The Village Organic Farm Travels the World

Feeding Ireland

Sad as it is, we have decided to head home to Australia in a couple of weeks.  We’ve delayed it for as long as possible because WE LOVE IRELAND.  But realistically, we need to get home and work out what we’re going to do for the rest of our lives.

Staying in Ireland was going to be fraught with complications and hurdles, not least being that the Irish economy is a toilet right now.  A combination of factors, including questionable management of the Celtic Tiger, has brought Ireland to the point where use of the ‘R’ word (recession) is now being phased out and the ‘D’ word is creeping in.  Hundreds of people are losing their jobs every week, the dole queues are growing and no one seems to know when this ‘bust’ part of the boom-bust cycle will end.

So this is not a good time to be looking for work.  And certainly not a good time to be trying to earn enough to save a few Euros and enjoy the poxy Australian dollar exchange rate in reverse.  Several large employers are dramatically downsizing (Dell Computers recently announced that it would cut 1,900 jobs at its manufacturing plant in Limerick, moving some of the positions to Poland) and the banking sector is in turmoil.  In just one day Allied Irish Bank’s share price fell 58 per cent, Bank of Ireland plummeted almost 55 per cent, and Irish Life Permanent closed down 50 per cent.  After reporting a profit of over €1 billion in July 2007, AIB’s total value dropped to just €528 million this week, €122 million of which the bank had in secret loans to its recently departed Chairman.

To compound the economic downturn, the Irish food industry received a battering in the form of a dioxin scare that forced a recall just before Christmas of all pork products dating from September to December.

Contaminated animal feed supplied by one Irish manufacturer to just nine pig farms had caused the contamination of pork with between 80 and 200 times the EU’s recommended limit for dioxins and PCBs.  Now, one would imagine that with only nine affected pig farms, the recall would not be a big deal.  But, as the FSAI (Food Safety Authority Ireland) pointed out at the time:

It is estimated that approximately 10% of pigmeat from the Republic of Ireland is affected by the current contamination with dioxins. However, as all Irish pigs are slaughtered and processed in a small number of processing plants, it has not been possible to distinguish between potentially contaminated and non-contaminated product. Therefore, as a precautionary measure all pork products originating from the Irish Republic have been recalled.

In addition to the tonnes of bacon and sausages (and more ham pizzas than you could poke a stick at…), thousands of pre-ordered Christmas hams were withdrawn and many were destroyed.  Not only were customers seriously inconvenienced, retailers had to produce refunds at a time when most were experiencing lower-than-usual pre-Christmas takings, and compensation from suppliers was uncertain.

The consequences were initially projected to be catastrophic.  The pork industry is the fourth biggest in Ireland's agriculture sector, worth around €400 million (A$795 million) per year to the Irish economy. The country's farms produce over 3 million pigs per annum, almost 50% of which are consumed within the Republic.  The remainder is exported, mainly to Northern Ireland and Britain but also to Western European countries and as far afield as China.

Within two days of the recall announcement 1,800 jobs were lost with a further 6,000 jobs said to be at risk, although my guess is that this alarming figure was over-estimated.  Processors halted the slaughtering of pigs until the Irish government promised them financial reparation, the details of which are still being finalised.  100,000 pigs were condemned for slaughter (most of which are still on death row, creating a consequent problem of animal welfare) and the estimated costs of the crisis initially stood at €100 million (A$200 million).

Within a few weeks, however, some of the withdrawn pork products were put back on the market – once the producers could provide substantiated evidence that their raw material came from pigs that were not fed on the contaminated feed.  This process in itself presented challenges in relation to adequate storage while producers waited for the all clear.  It also raised questions about traceability, and highlighted how vulnerable organic, local and artisanal food is to being dragged into the vortex of consequences of factory farming.  According to FSAI:

All food and animal feed businesses are required to establish and implement food traceability systems which are compliant with current legislation. It is a legal requirement to have a system or set of procedures that allows food businesses to trace one step forward and one step back. This means that food businesses know who supplied them and where their product has gone. However, there is no legal requirement for food businesses to have traceability systems which can trace raw materials through the factory and into finished product (i.e. Process Traceability). So it is not a legal requirement for pork factories to be able to identify exactly which pork carcass from a particular farm went into each batch of finished pork product.

Pig slaughter plants in Ireland comply with these legal traceability requirements under the supervision of DAFF (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food). However, given the nature of the slaughter and cutting process it is unlikely that these processors would have been able to introduce additional traceability systems to those required by law. Therefore, most pork processors cannot identify exactly which farm produced the pigs that resulted in the pork cuts distributed from the factory. This necessitated a complete recall.

The cause of the contamination is still being debated.  The current official line is that a machine fault caused fumes from lubricating oils laden with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) to come into contact with the pig feed.  There is some conjecture – perhaps politically motivated – that this PCB-laden lubricant came from fuel oil smuggled across the border:

The Irish Republic's environmental protection agency and Irish police are investigating the possibility that the feed was tainted with dioxins from smuggled fuel oil.

The fuel is converted from agricultural green diesel to red diesel used in motor vehicles and for heating oil. This process, pioneered by the IRA's south Armagh Brigade during the Troubles, produces dioxins as a waste byproduct.

Police are acting on intelligence that the oil used to heat the animal feed in a processing plant in the republic was sourced from Co Tyrone in Northern Ireland and may have been smuggled fuel. However, they are also exploring an alternative theory that the oil was legitimately sourced but was tainted by being transported in a tanker contaminated with dioxins. (Henry McDonald and James Meikle, The Guardian, Thursday 11 December 2008)

Another possibly more worrying cause is also being scrutinized: that rejects from pizza production plants were being put into the pig food production process with their plastic wrapper still in tact.

…more likely is that non-feed grade oil is being used at some point in the cycle to dry biscuit meal (out of date biscuits and bakery goods from the food industry). Such non-feed oils obviously do not have the same quality controls as extra virgin olive oil and so could very easily have higher than food-safe levels of contaminants, including PCBs and dioxins. This suggestion hints once again, as did the ongoing melamine scandal, at how easy it seems to be for unscrupulous sectors of the food industry to use non-food materials in their products, allegedly. (David Bradley, Sciencebase, 07Dec08).

At 200 times the safe limit for PCB consumption, most consumers would reasonably avoid food with a high risk of contamination.  Dormant fear, which is so easily whipped by the media into panic, is rarely mediated with common sense and comprehensible facts.   A rasher or two of bacon with a small amount of PCB is not overly harmful.  It’s the accumulation of dioxins that is the concern and one would have to eat several kilograms of the stuff over a short period of time (less than a week) for it to have any noticeable effect.

The paradox is what we as a society determine to be ‘safe’ and what we don’t.  I wonder how many people carefully disposed of their ‘toxic’ bacon, ham and sausages into containers destined for landfill, then sat back and celebrated their responsible actions with a cup of tea and a cigarette.

According to Graham Harvey, writing in The Guardian a couple of days after the recall was announced, the pork scare had a wearying familiarity about it.

First, there's the shock announcement that the suspect foods have been cleared from supermarket shelves. Then, the usual experts get paraded before the media with a reassuring message about the risks being very small – a message Michael Meacher is right to question.

Food safety agencies are called in to carry out urgent investigations, implying that such events won't be allowed to happen again. News gatherers ratchet up the drama with grim stories of the effects of whatever the particular poison happens to be. Farmers and food processors step in to calm the hysteria with claims that the fuss is being overdone and a little bit of contaminant isn't going to do you much harm.

During the current dioxin scare I've even seen a Lib Dem press release calling for better labelling, particularly for ready meals. The suggestion is that contamination is all to do with foreign foods, and if we could only be sure our pork pies or microwave-ready toad-in-the-hole were made from good British ingredients, we'd be safe.

It's nonsense, of course. When it comes to safety, what matters is not where a food is produced, but how. And with our present large-scale, centralised, industrial production systems, food scares are inevitable.

I've a farmer friend who regularly raises a few pigs on her mixed farm. Her chosen breed is Berkshires, once famed for the quality of their pork. They spend their lives rootling around in pasture paddocks and feeding on a ration based on home-grown barley.

In due course, they're trucked off to the nearest abattoir for slaughter. The butchered meat is then returned to my friend's farm for sale to friends and locals. It's inconceivable that meat like this could be contaminated by dioxins or any other industrial poison.

If the unimaginable happened and a freak storm should dust the pasture with dioxins or PCBs from heaven knows where, even then the consequences would be limited. The contamination would be localised and contained.

Our industrial food systems, however, make intermittent catastrophes almost inevitable. Pigs are all too often crowded together in sheds and fed rations formulated from any number of globally-traded industrial grains and food by-products.

As I write, speculation has it that the current incident was caused by contamination of animal food with non food-grade oil such as diesel fuel, or with plastic food wrappings. Whatever the cause, once meat has become contaminated the highly-centralised nature of our food system makes wide-scale poisoning far more likely. Contaminated meat can quickly find its way into products that may be sold in a number of countries. Tracing contamination becomes a nightmare; avoiding such foods virtually impossible.

In their bid to reduce the risk, food safety agencies rely on hazard analysis to identify those parts of the process where contamination is most likely. But so extended is the global food chain that nasty surprises are inevitable from time to time. It's also inevitable that those of us who live on industrial foods will get an occasional dose of pollutant.

If you're not happy with the risk-analysis route to healthy eating, the best advice I have found is to make sure your pigs – and cattle and sheep for that matter – are raised on grass. And don't be put off by the fact that you live in town. I know a West Country pig farmer who makes a good living by supplying pigs direct to city folk.

He raises them – on pasture, of course – feeds them on a home-grown ration, has them slaughtered, then delivers the meat to the owner. Having paid up front, the owner gets a photo of his or her animal and is free to visit them on the farm if they wish. It looks to me like a fairly foolproof way of getting worry-free pork, or pretty well any other animal food come to that.

It doesn't even have to be expensive. Buying direct from the farm, consumers can often get this sort of meat at the price they'd pay in supermarkets for the hazard-assessed version. Whatever else its failings, industrial agriculture was supposed at least to deliver cheap food. Unfortunately, it doesn't even do that – especially when the cost of food scares is factored in.

I couldn’t agree more.  I wonder if Australia will take heed of the Irish experience and foster small-scale food production and more direct producer-consumer marketing initiatives.  I’d be joyful if all tiers of government started using the ‘F’ word – food – in relation to policy formulation, strategic development and, more importantly, action.  Why is it that food is not on the discussion table?  Why can we identify and prioritise other primary needs like shelter, clean air and water without mentioning access to nourishing food?

