Welcome and thank you to the following volunteer Food Hosts for offering their premises.

Rebecca at Tanti St, Cheltenham – Tues 5-7pm
Liz at Frederick St, Brunswick – Tues 5-8pm
Mike at Collins St, Docklands – Thurs 3-7pm
Mel at Peterson Ave, Coburg North – Thurs 6-8pm

Click here to sign up and get your organic food delivered to one of these convenient Melbourne locations.

The price wars of big supermarkets are not only destroying farming families, they’re revealing a community willing to sacrifice animal welfare, healthy land and good food quality just to save a dollar.

What is it about cheap food that blinds us? What’s going on in our heads that lets us pay a premium for a smart phone or designer label clothes, but with food we want the absolute cheapest?

Over decades our spending habits have told food retailers we love cheap chicken, eggs and pork. In miserable indoor animal factories chickens and pigs are bred, fed and medicated to grow and lay at the fastest possible rate to deliver the cheapest ‘product’. The resulting industry is so concentrated that a few large companies control everything, from prices to farmer to the breed of chook that can be farmed.

Beautifully packaged for us on the shelves of our local Coles or Woolworths, the curtain is firmly shut on how the products of industrial agriculture arrive so cheaply in our shopping trolleys. If we had to buy our bacon and eggs directly from a confined animal operation, could we honestly front the huge array of fattening pens and laying cages, and look brutalised animals and an underpaid farmer in the eye while we hand over a pittance for the ingredients for our Sunday breakfast?

To keep costs down to make our $1 a litre milk possible, the milk factory can legally mix in up to 12 per cent waste permeate to full cream milk. Permeate is the waste product from manufacturing low fat milks. Milking cows are bred to be more productive and selected for larger and larger udders. There’s a limit before a cow’s udder painfully stretches to cause greater rates of mastitis and other infections requiring drugs to maintain the cow’s ability to produce milk fit for human consumption.

Low milk prices means only the dairy farmers with ‘super-herds’ of up to 1000 cows can maintain a viable business, which explains why 30 Queensland dairy farmers walked off their farms in the last 12 months. It is impossible for a young dairy farmer to buy their own farm without taking on enormous debt.

Similarly the effect of an 80 cent iceberg is felt from the local fruit and veg shop, right back to the farm. When the two big supermarkets halve the price of lettuce, the independent supermarkets and local fruit and veg shops must follow and the call goes down the supply chains to all lettuce farmers to drop the price on iceberg.

There’s no award wage for a farmer; they simply work more for less money.  To grow more lettuces more cheaply on the same bit of land, soils are worked harder and harder, fertility drops and more salt-based fertilisers are added to compensate. The weak plants growing in depleted soil need more sprays to protect them from pests and diseases, therefore more excess nitrogen and pesticide residues wash off farms and into creeks, rivers and oceans. The unintended results are polluted waterways, wildlife deaths, algal blooms and dead zones in estuaries.

Since the 1970s Australia has lost 40-50,000 farmers and now the age of the average farmer is well over 50. What son or daughter wants to take over the family farm when they see their parents and grandparents working for less and less and not being able to look after themselves, their health, their soils or their animals humanely? The more we squeeze farmers, the more they leave the farm or take their own lives in despair.  When there’s no one left to take over the farm what are we going to eat – supplements?

The government and the ACCC need to step in and stop the predatory pricing practices of Coles and Woolworths. As consumers we need to start thinking beyond our wallets and start buying the meat, milk and produce we know is grown humanely, sustainably and bought at a fair price from a local retailer. We need to reconnect with the people who grow our food so that it becomes inconceivable to buy food that requires people, animals and the land to be sacrificed.

There are convenient and affordable options allowing us to get closer to where our food comes from. Talk to your local fruit shop owner about where they get their produce from and why. Find a local online ethical food box delivery scheme. Join or start a neighbourhood food co-op. Shop at farmers markets.  And to really, really reconnect we can grow our own food, keep some animals at home and become farmers ourselves.

Originally published by Online Opinion a not-for-profit e-journal providing a forum for public social and political debate about current Australian issues.

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