Cor and I
consider ourselves to be reasonable exponents of eating well, that is, eating
animals and vegetables and fruit that have been produced with a high level of
care and consequently, a high level of flavour. But we compromise. Everyone does it, and on a recent road trip I
was given cause to consider the drivers of compromise, staring down at the
decidedly non free-range bacon and egg sandwich from a roadside café that was
to be my breakfast.
We get a lot of
lecturing. People telling us we should
eat organic, free range, biodynamic, RSPCA inspected, local, sustainably
caught, responsibly farmed, the list is endless.
But all too
often these lecturers don’t try to understand or respect why people compromise
when it comes to their food. As far as
they are concerned, there is no excuse for not eating food that falls into the
aforementioned categories. Or if they do
look for a reason, it is all too often blamed on the big food retailers, for stopping
the march of the citizenry towards better food.
Actually, the first time I have really seen compromise even acknowledged
was in this great Milkwood post: http://milkwood.net/2013/12/23/the-ethics-of-almost/#comment-22982.
The reasons we
compromise, as I see them, are threefold.
I believe they are:
1. Time
2.
Information
3.
Money
Time
So you are, like
us, on a roadtrip, looking for a quick breakfast on the go. You don’t have time to seek out the one
backstreet café in town that serves locally made bacon on their sandwiches.
Or you have a
couple of kids, you and your other half leave for work at 7am and get home at
7pm, eat, put the kids to bed, steal a couple of private moments in front of TV
before falling asleep. And weekends are
no better, ferrying kids around to sporting or social engagements. When are you supposed to have the time to
seek out this wonderful food you are being told you should be feeding your
kids? If it isn’t packaged in flashing
lights at the supermarket when you do the Saturday afternoon shopping trip, it
doesn’t make the pantry or even the trolley.
Of course, like
everything, this driver is one of choice.
You could spend your weeknight spare time tracking down these producers,
or restaurants, or markets, but sometimes you would rather spend the time
decompressing, or if you are the road, driving on (I personally love it when we
“make good time”).
 |
| Start out with some herbs like we did.... |
Information
This one is
related to the time driver, because it takes time to understand our food. The way things are these days, with an
endless stream of jingo-istic food phrases thrust at us, it takes time to
follow each of them through to what they actually mean. Organic?
When it comes to meat that doesn’t mean free range, just that it has
been given feed grown with organic chemicals (though there are some approved
non-organic ones too). Free range? That just means given access to an outside
run, not necessarily for the whole life of the animal nor one that allows the
animal to scratch, or root around, or do what it does naturally. Most citizens don’t know this stuff. The simple information they have been
provided is: organic/etc = good & expensive; everything else = not so good
& cheaper. Hell, even people who
sell organic stuff don’t know that an organic certification actually allows the use of chemicals and some drugs, nor how dangerous some 100% organic chemicals can be.
So if you don’t
have the time to research all these things, you aren’t going to be
informed. And labelling, contrary to
what the demagogues think, is not the be all and end all answer. Labelling will never explain fully where a
product comes from, the conditions it was grown or raised in, and whether the
grower is receiving a fair price for the product.
Solving the
information problem takes time, and I know that there are lots of people out
there trying to help in this regard. But
I will make two easy suggestions for those not sure where to make a start. The first is to borrow or buy a copy of the
book The Omnivore’s Dilemma by
Michael Pollan. It is incredibly
compelling while being very informative (think Bill Bryson), and goes a long
way to explaining how food is produced in modern America, and many of the
techniques that have been adopted elsewhere.
The second
suggestion is to buy go back to buying your meat from the butcher. It isn’t any more expensive than the
supermarkets (unless you want it to be) and when you are looking in that glass
case at those pork chops, you can ask the simple question “where did those
chops come from?” The butcher won’t be
offended by your impertinence, he will relish the chance to share some of his
knowledge of his supply line. Whether it
is from commercially farmed (confinement) large white pigs, or free range
Berkshires, or something else entirely, you will have in a few seconds
increased the amount of information you have about your food, and taken a
valuable first step towards knowing your food.
The other
important element of information comes to flavour. Not knowing that certain types of produce
taste better, and thinking that “a tomato is a tomato and a chicken is a
chicken” is the one of the greatest information obstacles that we must
overcome.
Money
I left this one
for last, because it seems to be the most sensitive one. The fact is that yes, food that is produced
in a caring manner, and that gives a good return to the farmer usually costs
more. But, and here, is a big but, it
doesn’t have to. That’s right, it really
doesn’t have to.
Sure, if you
don’t have the time to make the effort or the information on where to go, and
you want to buy your high quality food from the supermarket, yes it will always
cost more. However if you
do your homework, and change your buying habits, you can get it for the same
price as you would pay for the food you normally buy.
You find that
person in your area with their own free-range chooks, you won’t pay $6.35 a
dozen you will pay $4-$5. You find a few
people with a similar outlook, and you can buy a side of beef, cut up, for $8 a
kilo. There is no way the supermarket is
going to beat that price. Same thing
works with pork. Sure, you have to stock
your deep freezer, and order in advance, and do some running about, but this
comes back to the time consideration.
Find the market gardener in your area, maybe at your local farmers’
market (if you have one). Buy a week’s
worth of veges from them and then compare it to your normal bill. Pleasant surprise almost guaranteed.
Overcoming the Drivers
So those are my
thoughts on the compromises we make. I
will finish this post by charging my fellow food-lovers with a challenge. When next you find yourself saddling up the
high horse (as I too often do, I admit it) get down for a minute and think
about which of these compromise drivers you can help your audience to
overcome. The more we all pull together
to do this, the closer we will get to what I believe will be a “tipping point”
in our society’s relationship with food, and restore the relationship between
the citizen consumer and the farmer. I
am going to try and do my part, want to give me a hand?
 |
| ...and end up making your own sausages! |
No comments:
Post a Comment