Michael Pollan’s open letter to President-elect Obama (“Farmer in Chief”) urged him to include in his restructuring of the new America liberation of critical issues such as food security, food quality, nutrition and soil management from the clutch of corporate commodity interests.  Good luck.  I hope Australia doesn’t wait – as per usual – for the US to lead the way or prescribe what policies its western partners ought to adopt.

It’s frightening that we must expect to see in our backyard sometime soon a food crisis on the scale of the one still reverberating around this little island.  Perhaps the silver lining will be that mainstream consumers will come to demand viable alternatives to factory-farmed food instead of judging them to be luxuries of the elite and wealthy.

The end of an awesome year

We hope you had a wonderful Christmas and season of celebration.  Ours was very quiet but lovely.  After nearly a year of being on the move, five months of that being overseas, we have dropped anchor for a while.  We're in Ireland, staying with Rob & Mairead near Sligo, where we've been WWOOFing (working for our keep) since mid-November.

Our hosts are away down south enjoying the Christmas break with their respective families, so we are here on our own for a week. Oliver was concerned about how Santa Claus was going to get down the chimney and out the wood stove, so on Christmas Eve we left the doors on the stove open for him and, sure enough, the next morning there was ash on the floor and he had eaten the biscuits we had left, and he'd taken the carrot we chopped up for the reindeer.  More importantly, there were presents under the tree...

We spent Christmas Day snug around a fire, watching DVDs and then eating roast goose and all the trimmings, including potatoes, silverbeet and brussel sprouts harvested from the garden. The goose was a present from a neighbour - delivered still warm and intact.  Pat dealt with it as though it was a giant chicken but the fine down proved to be a challenge until Rob told us about lighting some rolled up newspaper and singeing it off.

The days are short but interesting: we wake at around 9am, when the sun peeks over the hills to the south and throws an orange glow into our room.  For the last few mornings we have looked out the window to see fields of frost, neatly segmented by white capped stone walls.  After the sun has travelled its 90 degree arc to the west and set at around 3:30pm, we stoke the fire and start heating the water and making preparations for dinner.

Oliver loves the two dogs and the pony.  Brownie, the smaller but smarter dog, joins him on the couch for a cuddle when he's allowed inside.  Salem, the dopey dalmatian, rarely gets an invitation to come inside but when he does, he's in like a shot and generally creates a bit of havoc.  I'm learning about using the Rayburn stove and Pat is learning to manage the micro-hydro system that gives us all the electricity we need as long as we don't run too many things at once.

To earn our keep, Pat's been chopping wood and has built a mezzanine floor and shelving in Rob & Mairead's huge shed.  Oliver and I have spent hours in the balmy warmth of the poly tunnel, getting it ready for the winter, and have also dug potatoes and harvested other vegetables outside. We have been surprised by the amount of biomass and fertility above ground, compared to sub-tropical gardens and pasture, and despite the cold temperatures.  I imagine the explosion of activity in springtime would be a sight to see here.

The rhythm of life is so different - most activities don't start until at least 10am (some shops in nearby Manorhamilton don't open until 11am!), shops shut for an hour for lunch and then stay open until after 6pm.  Socialising happens until late into the night: pub music doesn't start until 10pm or later, and it's not unusual for the phone to ring after 10pm.  At Crystal Waters we would be shocked if anyone rang after 8:30am!

Oliver and I have been battling head colds (mine morphed into a chest infection that threatened to turn into pneumonia, so I'm on antibiotics: no alcohol for NYE!) and we haven't ventured out much since Christmas Eve.  Pat says it's blinky freezing out there today; it's 12:30pm and there's still a heavy frost on the northern side of the house.

We've decided to stay for most of January and will make plans over the next few weeks for our return, or perhaps not, depending on what opportunities come up in that time.  I'm finding such flexibility both liberating and scary.  We are so grateful for this comfortable, warm and relaxing home while we work out what to do with the rest of our lives.

We wish you a new year that meets all your expectations, fulfils your dreams and realises your desires, and look forward to catching up somewhere along the way.

Morphing from Italy to Ireland

It's been a while since my last post about our travels – hope you haven’t been on the edge of your seat.  To remind you, we were last in Italy after Terra Madre in Turin and then a week or so in Bra. We had no plans at that stage and life got a bit messy: we had nowhere to go and yet we were overwhelmed by the myriad options.

So where the heck are we?  We're in Ireland!  And thank goodness, may I say.  Essentially we decided to bolt to the comfort of our friends’ home in Dublin to decide where to next.  How we got there was very Italian: simple and yet complicated at the same time.

We found a cheap Ryanair flight from Milan direct to Dublin on the 5^th of November.  It cost us €202 for all three of us, including two extra bags - a bargain in anyone’s terms.  I think roughly one-third of that was taxes.  The five-hour drive from Bra over to Milan was a bit of a nightmare, with wrong turns sending us on a scenic tour of nowhere, and me in a state of near panic worrying that we might get plunged into a tunnel without warning.  Milan is huge: it took almost an hour just to get through Milan and out the other side to Bergamo Airport, from where Ryanair flies in and out, then another half an hour to get out of there again and find a service station to fill the hire car and find the correct combination of exits to make our way back to the hire car depot.

Then we negotiated the Ryanair experience.  I don’t recommend it if A] you’re tired, B] you are travelling with a child, C] you have lots of luggage or D] you don’t like being treated like a member of the bovine family.  Given that we could tick all of the above, it was not much fun.  This is cattle class with a capital C: cheap but comfortless.

The way it works is that you pay a ridiculously cheap amount for the ticket AS LONG AS you are prepared to fly at weird times, like midnight or 5:30am.  Then you pay extra per passenger for a whole host of things:

•         Payment Handling Fee
•         Airport Check-In Fee
•         Priority Boarding Fee
•         Infant Fee
•         Checked Baggage Fees
•         Excess Baggage Fee
•         Infant Equipment
•         Sports Equipment
•         Musical Instrument
•         Flight Change Fees
•         Name Change Fee
•         Stupidity for Travelling Cheap Fee

Essentially, Ryanair works really well for adults travelling with a small carry-on bag and going somewhere interesting for a weekend.  This clearly wasn't us.

I have to say at this juncture that I think their policy of not allowing pooling of baggage allowance is unfair, especially for families like us.  For obvious reasons, we have suitcases of different sizes: a HUGE case for a great big strong daddy bear, a medium-size case for a moderately strong mummy bear, and a cute little case for an often tired and emotional three-year old to drag behind him.  The last does not lend itself to carrying 15kgs.

Anyway, being stubborn and tight, and given that we had arrived with plenty of time to spare and there was plenty of space adjacent to the check-in area, we decided to save a few quid and create entertainment for our fellow passengers.  We spread everything out and set about reorganising our nine pieces of luggage into three checked bags of 15kgs each and three carry-on bags of 10kg each, plus Oliver’s stroller and his car seat.  A major achievement.

The flight departed at 9pm and arrived at 10:30pm or thereabouts.  So, after customs, and baggage collection, and a taxi to our hotel, we flopped into bed sometime after midnight.  Completely wrecked.  But it was cheap!

Then, as a kind of wind-down and pressure-valve release, I sat up for hours watching replay after replay of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech and post-mortem of the US election.  How moving it was!  I shed bucketloads of tears and felt such optimism and hope for the future.

So, now we were in Dublin.  We were amazed at just how relieved we felt at being able to speak English!  The stress of negotiating language and cultural barriers had certainly taken its toll over the preceding weeks, despite the romance of being in France and Italy.

Our friends, Chris and Nolene (ex-pat Kiwis), embraced us warmly and we felt comfortable and nurtured in their home just south of Dublin (at Delgany).  We meandered to nearby Greystones almost every day for coffee, passing mansions of the rich and famous, and walking through a massive private golf course.  Greystones is a commuter town, and it seemed to us to be very affluent, but there were also many ‘For Sale’ signs.

The Irish economy is in a bad way, with a massive market correction signalling the demise of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, the local term for the economic boom of the last decade or so.  Town after town has houses half-finished and abandoned, evidence that the ‘bust’ part of the cycle had arrived.

We have met a number of people who have been directly and severely affected by the economic downturn.  Stories about up to 50% of the workforce being laid off are common.  There’s talk that the trade figures for this Christmas will be the worst for decades, and social support agencies are bracing themselves.

Meanwhile, in Delgany, Chris and Nole fed us well and encouraged us to formulate a plan.  So we walked and breathed and thought and walked some more and talked a bit and, when nothing else materialized, we finally decided to bite the bullet and head home to Australia.  Perhaps it was a delaying tactic, or maybe just courtesy, but before we headed to the airport we hired a car and drove to Sligo to say goodbye to our friends, Rob & Mairead, with the intention of then heading south to farewell Tom & Mary in Co. Clare.

I must say that I found the time in Delgany pretty tough, despite the great hospitality.  In hindsight, it makes sense that something was going to have to give, given the rigours of packing up the farm, on top of leaving our home in January (and then selling it in August), on top of a pretty gruelling itinerary for four months, compounded by travelling with a child who was pretty clingy and home-sick.  What gave was my health and the walls came tumbling down.  Actually, Oliver and I were both sick but I got sick enough to seek out some acupuncture and Chinese medicine, which helped in the short term.

The thought of leaving Ireland was pretty sad.  It feels like we’ve seen only a tiny fraction of it and yet there’s a tantalizing familiarity that made me yearn for more.  I don’t know if it was the desperate look on our faces but Rob & Mairead generously offered for us to stay for a while and, well, five weeks later and here we still are!  Pat’s been doing some work building a mezzanine floor in their huge shed, while Oliver and I have been doing mostly indoor stuff but also getting the polytunnel vegie area ready for winter.  I’ll write more about Bohey in the next post but suffice to say we feel utterly comfortable here.  And the Guinness is good.

 

Bra and surrounds

More on this later...

Article for Slow Food's Snail Pace magazine

Slow food producers are wonderful people to hang out with.  Usually they have become a producer of good, clean and fair food as a result of a long-standing fascination for a particular food, or a desire to satisfy their yearning for right livelihood, ecological and/or social integrity.

However, what I like about them is their passion and creativity.  I like that many of them are risk-takers and rugged individualists, with questioning minds and a penchant for challenging the status quo.  I’m attracted to the artistic energy they put into their food and the depth of connection with their raw ingredients, animals, plants or soil.  I love that they live for what they do.  I could go on and on.

