Local coconuts!? Dan and his irrepressible pea sprouts.

Local coconuts!? Dan O'Farrell and his irrepressible pea sprouts.

5th August 2014

Local coconuts you ask? Is that a picture of a secret plantation somewhere on the Mornington Peninsula? Has global warming changed things this much already? Well, not really, it’s just that Malcolm from Aclara Health Foods came by the Fair Food warehouse last week. Malcolm was ecstatic that after many years working with organic coconut products he’d managed to get a shipment of certified organic drinking coconuts from Thailand through quarantine unfumigated (no mean feat). However, he was also in panic because he had 10,000 of them in cool storage and no one to buy them.

It sounds like a the start of a bad joke and it was a bit of a conundrum for us. Usually we wouldn’t seek produce from overseas like green coconuts and my first instinct was to say, “no”, but what do you do when you know there are 10,000 organic coconuts in a Melbourne cool-store destined to become food waste if they’re not eaten. So we said we’d help out.