a thought for banana growers who for the second time in 6 years won’t have an income for the best part of a year.

This week most of you would have got buerre bosc pears in your boxes from John and Sam Mustafa, who own Yarra Organics based at the famous Pettys Heritage Orchard in Templestowe.   Pettys is only one of a couple of organic buerre bosc growers in Victoria – these beautiful brown pears with the nutty taste are one of John and Sam’s mainstays.   This year Yarra Organics is having a bumper pear harvest and it gives us great joy to be putting the beurre bosc, and from next week, the green packhams in our boxes.  This joy is compounded because another season like the last two dismal harvests could have meant the end of decades of hard work for John and Sam – it really has been that close to closing the gate.   To see the relief on John’s face this week at his market stand surrounded by pallets of pears is enough to bring tears to your eyes.   Enjoy that sweet, crunchy first bite.

We were recently interviewed by Lena Norton, editor of Green Magazine – here is the full interview with Doron Francis, Enterprise Manager of CERES Fair Food…

Can you tell us exactly what the Fair Food scheme is?

Fair Food is a Melbourne based Organic Box Delivery scheme with a number of social twists – all profits go towards supporting CERES, we have a distribution system which reduces food miles, we support local farmers and provide our community with low-cost, organically grown fruit and veg.

We also provide a fruit box delivery service for the workplace called Fair Fruit. We have a number of customers in and around Melbourne including NAB and Melbourne Water, mostly larger organisations who are keen to provide their staff with access to locally grown, organic fruit. Our customers want to work with an enterprise which has some social benefits too (i.e. less food miles, supporting CERES etc…).

What are the aims of Fair Food and how do they fit with the ethos of CERES?

Fair Food is a Social Enterprise which helps support CERES and our mission to promote sustainable living and alternative energy systems.  Our primary objective at CERES is education, with over 65,000 school kids coming to our park each year to learn all about the need for sustainability, community and cross cultural awareness.  CERES also has a strong focus on organic food production with a propagation centre, nursery, market gardens and regular organic market.

Fair Food has a number of goals: first and foremost we wanted to create an alternative to supermarket shopping, which, as we all know is dominated by two major players in Australia. Supermarkets supply nearly 80 per cent of all groceries sold in Australia and we see this as a major threat to the environment, local economies and our food culture in general.  Market concentration in the supermarket industry has been cited as the main culprit for food price inflation over the past 10 years and often, supermarkets use bullying tactics to dictate prices and business terms to farmers. This has led to smaller farmers going out of business because of reduced margins or an inability to supply to supermarkets specifications (see article by Cassie White – Perfect produce quest killing Australian farms).

This is coupled with a supply chain which has a disturbing dependence on long distance transport, fossil fuel and cold storage. Carbon emissions from supermarket related food transport alone account for more than 2 per cent of the total carbon emissions in Australia. Shopping at supermarkets will generally mean that customers have no idea who grew the produce, how it was transported, stored and what environmental considerations were taken in its production.

CERES Fair Food is almost the antithesis of this model.

We work almost exclusively with Victorian farmers, the closer to Melbourne the better.  We want to build long lasting relationships with our farmers and growers, based on trust and sticking by them right through the growing season and not chasing the lowest price just because there is an over-supply in the market.

Fair Food provides a link between farmers and customers. Our members care about where their food comes from and how it’s produced. They can see the advantage of buying local – the produce is fresher, in-season and whatever they spend with us stays within the Victorian economy. All of our suppliers are organic certified, which means our customers know that their food is produced without chemicals or GMO.  However, we also try to get to know our growers and understanding their land care credentials.  This is something that we are keen to spend more time doing as we mature as an organisation. Ideally we would introduce our own standards which would also take into consideration a component of social justice, for instance, ensuring farm workers are treated fairly.

Where did the concept for Fair Food come from?

CERES have always been a big promoter of local food and have spent years supplying and supporting fledgling food Co-ops (essentially buying clubs where people can get together to buy bulk organic food and take advantage of lower prices). After researching various models we decided that we would adopt a distribution system similar to Food Connect in Brisbane.  This model has elements of CSA (Community Shared Agriculture) and Co-ops. It uses pick-up points instead of door-to-door delivery which saves on food miles and encourages people to get know likeminded folk in their neighbourhood.  Rob Peakin (Food Connect Founder and all round clever bloke) has a solid vision for alternative food systems and was very instrumental in helping us get systems in place in the early days.

How was the scheme started?  What kind of funding did it require?  How did these funds enable you to build Fair Food?

In December 2009 CERES won a Government grant (Jobs Fund for Job creation) to expand our food distribution enterprise.  The funds have helped us to hire staff, lease a warehouse, purchase delivery vans; develop our website, IT systems, branding and marketing, as well as provide other capital expenditure necessary for starting up an enterprise of this size.

How do you see schemes such as Fair Food influencing the marketplace?

Well, with Supermarkets dominating the marketplace there’s obviously a big job to do before we can say that we have any real influence.  However, we see it as a big opportunity too, with more and more people waking up to the fact that local and organic food systems aren’t just fads but have tangible social and environmental benefits. We recently carried out a survey on our customers and although we have only been operational for just over 6 months it appears that our members are very happy with our service, the produce and most of all the ethos behind what we are doing. They are excited about knowing who grows their food and that they are supporting a service that has other social objectives too.

Much of the food in the weekly boxes is grown on site at CERES in Brunswick.  Who grows, tends and harvests the crops?  How do you decide what to grow and in what quantities?

We have two main market gardens – at CERES itself (managed by Farmer Steve) and another plot about 4km up the Merri Creek at our Harding Street garden (managed by Silke Genovese).

Do you find consumers are interested to come and see where their food is grown, or to be more educated about the process by which their food arrives on their plate?

Both, we have a lot of interest in farm visits, which we will be starting up in when it cools down a bit, and people are also responding positively to articles and links we publish online.  We try to give our members as much information about how food is really produced as possible by giving them access to information which they may not be aware of.  For instance last year we hosted a free screening of Food INC – this something we hope to be doing a lot more of in 2011.

You have staff from AMES working at Fair Food.  Can you explain how this shapes what you do and why it works so well with the overall motivation of the scheme?

This is another example of our commitment to providing a social outcome for what we do.  We have employed a number of people through AMES and it’s exciting to see the guys develop new skills and become better equipped to deal with the Australian workplace.  In fact everyone we have hired through AMES has been an asset to Fair Food, making working at Fair Food an extremely inclusive and fun place to work.

How has the scheme created new links and relationships between growers, sellers and consumers?

It’s about developing trust really.  We already share a lot of information about our farmers via our website, Facebook, newsletters and in farm visits.  It’s empowering for growers to meet customers and vice versa.  We are planning more ways of getting information to our customers, such as asking farmers to write guest blog articles, producing podcasts and videos, so that our customers can get a feel for some of the realities of growing food and are more in tune with the growing seasons.

Is it true that you are already fielding questions from other organisations over Australia who want to emulate the scheme in their own locations?  If so, how do you offer advice and support?

Yes we are open to providing help to individuals or organisations who would like to set up something similar to Fair Food.  So far this has ranged from fact-finding meetings and tours of our warehouse, to sharing information and systems.

What is the future for Fair Food?

There is still so much to do… but more happy customers and farmers would be fantastic!