What I couldn’t say about Slow Food producers is that I love their ability to accurately fill out forms, balance the books, calculate exactly the amount of tax they owe, or memorise food safety regulations.  For most of my artisanal food producer friends, those aspects of their enterprise are avoided for as long as possible and finally approached with reluctance, even fear.  It’s not that they intentionally set out to break rules; it’s just not in their make-up for them to do paperwork.  I know this intimately because I married one.

My husband and I have been operating a farm in the Sunshine Coast hinterland producing a range of organic dairy products, beef, eggs and poultry.  A driving force of the farm was our quest for the best quality food possible.  So what constitutes the best quality milk and eggs?  And how do you produce it consistently?  And how do you do it in such a way that builds up fertility in the soil, ensures animal well-being, minimises harmful impacts on the environment and still makes a modest living?

Perhaps we were naïve in that we didn’t ask: how do we meet all our statutory obligations and still get seven hours sleep per night?  Followed by: how do we do all of the above and sustain the passion and artistic juices for producing good quality food?

I wonder if the ‘art’ part of artisanal is fully appreciated.  Producing Slow Food is an art.  If that artistic expression were in the form of a beautiful oil painting or marble sculpture, would society still expect so much left-brain activated compliance?  Did Van Gogh do his own books?  I reckon not.

In Australia many small-scale food producers I know complain about the amount of time and energy they must expend on compliance and, in particular:

• unwarranted or disproportionate application of regulations compared with assessed risk;
• pedantic or inconsistent interpretation of regulations;
• overlap (or even contradiction) of requirements from various agencies.

There is a strong feeling that small-scale food production is being regulated out of existence.

Which is why I embarked on a fascinating journey to look at what other countries are doing to support their artisanal and small-scale food producers in relation to their regulatory obligations.

To assist in the journey I was fortunate to be awarded a Fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, which funded me to travel this year to a number of Slow Food events in the USA, Ireland and, finally, Terra Madre in Italy, where I joined the Australian delegation (Pat came as an observer).

Other contributors will have waxed lyrical about the awesome event in Turin.  Although I found it overwhelming in its size and scope, I loved meeting producers from other countries and wish I’d stepped out of my comfort zone to initiate more conversations, especially with delegates from non-English speaking countries.  (By the way, a tip for future Terra Madre delegates: make sure you take a small photo album of your enterprise and/or activities in your region – it’s an invaluable tool when conversation is restricted.)  Despite the language barriers, I’ll return home with a sense of international camaraderie.

Meanwhile, my husband and I are questioning how we can continue to make a living out of small-scale farming.  It is not just about sales: like many producers, we know the support is out there and I’m sure our customers – and co-producers – would urge us to continue.  Sales alone might nourish the bottom line but do they nourish the spirit?

I’ll be writing a report on the findings of my Fellowship project, which I hope to share with Slow Food members.  One initiative that appeals immediately is the establishment of Artisanal Food Forums, whereby representatives from various food sectors (e.g. dairy, cured meats, seafood) meet with the key regulatory stakeholders (in particular, food safety) to discuss issues and explore solutions.  The key to the success of this, I imagine, would be appropriate and skilled facilitation, coupled with sound legal and financial advice.

I can’t think of a better way for Slow Food convivia in Australia to actively support their food producers and preserve production of local food that is good, clean and fair.

Terra Madre 2008

Terra Madre 2008: we came, we saw, we conquered.  What an event!  The opening ceremony in Turin (Torino, Italy) on Thursday night (23^rd of October) was awesome and inspirational, with music and theatre wrapped around lots of words – some wise and wonderful, some more easily measured by quantity rather than quality.

The next four days offered many experiences: from the Earth Workshops to the Taste Workshops to the talks at the two Sala; from hobnobbing it at the massive Parmigiano-Reggiano stand at Salone del Gusto to savouring slivers of Presidia cheese from South America; meeting people from around the globe, some with cultures similar to our own and similar stories to tell about their triumphs and their struggles, and some with life experiences that we can (thankfully) only try to imagine.

The first commitment, after the Opening Ceremony, was the Australian regional meeting at 10am on the 24^th of October.  It was rather a strange affair, with just a few pre-determined speakers and everyone else listening passively.  No issues, joint projects, desired outcomes, future agenda…  Many of the Australian delegates were staying at the same venue and therefore had time to connect on the hour-each-way bus trip to the conference venue, so perhaps some of this ground was covered at another time.  I wondered if we had made the right choice to stay closer to the conference venue (about a two kilometre walk each way, which was actually a great way to gear up beforehand and relax afterward).

After the regional meeting, I stepped out of my comfort zone and introduced myself to a couple of delegates, and what an interesting bunch they were.  After five weeks in non-English-speaking countries, it was great to talk Australian!  Over the next few days it was a relief to meet up occasionally with those familiar faces but I was still surprised at how easy it was for people to disappear into the masses.  I looked for the other Noosa convivium delegates to no avail.

The conference program was full and varied, with a selection of workshops under several themes presented at set times over the next three days, including:

The Future of the Climate and Food

Following the Manifesto on the Future of Food and Manifesto on the Future of Seeds, the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, created by the Tuscany Regional Authority by Vandana Shiva, now presents the Manifesto of Climate Change and the Future of Food Security. This essential document sums up the main problems and offers potential solutions to turn the tides.

MARKETS – Fewer intermediaries, more trust

Farmers’ markets and other forms of direct sale. In collaboration with CEFA, FAIRTRADE, EU.

MARKETS – Indications of origin

Geographic Indications (GIs) such as Darjeeling Tea, Pampas meat, Basmati rice, and Parmigiano cheese embody unique expressions of culture, tradition, and place. Yet, some GIs succeed spectacularly while others fail miserably. Explore what does and what does not work. In collaboration with Rimisp - Latin American Center for Rural Development.

EDUCATION – Learning communities

Educational experiences in creating an agroecological culture. Comparison and presentation of international educational projects.

NEW NETWORKS – Youth, food, agriculture

Presentation of the Terra Madre youth network.

PRODUCTS – Fish: transform and preserve

Small fishing communities are even more vulnerable than agricultural communities. In situations where fish resources are already heavily exploited or compromised, alternative strategies are needed. Transforming and preserving products is a way of adding value to a product which is not easy to manage in terms of income and can create new opportunities and skills in local areas.

The common thread was, of course, good food – or more specifically, high-quality food grown and prepared ethically, carefully, cleanly and fairly, and shared in the spirit of conviviality and nourishment.

The planning for Terra Madre involved a huge amount of logistical manoeuvring.  Participants from 1,652 food communities representing 153 countries converged on two principal venues – the Palasport Olimpico, where the opening and closing ceremonies were held, and the Lingotto Oval, where Terra Madre was held.  The Oval was linked via a crowded corridor to Salone del Gusto (the international food fair), which was held in the Lingotto Pavilions, otherwise known as the old Fiat factory.  Fiat still has their head office at Lingotto but, sadly, the manufacturing operations have been shipped overseas (presumably where labour is cheaper and production costs are lower, but it doesn’t seem right, does it?).

Many of the delegates were from Western Europe.  Of the delegates from the other developed countries, most (like us) did not need permission to enter Italy for up to three months.  However, the real challenge lay in getting the delegates from undeveloped countries – especially complicated places like Iran and Afghanistan – out of their country and into Italy on temporary visas.  Some delegates were only granted visas in the last week before the convergence happened.  I suspect a few might have missed out.

All in all, at Terra Madre there were 7,000 delegates (including ‘youth’ and cooks/chefs), observers, media, organisers and people presenting the food of the Presidia, which is a bank of ‘endangered’ foods from around the world.  Many of these foods are in danger of being lost because the ingredients are becoming scarce (specific breeds of animals or plant species are no longer found easily), or the production techniques are not being transferred.

According to Slow Food:

·      75% of European food product diversity has been lost since 1900

·      93% of American food product diversity has been lost in the same time period

·      33% of livestock varieties have disappeared or are near disappearing

·      30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct in the last century, and one more is lost every six hours

“The Presidia sustain quality production at risk of extinction, protect unique regions and ecosystems, recover traditional processing methods, safeguard native breeds and local plant varieties.  The Presidia directly involve producers, offer technical assistance to improve production quality, organize exchanges among different countries, provide new market outlets (both locally and internationally).”

Not all the Presidia food was to my taste – some of the cheeses were so aged or mouldy that I didn’t enjoy the smell, let alone the flavour – and some of the cured meats seemed too rare to be safe.  Fancy me being concerned about food safety!  One cheese, called ‘cheese in a sack’ (because it is) from Bosnia, looked really interesting: a mass of crumbly curds inside a dried sheep’s stomach.  The sack was about the size of a large European pillow and greying yellow in colour.  I suspect there would be a minimum level of local gut flora required to adequately digest these foods.

I got hooked on a smoked cheese that was made in spindle-like shapes with a pattern of grooves around them, but I’m ashamed to say I didn’t get the name or origin.  Smaller, flatter versions of this cheese, about the size of an oval business card, were being heated over a cast iron hotplate and emitting the most mouth-watering aroma. Customers were eagerly buying up all the ones I left behind and the stall was having trouble keeping up supply, probably due in part to the fact that they were one of the few hot items available at the Presidia.  The cooked cheeses were being served on tiny moulded cardboard plates with a toothpick through the middle – all the packaging used at Terra Madre and Salone del Gusto was 100% recyclable.

Another hard-to-walk-past Presidia food was liquid chocolate made from South American cacao mixed with some secret ingredients (I remember that one of them was chilli), which was being slowly agitated in a huge steel container and cycled through a fountain.  The stallholder would take the money and then interrupt the chocolate flow with a small paper cup.  Although liquid, the chocolate was too thick and rich to be drunk and so it was served with a small spoon: one tiny cup satisfied the three of us.  Later I raved about this nectar to a chef, who admitted that he had taken his cup to a stall serving semolina pancakes and another serving something akin to ricotta and had combined the three in a taste sensation verging on orgasmic.

By the way, during one of our brave explorations of the chaos of Salone del Gusto, we stumbled on a stall selling porchetta, carved straight off the huge hot roast.  On our first visit we bought it served in panini but a couple of days later, when I managed to find the stall again, I bought enough for dinner (about €10 worth).  Then, as the journey back to the Oval, I pulled lumps of seasoned meat and crackling straight from the packet, the juices sensuously dribbling down my fingers and hand.  Nigella Lawson, eat your heart out.

