Dianne Loughnan - Food Shock

There is something strange about apricots in the shops today. They dont smell like apricots, they dont feel like apricots, they dont look like apricots and they certainly dont taste like apricots. They are hard, cold and pale. Lined up on the supermarket shelf they look like little yellow billiard balls waiting to be sunk.

If you grew up on a farm 40 years ago, you might remember that real apricots were a deep orange colour with brown freckles. They were soft. They came in varying sizes and ripened on the tree in summer. They were sweet and juicy and smelt like apricots. You always broke them apart to check for grubs. Grubs did not hurt you; grubs were made of apricots. Kids spent a lot of time up trees in the Christmas holidays picking and eating apricots. When they came down, the toilet was a popular resting spot.

If you didnt grow up on a farm you might remember the weekly visit to the fruit shop to buy real apricots. Or to your local butchers shop where carcasses were hung in the cold room and the butcher cut off the bits you wanted to buy. Like the apricots, meat back then was somehow stronger and sweeter than it is today. It was never blandthere was no confusing beef with lamb or pork. Providing Mum didnt burn it, the meat was always flavoursome. While there were no guarantees, if the animal was young and well handled by the butcher, the meat was very likely tender too. Most importantly, the butcher could tell you the breed of the beast, its age, what it ate, who grew itand the gossip around town.

You might even remember stopping in at a local dairy farm on the way home from school for a bucket of fresh, warm milk. It wasnt pasteurised or homogenised, and because you are reading this now, you didnt die from it.

The food we buy from the supermarket today is a very different product. Its consistency and availability is always guaranteed. The meat cuts, wrapped in plastic on Styrofoam trays, are of the same size, shape, colour and taste. Chicken eggs are of uniform size and colour with no indication a chook had anything to do with them. The fruit and vegetables are perfectly shiny and blemish-free. The milk has been sterilised to within an inch of its life and sits cold and still in row upon row of plastic bottles.

Have we lost touch with our food? Despite Australias historical connection to farming, the modern consumer has no idea how their fruit, vegetables and grain are grown or their meat and milk produced. The majority of Australians have never set foot on a farm.

The traditional suburban fruit shop supplied with locally grown, seasonal fruit and vegetables is largely a thing of the past, as is the local butcher, baker and the candlestick maker. In the main, Australians get most of their food from the supermarket. The rest comes from the fast-food restaurant next door. Food is mass-produced, cheap and abundant. What does this really mean for the consumer and the farmer?

Much of our food is grown via broad-scale cropping and intensive animal production systems. Dont think this only happens in America. Most Australian pigs are not familiar with mud and most chickens have never scratched the dirt. The factory farming of livestock is widespread. The truth has come home to roost.

Fruit and vegetables grown under our conventional agricultural system are promoted as clean and green. But are they really? Synthetic chemicals are the backbone of modern horticulture. Millions of tonnes of grain cannot sit, intact, for long periods in storage silos without help. Fresh food is transported long distances and stored for long periods before it is sold to the consumer. How fresh is fresh? Given the choice (and a good dose of nostalgia) many Australians would love to eat fresh, organically produced meat, milk, fruit and vegetables direct from the local farmer. The statistics tell us so. In a free, wealthy society, built on the sheeps back, what is preventing this in Australia? Have we lost sight of what the consumer wants? Does the consumer know enough about the food they buy? Do they care? And if so, can they do anything about it?

One hundred and fifty years ago half the population of Australia were farmers. It took half our time, money and effort just to feed and clothe ourselves. But if we were to become a modern society, riding the wave of the industrial revolution, we had to free people from farming so they could work in other newly developed industrial sectors. We also had to free up income spent on food to spend on other things that the new industries would produce. We had to make it possible for fewer farmers to feed more people, at a lower cost.

Through the industrialisation of agriculture, these objectives have been achieved. Through economies of scale, specialised production and new technologies, we now have the most efficient food production system in the world. Consumers have cheap, plentiful food. But at what cost?

Australian farmers are technologically advanced and well capitalised. While, seemingly, this is a plus for the industry, could it be part of the problem for the Australian consumer? Has the success of the industry killed off the small farmer capable of supplying fresh food locally?

Today, less than 2 per cent of working Australians are farmers. We spend only 14 cents in every dollar of our disposable income on food. The farmer gets only 2 cents of this. The other 12 cents goes to processing, marketing and distributing food. We now pay more for packaging and advertising than we pay the farmer to grow the food. Why is this so?

The nature of rural communities is changing. There are bigger farms, fewer farmers, fewer people, fewer services and fewer close-knit communities. Urban communities are disconnected from rural ones. Farmers incomes are declining and the sector is shrinking. Any future gains from the further industrialisation of agriculture must be squeezed from the farmers pocket.

Our farming system is depleting our natural resources and damaging the environment. The sustainability of both the environment and farming has come into question. Broad-scale, industrial agriculture may temporarily increase the carrying capacity of the earth, and the size of the beasts it runs, but for how long is this sustainable? What are the alternatives?

Australia has a secure supply of food now but will this always be the case? Who really owns the Australian farm and, in turn, our food supply? When Australian farmers produce 93 per cent of our food needs why are we finding increased amounts of imported food on supermarket shelves and Australian-grown produce being left to rot in the paddock? In a food-insecure world, what are our obligations to our starving neighbours of Asia and Africa?

The answers may surprise.

This book provides an indepth investigation of how we grow, distribute and consume food in Australia. It looks at the economic, social and environmental impacts of our modern food production system on Australian farmers and consumers. It looks at the effects of globalisation on our ability to maintain Australias food security and food sovereignty. It brushes with the alternatives. It will stimulate our thinking about the food we eat and the choices we make as both food producers and consumers.