One of the feats of Terra Madre was the successful and inclusive system of communication.  How do you run a gathering of several thousand people from around the world, in six or eight different languages, with simultaneous workshops and meetings under the same cavernous roof?  When we arrived at the Australian regional meeting on the first day, I tried to convince the volunteer on the door that we didn’t need translation as it was all going to be in English.  But she insisted we go to the desk where the headphones and receivers were being handed out.  The reason became obvious when we returned to the meeting: the speaker was inaudibly talking into a microphone and all participants were receiving the audio via their headsets.  And so, later when I was wandering around the venue in between commitments, I could look in on six concurrent workshops, each with hundreds of people intently watching the speaker(s) in near total silence and periodically bursting into laughter or applause.  It was quite surreal.

At subsequent workshops, the ingenuity of this system shone through – it didn’t matter if the line-up of speakers included four or six different languages because as long as we had our headsets tuned into channel 2 (English) we would hear English either as spoken by the speaker or as relayed by one of the translators, who sat in booths at the back of each meeting room.  Thus the translators worked doubly hard: if, as at the last session, there were an English as well as an Italian speaker, the English/Italian translator would translate the English speaker into Italian for channel 1 and later translate the Italian speaker into English for channel 2.  I don’t know if there were any translators with more than two languages under their belt, but they would have been worth their weight in gold.

One-to-one communication was a little more challenging and fraught with misunderstandings.  When ordering food, the best method was pointing, holding up the requisite number of fingers and nodding (with a smile).  Thankfully, most stallholders understood a little Italian (certainly numbers from one to ten).  When trying to talk to other delegates, it was a little trickier.  Many of them spoke at least two languages, and I felt really inadequate.  We had a great time talking to a couple of delegates from Benin (a happy African country between Togo and Namibia, apparently with a stable democratic government).  Being an ex-French colony, their first language is a French hybrid but they learn English for trade and international communication, and I think they also have at least one African dialect under their belt.  Oliver was a great conversation-starter.

I felt sorry for some of the delegates – the ones we saw being ‘mothered’ by a volunteer obviously assigned to stay with them.  These were mainly peasants who had never been out of their country before, and possibly never out of their region or village.  They looked like frightened rabbits and I wonder if they would have welcomed an approach from us clumsy antipodeans.

Going to Terra Madre was a good lesson for me in managing my expectations.  I didn’t get to meet as many people as I thought I would and the myriad offers to visit delegate’s farms didn’t materialise.  And then I ended up bumping into some people several times – like a wonderful woman, Anza Muenchow, from Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington State, who I first stood next to in the queue for the toilet and then banged into five subsequent times (no, not always at the toilet).  Celestine Prophecies would say that we were destined to teach each other something, and maybe we did, or are yet to.  Anza gave us a DVD on food production in the north pacific coast region, which made me wonder if we should be exploring that area next…

In between commitments at Terra Madre, I made a few excursions next door to the food fair.  I knew Salone del Gusto was going to be big but the scale was still shocking.  Imagine aisle after aisle of stalls – several hundred in all – and each beautifully decorated and throbbing with custom: 180,000 visitors over the five days!  A journey through Salone del Gusto was a journey to the roots of food and through the flavors of countries in all five continents: Italy, Great Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Japan, Argentina, Mexico, USA, Philippines, Norway, The Netherlands, Brazil, Guatemala, Slovakia, Poland, Colombia, the West Indies, Australia and many others besides.  The Italian market had themed lanes:

• ·      Fruit, Vegetable and Spice Lane
(fruit and vegetables, spices, herbs, vinegar, tea, infusions)
• ·      Cheese Lane
(cheese and dairy products)
• ·      Cured Meat Lane
• ·      Oil and Condiments Lane
(oil, condiments and pickles)
• ·      Grain Lane
(cereals, pasta, bread)
• ·      Meat Lane
• ·      Fish Lane
• ·      Sweet and Spirits Lane
(desserts, chocolate, honey, jams and preserves, spirits and liqueurs)

Plus, of course a special space for beer.

I took the opportunity to find some more material (in English!) about Parmigiana-Reggiano at the massive (separate) stand.  By a stroke of good luck, the President of the Consortium was there, and he kindly gave me almost half an hour of his time.  He endorsed the information I had that Parmigiana-Reggiano was threatened by diminishing production of approved milk.  We talked a lot about his role, on behalf of the Consortium, in defending Parmigiana-Reggiano from imitations and from the WTO’s efforts to allow those imitations to be given equal marketing opportunities in Europe.

I did a little more digging and found a 2005 WTO paper that outlined the debate about GIs (geographic indication: limiting use of a food’s name to products from within a specified location), expressly in relation to cheese.  The paper summarised concerns of the International Dairy Foods Association, which says that enforcement of the GI system (i.e. relabelling of non-compliant products) would mean:

• a loss of access to established product names;
• consumers would have to be convinced that the ‘new’ product is the same quality as the cheese that they have been buying for decades;
• millions of dollars in packaging costs and marketing to preserve and regain sales.

I wondered why an international association should be so concerned about wanting to market cheeses made in one country with the same name as a cheese made in another country.  And then I read that the IDFA is “the US dairy processors collective voice in Washington, D.C., throughout the country and in the international arena”.  IDFA members are responsible for more than 85% of the total volume of milk, cultured products, cheese, and ice cream and frozen desserts produced in the United States.  One of them (and I suspect the largest) is Kraft, which has been producing and marketing Parmesan cheese for more than six decades, and Feta cheese for twenty years.

We’re not talking small fry here: according to the paper, in 2002 the US cheese industry was valued at US$13.7 billion (at wholesale).  In 2003, the US produced:

·      2.806 billion lbs of Mozzarella

·      676 million lbs of Cream Cheese/Neufchatel

·      283 million lbs of Provolone

·      264 million lbs of Swiss (Emmental)

·      127 million lbs of Parmesan

 This is not necessarily good cheese, but lots of cheese nevertheless (the hoary chestnut of quantity vs quality again).  And that’s not counting all the cheeses whose names are not in question.  Which brings us to one of the IDFA’s arguments: that the GI system restricts access to names that are considered generic (by whom?).  I must admit that before I went to Parma I didn’t understand that Parmesan referred to a specific cheese made in a specific region.  Imagine the consequences of the GI system being extended to cover ‘cheddar’!

The IDFA also argues that the EU’s own internal GI system (separate to the WTO system) is faulty.  At the time of writing the paper, the EU protected:

·      2,100 types of wines and spirits

·      600 foods, including 149 cheeses

·      63 meat-based products

·      16 types of table olives

 This inhibits US feta and Parmesan manufacturers wishing to export their cheese to the EU.  However, the EU has problems enforcing this protection within its own member countries.  For example, Germany is Europe's leading producer of Parmesan after Italy, and the largest producer of Feta is not a Greek company: the Danes manufacture most of the Feta in the EU.

Essentially, like all patents and other trademarks, it appears the rules are only adhered to when the money is spent on defending them.  According to a 2003 Time article, the issue gets even more complicated in the dark and murky world of litigation:

“To this day, the Parma ham from Parma can't call itself that in Canada, because a food company called Maple Leaf Meats registered the Parma name as its own back in 1971. When the Parma consortium began exporting directly to Canada in the mid-1990s, Maple Leaf Meats sued and won. The Italian consortium now sells its ham in Canada under the name "the original ham."”

As a consumer, I want to feel confident that the food inside the package I am picking up at the market is what the label says it is.  While the name is important for initial recognition, if the qualities of that food meet my expectations, I don’t care what it is called.  But I think it is fair that a food made in a time-honoured way, and within the designated region of production, should have first rights on the traditional name for that food.  I certainly don’t believe Kraft should be allowed to call the stuff they sell in green cans, ‘Parmesan’ (perhaps they could try, as my father calls it, “the-scrapings-from-between-your-toes”).

Back at Salone del Gusto, at the large Ireland stand, I caught up with Giana Ferguson from Gubbeen Farmhouse and spoke at length to Darina Allen of Ballymaloe House and Cookery School.  You gotta love the Irish passion and sharp wit.  All that Guinness, perhaps?  Giana and Davina’s enthusiasm for local, slow food almost seeps from their pores.  Davina and I talked about Codex Alimentarius – almost in hushed tones – and the implications for food in the future.

“The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by FAO and WHO to develop food standards, guidelines and related texts such as codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme. The main purposes of this Programme are protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and non-governmental organizations.”

For example, one of the first Codex standards, established in 1978 (and revised in 1999 and 2006) is the Standard for Cheese.  While this standard is not specifically referred to in the Australian Food Safety Standards (FSANZ), it forms the basis for international cheese production, at least for those countries that are members of the World Health Organisation.  Below is an excerpt:

CODEX STAN A-6
7.1 NAME OF THE FOOD
The name of the food shall be cheese.  However, the word “cheese” may be omitted in the designation of an individual cheese variety reserved by a Codex standard for individual cheeses, and, in the absence thereof, a variety name specified in the national legislation of the country in which the product is sold, provided that the omission does not create an erroneous impression regarding the character of the food.

Sounds kind of Monty Python-esque to me: “The name of the food shall be cheese, and cheese shall be the name…”.  The problem with the Codex is that it makes it easier for those with an interest in food as a commodity to argue for homogenisation of production, and therefore more scope for global trade.  It is the Codex that appears to be the cause of the gradual extinction of local and traditional food, and by inference, good quality food.

Davina introduced me to Donal Lehane, managing Director of Food-NPD, a research and innovation centre at the Waterford Institution of Technology:

“Food-NPD develops, manufactures and commercialises new lifestyle foods that satisfy emerging gaps in the market. Food-NPD helps to address the new health and nutrition concerns resulting from busy lifestyles, changing work patterns, different demographics and new leisure pursuits. Examples of innovation include development of dashboard dining, children’s lunch boxes, snacks for the elderly, healthy alternatives to today's fast foods.”

Dashboard dining?  Anyway, I asked him for his thoughts on regulatory impediments for small-scale food producers in Ireland.  Donal asserted that the biggest compliance problem facing producers of animal products was dealing with the veterinarians – peak regulators who didn’t understand food and food production, and who have little sympathy for the challenges facing small business owners.  His view was that BSE (mad cows disease), avian influenza and other bio-security threats have handed unprecedented power to the vets, and it was causing terrible problems all through the EU.

The final session of Terra Madre was held on Monday (27^th of October), when many of the delegates had departed.  A shame really because for me it was the best session of the lot and addressed issues about food that are so dear to me, being about the spirituality of food production and consumption.

Carlo Petrini joined Enzo Bianchi, the prior of an Italian monastic community, and Satish Kumar, disciple of Gandhi, founding director of Schumacher College in the UK and editor of Resurgence magazine.

They had a wonderful discussion on the concept of ‘sacred’ (defined by Bianchi as ‘something to be respected’).  It was agreed that our loss of respect for where food has come from (mother earth = Terra Madre), and for those who have grown, processed and prepared it, has meant that eating for many is now merely an act of ingesting fuel.

“Why do monks pray before meals?” Bianchi asked. “Not so much to give thanks, but to emphasize the sacredness of the moment and create a distance between themselves and food. We are accustomed to eating in silence but our meals are a masterpiece of communication.”

Kumar spoke about the connection between food and Indian philosophy.  He went on to describe Gandhi’s relationship with food and how he taught that loving food is ‘an expression of gratitude’.  He blamed economists for creating a ‘fear of scarcity, which doesn’t exist in nature’.

I particularly resonated (excuse the pun) with Bianchi’s explanation of why we ‘clink’ our glasses of wine before drinking.  The origin of this act was not, he declared, to join in wishing the other good health or good digestion or whatever.  It was, rather, to complete the stimulation of the senses to ensure a fully present and respectful experience.

He explained that when we bring a glass of wine to our mouths, we first look at it and admire the colour, viscosity and clarity.  We then bring it closer and the fumes fill our nasal passages, exciting our memories of fruits, spices and the rest.  As the first sip touches our tongue, we relish the sensation of the cool glass against our lips, the temperature of the wine and the feeling of it passing over our tongue, washing against our gums and bathing our palate.  We then taste the wine and savour the initial flavour, explore the different experiences at various points of our tongue and throat, marvel as the flavour changes over time, and finally swallow.

The only sense thus not stimulated is hearing (especially for monks eating in silence).  And so a ‘clink’ of glasses wakes our ears and signals, if you like, that a sacred act is about to be committed and to encourage us to be fully present, grateful, respectful and convivial.

The session concluded with a call for us to rediscover the sacredness of being at the table and sharing food together.  Hear, hear!

More on Parma...

One of the most enjoyable aspects of living in central Parma is the late afternoon ‘promenade’ that seems to involve all of the city folk.  Thousands of people take to the streets and amble along, chatting and smoking, and window-shopping (which makes it easier to check out their reflection in the shop windows).  Older people, dressed to the nines, holding hands or arm-in-arm, amble along and stop to chat to their friends and relatives.  What makes it really wonderful is that there are few cars – the whole of the inner city area, as in most large cities in Italy and France, is restricted to residents’ cars.  (There is not much off-street parking either, and parking on the street is prohibited in the central area – we had to park our hire car in a private garage about five minutes walk from the hotel).  What little traffic there is carefully negotiates the pedestrians and the sidewalk cafes, and does not assume right of way.  It’s wonderful.

The main hazard is the hundreds of bicycles.  Everyone rides a bike: we saw great-grandmothers, businessmen in suits, women dressed to the nines (even in high-heels and short skirts), some with a child on the back, some with a child on the front as well, all pedalling along, balancing bags of shopping, mobile phones and cigarettes.

I felt completely safe wandering around, even at night on my own.  Periodically we would hear a bunch of approaching teenagers and brace ourselves for the kind of yobbo aggression that we have come to expect from that age group in Australia.  But instead they would invariably be chatting or comparing clothes and sometimes even bursting into song – with harmonies!

Meanwhile, at dusk the sidewalk cafes were full of locals taking aperitifs before continuing the journey home or to a restaurant.  There was no intention to get drunk or compete with each other, no ugly sexual overtones.  Just gentle people enjoying each other’s company.  It was so relaxed and therefore relaxing.   We thought this ambience was something special that coincided with the Verdi Festival (and the Caravaggio exhibition), but everyone we spoke to said that Parma was like this all the time – lots happening and very cosmopolitan.

Under our window, on the steps of the Baptistery or at the corner of the Piazzo Duomo, we were serenaded every day by a rotation of two busking piano accordionists.  One, in particular, was so talented that I raced to the window every time.  He had a dazzling repertoire, which included a Bach fugue, several Gershwin pieces and, most gobsmackingly, Flight of the Bumblebee – at top speed.  His accordion was massive and must have weighed 20+ kilograms, but he wielded it like a flute.  Each piece was played with a base line and chords using his left hand, and at least one melody and harmony line with his right.  As far as I could tell, he was note-perfect.  I don’t know what his average daily takings were (he collected it in a battered taped-up yoghurt container) but I hope he was well compensated.  We donated a small superannuation over the two weeks.

Competing for our attention on the steps of the Baptistery most evenings was a couple of young lovers, canoodling and snuggling in the romantic late afternoon light.  It was just too, too perfect.

To be continued...

Cheese and Ham

It is written that Parma is the food capital of northern Italy.  We haven’t ventured outside the region to get an idea of whether other towns lay the same claim or even match Parma’s fierce pride in its local produce.  But it is certainly true that the Emilia-Romagna region produces internationally regarded foods, specifically Parmigiano-Reggiano (aka parmesan) cheese and Parma ham.  These two foods are perfect examples of a speciality that is in great demand, and the techniques that contribute to its uniqueness broadly celebrated, and yet is under threat from the homogenisation of our food and the insidious dismantling of localisation.

 

So on Friday (17^th of October) we felt very fortunate to go on a guided tour that showed how these foods are produced.  By the way Wikipedia offers the following clarification:

“Parmigiano is simply the Italian adjective for Parma; the French version, Parmesan, is used in the English language. The term Parmesan is also loosely used as a common term for cheeses imitating true Parmesan cheese, especially outside Europe; within Europe, the Parmesan name is classified as a protected designation of origin (or DOP).”

Our first stop was at a small Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP producer.  The owners, the Araldi family, live near a little town called San Michele di Gatti near Felino in the Province of Parma, about half an hour south of Parma city.  They produce perhaps eight (albeit it large – see below) cheeses per day: this is handcrafted, small-scale, high quality cheese production – the type that has connoisseurs drooling and premium prices being exchanged.

 

The family, I guess, has been making Parmigiano-Reggiano for generations and by all indications (and my inexperienced palate) the quality of their cheeses is very high.  Our guide, Laura, gave us a detailed talk on how the cheese is made – the process is surprisingly simple – and we saw batches at different stages.  Unfortunately they had a mechanical problem that meant we couldn’t see the day’s milk being curdled in the vast copper vats.

 

The wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano are enormous: the final products are roughly 500mm in diameter (although they look larger than that to me), 250mm high and 39kg on maturity!  I don’t know the weight of the fresh cheeses but I suspect they dry out during their maturation, which means they must initially be 45+kg.  Sobering thought: they used to do the trimming by hand, requiring them to lift and turn each wheel manually.  Now they have a machine for that job, which I think is a good example of appropriate technology being used to support a traditional process.

 

Here are some facts and figures (from the website of the Consortium of producers – Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano, which is excellent and well worth a look):

•       16 litres (of milk) to make 1kg
•       550 litres to make one wheel
•       20-24 average ageing of the wheels (in months)
•       39 average weight of a wheel (in Kg)
•       3,080,605 number of wheels produced in the 2007
•       18% export volume / total production

 

Production of Parmigiano-Reggiano is carefully monitored by the Consortium and also, of course, by the food safety mob (perhaps through the Consortium – I didn’t have this clarified).  The Consortium checks to see that the ingredients, production methods and final product conform to the prescriptive and very detailed standards, which must be followed in order to have one of the prized stamps of Parmigiano-Reggiano bestowed upon it.

“The Consortium's tasks were (and are): the defence and protection of the Designation of Origin, the facilitation of trade and consumption by promoting every initiative aimed at safeguarding the typicality and unique features of the product.”

 

Anything less is rejected and sold as an inferior (but still pretty damn good) cheese that obviously attracts a lower price from the wholesalers/retailers.  Little is wasted – even the trimmings are processed and sold as ‘ready to use’ pre-packaged grated Parmesan cheese – and each individual cheese is nurtured for obvious reasons.  A top class cheese aged for 30 months will retail for at least €14 per kg, making the wheel potentially worth €500 or A$1,000 (we saw 24-month old cheese selling at the market for around €11 per kg).

 

At the end of the tour, Mamma Araldi gave us a taste of 12-month old cheese versus 36-month old cheese, and the difference was stark.  I’ll try to describe it but you really had to be there: the flavour of the 12-month old was, as expected, mild in flavour but quite aromatic, surprisingly creamy and with a lingering taste mid-palate.  It tastes almost earthy.  Oliver enjoyed this cheese and I could imagine it in a panini sandwich or eaten by the chunk.

 

The grandfather cheese, however, was an altogether different experience.  The dry, crumbly Parmesan we buy in Australia in 200g plastic-coated wedges is a pathetic experience compared to this, which was more crumbly in texture than its younger counterpart.  The flavour was rich and complex, and the aroma flooded the nasal passages.  Rather like the effect of holding a matured red wine in the mouth, the flavour changed and was still lingering on the back of the tongue for minutes afterward.

 

Oliver didn’t like it, which was great because I got to have his share.  No sandwiches for this cheese: it is for savouring and enjoying in its own right.  Parmigiano-Reggiano is a staple in the diet of people in this region, and for good reason.  It is an excellent nutrient-dense and easily digestible food, which means Weston A. Price himself would have recommended it, I’m sure.

 

“The protein in Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese has two particular characteristics; it is rich in essential amino acids that in turn are easy to digest. Because of the activity of protein enzymes coming from milk and natural whey starter, the casein is broken down into smaller fragments, as it will happen in stomach, so that aged Parmigiano-Reggiano created by this ‘pre digestive’ activity is more easily digested and absorbed by the body. 
Beside this the combination of these amino acids with those contained in wheat supply the full gamut required by the body. 
The degradation of casein during cheese ageing, also reduces a part of it to specific bio active peptides that activate very specific functions either on the gut or secondary organs. 

Bio active peptides potentially control various bodily processes by:

•        stimulation of the immune system;
•        antibacterial activity;
•        enhancing of calcium absorption;
•        control of blood pressure.”

 

Interesting reference to the combination with the amino acids contained in wheat: science once again proving what tradition has prescribed for generations.  Thus, the Emilio-Romagnan’s staple of naturally fermented bread, pre-digested Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and well-cured Parma ham has sound nutritional roots.

 

It’s also interesting to consider the future of Parmigiano-Reggiano should the politicians have their way.  How tragic that food with such a long and glorious history should be at the mercy of the short-term goals of 20^th century economic rationalism.

 “When it is said that Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese has been "a great cheese for at least eight centuries", it is not only highlighting its ancient origin. Indeed, it means pointing out that this cheese today is still identical to how it was eight centuries ago, having the same appearance and the same extraordinary fragrance, made in the same way, in the same places, with the same expert ritual gestures.”

 

For example, the approved production methods specify that in relation to feeding the cows that supply the milk that supplies the cheese producers:

•        at least 35% of dry matter must be supplied by forage produced on the farm;
•        at least 75% of dry matter must be supplied by forage coming from the Region of Origin.

“Based on the previous clause, a farm is considered suitable if it has an area/cattle ratio (UAA) of at least 0.33 ha per lactation cow in the plains and 0.50 ha in the mountains. Should the farm area be less, the farmer must provide the necessary documentation proving the origin of the forage purchased.”

 

This makes the cheese extra special because currently only a small percentage of Italian bovine milk is produced from cows on pasture.  The challenge is this: according to Laura, the European Union has capped the quantity of milk produced in Italy and, consequently, Italian politicians have signed off on the requirement for Italy to purchase its additional milk needs from France.  Thus, should the quantity of suitable Italian milk diminish, the level of production of true formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano will dramatically fall.

 

Another threat is that due to global warming and other key influences, the price of suitable milk is going up, but the price of cheese is not rising in correspondence.  I’m not sure why this is so, possibly it’s a consequence of marketplace dealings, where products are often pre-sold.  This means the producers, who are not necessarily the suppliers of the raw milk, are bridging the price gap.  This is not sustainable.

 

It is ironic, then (from my perspective) that the future of Parmigiano-Reggiano probably lies in the rigorous application and defence of the standards that make this cheese so special, together with careful political lobbying and consumer education.  Having argued for years against external regulation, I can now see that third party accreditation is beneficial in reference to the quality of the end product, more so than its safety.  There is a strong case for returning to the guild approach, where quality is determined and prescribed by those who produce it, and thereby recognising the art of good quality food production (‘artisanal’ in its truest sense, instead of just a marketing term).

 

This then brings me back, once again, to the thorny issue of quality – what is it?  Can it truly be objective or is it by necessity subjective when applied to food?  How can we include in standards references to ‘mouth feel’ and ‘crumble sensation’?  How can we quantify, measure and standardise the outcomes of a consortium tester smelling the aromas being released from the carved horse tibia he uses to probe hams before determining their grading?

 

If taste, texture, mouth-feel and other sensual qualities are not valued, the arguments for standardisation of food according to economic criteria become stronger: the safety of the food and its price become the over-riding factors.  I am beginning to appreciate why Carlo Petrini has asked that discussions of quality be included in the curriculum of the undergraduate course at the University of Gastronomic Sciences.  This discussion is critical to the future production of good quality food.  Without it we may as well be eating gruel.

 

Our next destination was a large producer of Parma Ham – the Conti factory in the hills behind Langhirano.  Here we experienced the relationship between an operation’s size and its concern for health & safety: after signing a liability disclaimer, we donned disposable coats, hats and shoe covers before entering the factory.  The sheer scale of their production was overwhelming.  Imagine room after room of hundreds of hams at different stages of curing, including one special room with timber rather than metal racks, which housed possibly two thousand top quality hams.  Each ham will be sold either whole or in two halves for many hundreds of dollars and the factory holds the best quality ones for more than 12 months – talk about appreciating assets!  I found it interesting that not only is the flavour standardised but also each ham looks exactly the same as its neighbour.  The visual effect was stunning.

 

From Wikipedia again:

“Prosciutto (pronounced "pro-shoo-toe") is the Italian word for ham. In English the word is almost always used for an aged, dry-cured, spiced Italian ham that is usually sliced thin and served without cooking. In Italian, however it's paramount to distinguish between "prosciutto crudo" (raw) and "prosciutto cotto" (cooked - which instead identifies the wet cured ham). The most renowned and pricy legs of "prosciutto" come from central and northern Italy (Tuscany and Emilia in particular), such as Prosciutto di Parma and Prosciutto di San Daniele.”

 

Like Parmigiano-Reggiano, Parma Ham is produced under strict guidelines specified by the Consortium, i.e. Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma, which has been established, in part, to protect from imitations this ancient food – references to ham production in this region date back to at least 2 BC!  I wonder if imitations were an issue back then: I suspect they are more an indicator of successful branding than of any problem with copying good food production practices.

 

However, the origin is especially important in this process: here the unique geographical makeup creates the perfect combination of temperature and humidity for optimum curing.

In a gentle landscape, with softly rolling hills, fields and farmsteads, the dry and sweet-smelling breezes from the Apennine mountains creating the perfect and unique environmental conditions for a natural “drying” of Parma Ham.

 

Even with today’s high-tech production, the hams are still naturally air-cured for a good part of the process: the buildings have specially designed windows covered with perforated slats to draw air in from the shady side.  This cool mountain air is part of the overall ‘terroire’, if you like: no other place in the world could obtain the unique Parma ham flavour (which makes imitations doubly offensive).

 

Laura explained that even factory curing, even though it is done in large, temperature-controlled rooms, is designed to mimic the traditional methods.  Pigs are traditionally slaughtered around the time of the harvest moon and so the factory schedules the hams to spend several weeks in conditions of lower temperature, higher humidity (winter) followed by several months of higher temperature, lower humidity (spring/summer) followed by a period of cellaring.  The final product is concentrated in both flavour and size: the hams lose about 28% of their initial weight.

 

During our travels in this region, we haven’t seen any obvious evidence of pigs, which made the sight of so many hind legs hanging in row after row almost surreal.  In 2007, the Consortium says that 9.5 million Parma hams were produced, so somewhere there are this year’s 4.75 million Parma pigs lurking around a corner we haven’t yet turned.

 

Apparently the pigs are raised elsewhere, but still under very strict guidelines in relation to their breed, feed, final weight and slaughter.

The secret of Parma Ham begins with careful and accurate selection of the raw materials: the pigs.  The Large White, Landrance and Duroc breeds are used and the mean weight per batch must be 160Kg (+/- 10%).  Only castrated males are used in the production. The feeding of the swine and the breeding techniques are regulated to ensure a heavy pig with a moderate daily growth in an excellent state of health.

 

It’s interesting that one of the traditional foods for Parma ham pigs – and another factor that would have contributed to the celebrated terroire – is whey, which comes from guess-which-process.

 

Factory tour over, we retired to a restaurant on the other side of Langhirano for a ‘degustazione’ of products we had just seen being made.  The restaurant is part of a larger enterprise, Ariola, where they make wine and various other products, but through which the Conti hams are distributed – I suspect we would not have managed to taste such a prized food otherwise.

 

We were first served a platter of the said ham, together with a selection of pickled, oiled and dried vegetables such as onion, capsicum and tomato, and accompanied by the ubiquitous basket of country bread and the house sparkling white wine (I didn’t catch the name but it was excellent).

 

I’ll have a go at describing the meat but, again, you really had to be there (better still: shout yourself 50g at the best importing delicatessen you can find).  It’s so unbelievably delicate, a quality that is aided by being cut into paper-thin slices.  The texture verges on melt-in-the-mouth but with a bit of ‘chew’ to give it a pleasant mouth feel.  I thought it was a bit like very thin fruit leather.  The flavour is surprisingly aromatic and sweet but also quite strong – you don’t need a lot to experience Parma ham (which is a good thing if you are concerned about cost: the top shelf ham retails around here for about €50 per kg).  This is a food to savour and swoon over.

 

The next course consisted of other meats, including coppa, which is cured pork neck meat – a similar but stronger flavour and more robust texture than Parma ham.  Some people here prefer coppa, perhaps in the same way that some back home prefer a solid t-bone to a tender eye-fillet.

 

Next we were treated to some 30-month old Parmigiano-Reggiano served in big crumbles and drizzled with 7-year old Balsamic vinegar.  This way of eating cheese was new to me but I’m sold.  Vinegar of this quality is unlike vinegar I’ve ever tasted – even the best Balsamic vinegar I’ve had in Australia seems rough, sour and raw in comparison.  This nectar was something quite different: very thick, so that large voluptuous drops fell from the pourer; sweet and aromatic; and with almost none of that sour, astringent effect on the palate.  I think it should be called something other than vinegar, because the two products are like chalk and cheese.

 

This second course was served with Ariola’s Lumbrusco Marcello, and I’m officially an addict.  The label describes the ‘colore’ as “rosso scuro, intenso” and the ‘sapore’ as “secco, corposo, fruttato”.  Yes, yes and yes.  It was a perfect accompaniment.

 

I love the way the Italians are so generous with their food.  We’ve found this in many places, with people offering us little extras – at no cost – because they want to share something their uncle makes, or because as visitors we MUST try it as part of our on-going regional/Italian education.  I don’t know whether it was included in the price of €20 per person but our host left us with not only the bottle of the preceding white wine but also the bottle of Lambrusco.  I think our cause was helped by us being the only ones in the restaurant and I guess he would have wasted the remnants, or drunk them himself.  So we unselfishly helped him out but probably shouldn’t have – I was not fully in control of my being on the journey home, a dangerous thing when travelling on the right (wrong) side of the road.  But what could we do?

 

I sincerely hope the respective Consortia continue to preserve the integrity of these wonderful foods and protect them from the rationale of shared resources, centralisation, free trade and other short-sighted economic policies.  I would also hope that should the wolf get too close to the door, we consumers (or ‘co-producers’) of these products would get up in arms and support any actions against the madness.  Governments have been dismissed on lesser matters.

12 Hours of Contrast

Wow!  What a day.  I’m still in shock at the contrasts in emotion and experience.  From some of the worst fear and panic I’ve ever felt, to pure bliss and wonder.

 

It was time to leave the land of croissants and dog shit.  Even though being by the ocean at Nice had offered a welcome relief to the dry landscapes of central France, Italy was calling from across the mountains.  But how to get there…  I think out of some sense of self-preservation I’d conveniently forgotten about the forthcoming perils of the train journey: my claustrophobia was not going to like what I had in store for us.  If only teleporter technology were freely available.

 

The Cote d’Azur, and the Ligurian coast, is a serious of bays separated by steep mountains, so travel of any kind, apart from upward, requires negotiating tunnels and bridges.  As the Genoan taxi driver declared, “This is Liguria: tunnels and bridges, tunnels and bridges….!”  My nightmare made real.

 

The train itself couldn’t have been more Italian – in our carriage one of the external doors wouldn’t close, which had set off an ear-splitting alarm.  I don’t know what was more concerning – that the alarm was screaming in our ears or that no one in charge seemed to be worried.  We sat with it all the way to the first station and then a huge bloke in a uniform came and gave the thing a good thump and the door closed and the alarm stopped.  Prego.

 

Even though it was a six-hour journey there was no dining car, so no food or water – ha ha, tricked you, said the universe – and the toilet in our carriage wouldn’t flush.  Everyone reacted to this differently: the Italians on the train just sat and bantered while the Americans listed all the problems and the Brits just looked lost.

 

About three hours into the journey, an American couple got up out of their seats further up the carriage and gently confronted us, claiming that we had their seats.  We compared tickets and it looked like we had been issued the same seats.  Now, who do you think should have moved?  Yes, after we’d relocated everything – six pieces of luggage, empty chip packets, laptop computer, son, packets of sandwiches, etc – they sat in our seats for five minutes and then realised that they actually should have been in the next carriage and off they toddled, seemingly oblivious to the chaos they had created.

 

Later, as if to emphasise the David Lynch-ness of the journey, a comical (Italian) chap came through the carriage with a three-wheeled cart complete with real bike bell and some awful sandwiches and, thank god, some bottled water.  The cart was hilarious – it was so top heavy that whenever he let go of the handlebar to reach for an item, the whole thing toppled over onto the nearest person’s shoulder or chairback.

 

The journey started easily enough, with short tunnels (ten seconds long at most) separated by the most gaspingly beautiful scenery, with twinkling azure (funny that) water lapping up against perfect villages and massive villas built right to the water’s edge.  It was like having a Hollywood set roll past the window for a couple of hours.

 

But then the tunnels got longer and longer and the panic started to kick in.  I know it’s crazy, this paranoia about being underground, but no amount of logic or rationale helps once the panic starts.  The thing is, I HATE BEING UNDERGROUND.  I hate not being able to see the sun and I hate the thought of not being able to get up to the surface quickly, when I want to.  It’s impossible to explain why I panic – it’s probably as much about the fear of the panic itself as anything – but I really believe humans are not supposed to be hanging out under several million tonnes of rock.  It’s just not in our genetic make-up and it feels wrong and I hate it.  The panic is my body’s double exclamation mark to that certainty.

 

So, what do you do when you are on an interminable train journey that is principally about rocketing under several million tonnes of rock at 100+ kilometres an hour, and the panic starts?  I don’t know either.  I tried counting (my usual trick) and I tried walking up and down the train carriages until I realised that people were looking at me not because I was out of my seat and therefore offered a welcome relief to the pitch black scenery but because I looked white-faced and deranged.

 

I tried Rescue Remedy, which I must say did help a bit: my heart rate dropped and the sweating eased off a bit.  I tried holding on to Pat’s hand until it went white, too.  I tried breathing deeply, chanting a mantra, thinking about Oliver’s birth, typing my travel notes and eating the aforementioned awful sandwiches.  I even tried to go to sleep (which I know is the bleedingly obvious solution but actually getting to sleep once the panic starts is nigh on impossible).  The next step, I guess, was to get Pat to punch me out.

 

The ABSOLUTE WORST part was coming in to a couple of the bigger towns/cities, such as Monaco, where the stations are underground.  This means that not only are you under several million tonnes of rock, but you are slowing down and then stopping.  At the back end of the train, where we were in first class (which didn’t offer much in the way of alternatives to the facilities in economy by the way), it was dark and cave-like even in the station.  Even writing this is putting my stomach in knots again.

 

I’ll drop the suspense: at Genoa I eventually found someone in a uniform, who told me that there were more long tunnels to come and that the train was delayed 25 minutes, so we would miss our connection in Milan, and then I returned to our carriage to find someone else claiming that we had spilled over into her allocated seat (which we had) and I decided that enough was enough.

 

In my defence, I’d given it my absolute all for nearly three and a half hours.  Some women give birth in less time than that.  One positive, I guess, is that I learnt along the way that I can make it through a tunnel that is 74 seconds long without dying.  And I also learnt that unless I have some major breakthrough, probably via long-term expensive therapy, or travel only when completely high on a massive amount of drugs, I will never ever attempt to do that again.

 

So I convinced Pat – eventually – that I needed to get off and in the nick of time, we managed to transfer six pieces of luggage, more empty chip packets, laptop computer, bewildered son, packets of half-eaten sandwiches, etc onto the platform.  The stationmaster blew his whistle, the train went ‘toot toot’, and off they went, back into Gollum’s lair.

 

I was so relieved I almost wet my pants.

 

So, now we’re standing on a busy, grotty platform at Genoa (where?) with a bewildered and now cranky son, six pieces of luggage, blah blah blah and NO IDEA what to do next.   The only parameter was that we had to get to Parma sometime that evening.

 

Now, how do you get from Genoa to Parma without going through any tunnels?  The short answer is, you can’t (unless you charter a helicopter or fly via Rome).  Ha, ha, said the universe again.

 

A short break from the tension of the moment: walking into the main hall of Genoa train station was like stepping onto another movie set.  Welcome to Italy!, the scene screamed, as half a dozen macho policemen paraded around with sniffer dogs and guns on hips, while a gaggle of nuns took turns to go to the public toilet (€1 entry, presumably waived for them).  The bookshop had maps of Italy and southern Italy and detailed tourist information booklets on Genoa but nothing on northern Italy.  The Bureau de Change was closed for lunch, the tourism office was closed for the rest of the day (“for technical reasons”) and the woman at the bookshop was completely unwilling to offer any suggestions as to where we might go for help.

 

Did I mention that we had a bewildered, cranky and hungry three-year old with us?

 

And then I found someone who said that the only thing we could do was to get a hire car and the only place we could do that was at the airport.  Thankfully our taxi driver was wonderful – friendly, helpful with the baggage, beautifully dressed and he spoke a little English.  Don’t think you can get to Parma without going through tunnels, he said.  But if you go via Piacenza you will have fewer tunnels than if you go via La Spezia.  But you will have tunnels.  Great.

 

We did get a hire car, eventually – a tiny little Chrysler something, which we just squeezed into (why is it so complicated to install child seats in hire cars?) and off we went on our next adventure: to find the right autostrade heading north and to negotiate more *@#!ing tunnels.  I gotta say that the helicopter option was looking pretty attractive.

 

I won’t bore you with the details of the next hour’s journey but it was horrible, although not quite as horrible as the train because I was holding the steering wheel.  I don’t quite know why that helped but it’s probably some deep-seated control issue.  For most of it, we sat tucked in between some big trucks, which gave a sense of slow and steady – they knew what they were doing and weren’t taking any risks.   Also the tunnels were no longer than two kilometres and for most of them I could see the light at the end from about the halfway mark.  It was bearable, but only because there were no other options.

 

And then, suddenly, we came out of a tunnel and we had left Liguria and were in Piedmont and the valley opened up and I just knew in my waters that there were no more tunnels ahead.  Now I didn’t really know there were no more tunnels so I couldn’t completely relax but it was looking pretty good.  By the time we turned the corner onto the A1 and started heading east along the Po Valley toward Parma, I knew for certain that it was all behind me and it was the best feeling in the whole wide world.

 

Before long, we had reached Parma and after negotiating our way around tiny one-way streets following real time telephone instructions, we arrived at the steps of Palazzo Dalla Rosa Prati and there was Vittorio Dalla Rosa Prati, phone to his ear, waving a warm welcome.  Vittorio was also from central casting: 30-something, handsome, beautifully dressed, charming and with that enchanting Italian-flavoured English that makes my knees weak (although not as weak as French-flavoured English but it’s a close second).

 

The next few hours were like a dream.  Our apartment is on the second floor of the Palazzo, which has been in care of the Rosa and/or Prati families for centuries.  I’ll repeat that: centuries.  The bedroom and separate kitchenette both have double doors that open out onto the Piazza Duomo, with the main view being of the mediaeval Baptistery, which Vittorio explained is the most important landmark in the whole of Parma.  I can’t begin to tell you how beautiful it all is – the view, the smell, the décor, the lavish appointments...   And then, as if by the press of a button, some incredible music wafted up from the piazza: I leaned out the window to hear a Bach fugue being played on a piano accordion by a busker straight under our window.  He went on to play a gob-smacking repertoire, which included Flight of the Bumblebees and something Gershwin, all brilliantly performed.  The sheer romance of it all was overwhelming.

 

We delivered the car to its private garage (no vehicles are allowed to park on the streets in the centre of Parma – hurrah!) and then meandered back through cafes and past hundreds of similarly blissed out locals and tourists alike, promenading as dusk fell.  All the buildings are cleverly lit so that the city has a warm, honey tone (many of the buildings are incredibly old – it’s hard for us Aussies to conceive that people have been promenading these streets for 900 years or more).  Several parties of young men were touring the streets and singing (tunefully): they weren’t threatening or aggressive at all, and seemed to be celebrating something but I don’t know what.  Pat got talking to some Mormon boys from the USA, who said they had been in Parma for 12 months and it was always like this – always so much happening and always pleasant.

 

However, I suspect we’ve come at a particularly good time because Parma is celebrating Verdi this month and there’s a Correggio exhibition on right now.  Then, just to reward us further for our difficult journey only hours before, we stumbled on a public performance of some of Verdi’s most popular operatic songs being held in a huge open hall at the entrance to Teatra Parma, the local opera house.  Just as we arrived, a beautiful red-haired young soprano took to the stage and sang one of the famous solos from Rigoletto (I think) and then the choir performed the chorus from La Traviatta that everyone knows but I can never identify.

 

Quite apart from the quality of the music and the incredible acoustics of this open-sided hall, I was amazed to see people floating in and out carrying children, pushing bicycles, munching on food, answering mobile phones and having chats with their neighbour – it was as though this kind of thing happens regularly and so it was no big deal!  To me it was perfection.  I tried to capture some on video but it was useless and it would be impossible to adequately convey the magic of that experience.

 

We wandered across the Piazza to a small café and ordered a light meal of lasagne, tortelli with spinach, and risotto with funghi, all made with local ingredients (and generously sprinkled with Parmagiano Reggiano cheese, of course) and all were superb.  We washed them down with Italian beer (which was pretty good) but decided to stop there, even though I’d decided earlier on that I was going to get good and proper drunk when the day finally ended.  Oliver ate the whole plate of tortelli and then scoffed more than his share of the two desserts – tiramisu and tartufo, of course!

 

It was time to wander home then, only two blocks away, to our palace and our jacuzzi and gorgeous king-size bed.  What a day.  All of that in fewer than 12 hours.  Can you believe it?  I can’t.

 

It’s 5:30am on Saturday (11^th of October) and today is market day so I’ll head off to bed for a few hours sleep if possible.  But I can’t end this without saying how incredibly proud I was of my gorgeous son and how grateful I was to have Pat there today for his support and camaraderie.  We travel well together, us three.

Oliver is such a trooper and my heart swells when I think about how he coped with today’s (and all this journey’s preceding) dramas.  He has been homesick again and asks occasionally when we are going home to our old house, which I find really painful, knowing that we don’t know where home is right now.  I try to remember and comprehend how hard it must be for him to grasp what is happening.  To us it is exciting and stimulating and a dream come true.  To Oliver, it is a blur of new beds and scary situations and strange people.  But he rarely grizzles.  He keeps up as best he can and has a go at most food and experiences we put to him.  And I often forget that he’s only three-years old.  Nearly four.  God I love him so.

London revisited

Greetings, friends and rellies. We’re still travelling, we haven’t murdered each other and we’re not yet broke. It's been interesting to watch this week's global banking crisis unfold while in Europe - Australia has hardly rated a mention (except when the bloke was taken by a crocodile). We are feeling rather smug that we put our tiny nest egg into a fixed interest term deposit. Perhaps we could offer it to Iceland.

The week in Bath finished on a high note, with the tour of Duchy Home Farm (see previous blog). Even after having been there a week, we were actually not sad to leave our little cottage on the farm just out of Bath. Funny how even the most beautifully decorated and seemingly perfect accommodation can still lack… something. Warmth, connection, soul?

Our experience of London second time around was a much more relaxed affair – we were fortunate to be offered a bed for the weekend at the home of Richard and Rebecca (Pat’s niece) in Ladbroke Grove (a short stroll from Portobello Road). We did lots of walking and ate some superb food – kindly prepared by Richard – including delicious paella. I feel like I let the side down a bit by catching up on some rest and counting myself out of domestic duties, with the exception of a few cuddles with baby Ruby.

Their home is in one of those charming five level buildings with large stone stairs leading up to the entry level and doors to the three or four homes coming off a central (narrow) staircase. Richard and Rebecca occupy the top two levels, and have access to a roof space via a ladder through the skylight! The house has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a huge dining/lounge space that is connected to the large (but poorly designed) kitchen and a little balcony with a barbecue. It was heaven and we were very grateful (once again) for the comfort of a friend’s home.

A definite bonus is that they live within cooee of Holland Park, and the fantastic parks in London again blew me away. Apart from the great play equipment, there are large expanses of lawn dotted with shady trees, squirrels and lots of water features, which we don’t see in Australia. Oh, and at least one café near the play equipment.

On Sunday (28th of September) we walked to the Natural History Museum via Hyde Park and past Kensington Palace. I guess it took about an hour but it was a beautiful day and we really enjoyed watching all the kids and parents playing soccer (sorry, football) and riding their bikes. I could have meandered all day.

At the museum we spent a long time in the dinosaur section. Oliver was thrilled by (and a bit frightened of) the life-sized animated Tyrannosaurus Rex, which was the star of the show. There were skeletons of all kinds of dinosaurs, a mammoth tusk, a sabre-tooth tiger tooth and various other bits of prehistoric anatomy. It must be something that comes with the ‘Y’ chromosome, this fascination with dinosaurs – that and the ability to memorise all models of Fords and Holdens since the 1950s.

After queuing for a while, we had morning tea at the Museum café, where they were advertising fair trade and/or organic items, and cakes made on the premises. Actually most institutions and public places we went to offered great food – even Paddington Station had at least two shops offering organic coffee, and we could have had handmade Cornish pasties, which certainly looked handmade (even though the shop was part of a chain/franchise). There were plenty of healthy options for Oliver, too. Compare this with the food on offer at Australian airports, railway stations and, at the pinnacle of food crapness, cinemas…

Another thing that impresses me (I think) about the Poms is their ability to quietly and patiently queue (I wonder sometimes if their predisposition for patience verges on mere resignation). Actually, a comparison of various nations’ handling of queuing would make a great PhD (I’m sure it’s been done already). The Americans continually check to see if someone is cutting in and whether the queue is fair and equitable. The French are animated in their frustration but respect the right of the people serving to retaliate. The Irish celebrate it as a god-given opportunity for a chat. I put it down to the drink of choice – I reckon tea makes you dehydrated and unable to put up a fight, cola makes you edgy, coffee makes you belligerent and Guinness makes you want to socialise. I’ll let you know what happens in Italy.

Having been now to a couple of markets in France, I reflect on Saturday’s Portobello Market with some disappointment. Quite a bit of the stuff for sale was tacky, the stalls were not presented well, and it was crowded and messy. The volume of tourist traffic was astonishing – pedestrians streamed out of Notting Hill tube station and charged toward Portobello Road, which meant the stalls close to the top of the road were in the box seat to satisfy cashed-up customers’ craving for an apparent bargain. Another reason we didn’t stop for long at any stall was the flow of traffic didn’t easily accommodate two standstill pushchairs. I felt sorry for Oliver, who was sitting at the level of groins and shopping bags. The experience definitely wasn’t conducive to socialising. It was more like participating in one big queue with browsing along the way. So un-European.

Then, as if to emphasise the point, we made our way to the Farmers’ Market at Notting Hill Gate, which was held in the Waterstone's car park in Kensington. The location was simply awful. If we weren’t travelling with a couple of locals, I would have felt the need to leave a trail of (organic) rice to find our way out of the labyrinth. Despite the sunny and warm day it was grey and grotty: industrial waste bins surround the car park, so the smell on the way in was terrible. I think I would have been quite shocked if the chap at London Farmers’ Markets hadn’t warned me. The stallholders, aka stalwarts, deserve acknowledgement for making the most of things: most had gone to a fair bit of trouble to make their stall attractive, when they surely must regard this location as a liability to their endeavours.

However the quality of produce was high – I was surprised to see (again) that meat was on display on nothing more than a bed of ice. Most of it (maybe all?) was vacuum-packed so not exposed, but I can’t imagine a meat producer in Australia wanting, let alone being allowed, to offer his meat for sale without refrigeration. The highlight? We found raw milk and cream being sold by Dave Paul, a third-generation farmer with a Guernsey herd at Olive Farm in Somerset. And it was delicious.

We’d heard that raw milk was available in London but it was still delightful to find it. I don’t how much longer it will be available – according to Dave the demand is there but the food safety authority is tightening the noose of restrictions.

The other letdown about the Farmers’ Market, and why Rebecca rarely shops there, is that it was really really expensive: £20 for a chicken, albeit a free-range (and I think organic) one! We blew £40 in the blink of an eye. Even in this relatively affluent area of London stallholders must have to work overtime to nurture customer loyalty.

There are some keys elements emerging on what, to me, makes a good Farmers’ Market:

- Location, location, location: the San Francisco market demonstrated this well, being right at the ferry terminal and thereby solving the accessibility problem – thousands and thousands of potential customers have to walk THROUGH the market to get to the ferries.

- Good presentation: again, in San Francisco, CUESA (the Centre for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture) had a magnificent permanent display which provided an excellent backdrop for stalls, and the stalls themselves were set up under uniform umbrellas. The market at Bath worked, not because of uniformity but because each stall had a unique character, which the stallholders had clearly thought about.

- Wide range of local, seasonal food: if people can’t get a good chunk of their fresh food for the week during their circuit of the market, they won’t come back. The Bath market, situated next to Sainsbury’s, offered a good compromise and seemed to support business at both the market and Sainsbury’s. I wonder why more farmers’ markets in Australia aren’t held in the car park of independent supermarkets, such as IGA.

- No monopoly: it’s healthy to have more than one stall offering the same item and I don’t think it necessarily dilutes custom. Having said that, there are only so many jars of jam that a market can sustain.

- Clear and honest marketing: I like how London Farmers’ Markets ‘guarantees’ that the produce is indeed being sold by the farmer (or their employee) who produced it – something that FARMA (the National Farmers' Retail & Markets Association) is also passionate about. We were duped into making our way to a market at Westport on a wet Saturday that turned out to be no more than six stalls of crafts set along the river. It was embarrassing to have to amble up the street, nodding at each stallholder while trying to look vaguely interested in the contents, and then repeat it in reverse. This process took precisely 3.7 minutes. It wasn’t a market.

- Good layout: markets that have stalls in a straight line won’t work – and this is where the British queue fetish fails to impress. The markets at which I have felt most engaged have been in the classic ‘donut’ shape, with an outer ring and an inner ring, so you can meander on both sides while moving in the same direction and keep going round if you feel like it, without having to turn around or reach a dead end. This makes you want to exit. Markets also need to feel busy and compact but not too crowded. The French encourage customers to buy up and then take a seat at an adjacent café and eat your purchases with a wine or coffee accompaniment.

Hey, isn’t London noisy! On the first visit we accepted it as part of London’s exhilarating energy. But on our second visit, when we were craving sleep, it was annoying, especially the noise of the police cars, ambulances and fire engines. We have a theory – the police cars, in particular, have their sirens blaring (even when there is no other traffic) principally for effect: they’re really off to the corner store for a packet of fags. Perhaps they just want to feel important. In France the police cars are much more discreet – a short ‘woo-woo’ if someone crosses their path but otherwise they glide around the streets quietly. Even their siren is more laid back, about half the oscillation of their British counterparts. The French are just so cool.

On Monday it was time to leave the UK and Richard kindly drove us to Heathrow on his way to work. We successfully negotiated the new Heathrow Terminal 5 (it was a cinch) and flew off to France after surprisingly little concern that it was an international flight. I won’t be rushing back to Britain, even though we only saw a tiny fraction of the action, but London sure is a great holiday destination.

By the way, you can add any comments you have about this and any other blog posts by clicking on "Comments" at the bottom of each blog entry (we've had two comments back from places we've written about, correcting a couple of facts, so I'm being a little more careful about what I write...).

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