Why Kitchen Co-Op?

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kitchen Co-Op blog. I thought we could get started with the first and last (maybe – I do love a rant) long, dry, and semi-political post that will hopefully answer the question of why we should be actively looking for different ways to eat. After that we can have some fun, I promise, but for the moment, I’m going to climb up on my soapbox, and provide a little bit of background about the whole idea. I know you’re all sophisticated people so forgive me if you’ve heard this before. 

Maybe you’re sitting down looking at your dinner. Have you got any idea where it came from? Is the chicken in your curry free range, organic or broiler? What practices does the processing plant it went through use? Is there a family in Vietnam who has been impoverished by the industrialization of aquaculture for western export from the frozen prawns you’ve turned into pasta marinara? Why is there added sugar in the canned tomatoes you bought? And what is Acidity Regulator 303? It seems insane that we have to ask these sorts of questions about something that we put into our bodies. And if you are one of the growing number of people who are starting to ask them, you can expect to be met with few answers and an increased sense of anxiety about the food you eat and buy.

  

As consumers, there are very few things that we consume more in our whole lives than what goes into our mouths three times a day. Because eating is a basic human necessity, sometimes we forget that every time we eat, our money is making a political, economic, ethical and environmental decision. The rise of supermarket shopping and the era of industrialized food and agriculture have broken down the chain of accountability between the paddock (and it’s being very generous to consider some of the places processed foods start as ‘paddocks’) and our table. There has never been a larger disconnection between the food that we buy and where it came from, and that leaves a lot of room for practices that we might not support. It’s not about being a Luddite or a hippie or even a hipster (though I’m sure Instagramming pictures of our meals will follow); it’s about taking accountability for our food choices, and participating in society in a way that we feel upholds our values. Industrial economics is not the natural partner for agriculture. When the dollar value is the bottom line, so many things in the chain suffer, from the quality of the food, to the nutrients we are eating, to the livelihoods of the farmers that we should be desperately trying not to lose. The modern food industry, supported almost single-handedly by big corporation supermarkets, is fast making it a fiscal impossibility to farm. Those farmers that are surviving have adopted industrialized farming practices and even then that doesn’t stop them being controlled almost solely by their supermarket contracts, ever-eating into their profits (think about that next time you see pumpkin for 60c a kilo). And the produce suffers. Every time we go into a supermarket we are being sold the idea that we have the right to eat anything we want at any time of the year at a price we can afford. Of course when looked at in this light, it seems obvious that this could not possibly be the case, and yet a loaf of home-brand bread at the supermarket now only costs a dollar, and tomatoes are available (on special) all year round. Whole new breeds of chicken are being created because of our belief that we should be able to buy cheap breast and thigh and throw the rest of the bird away. In order to meet these needs, in most cases, it’s fair to say your dinner has become more technologically advanced than you are. And society is paying the price in a million different ways. Consider obesity, type two diabetes, the aforementioned decline of the farmer, the suffering of millions of animals and the god-awful taste of supermarket ready pre-packged meals.

That’s not what I want to eat. I want to eat animals that had names, dammit, and find excellent ways to cook with all of the meat, not just the prime cuts. I want to have to be creative when the only thing I have is zucchini for weeks on end because it’s fresh, in season and delicious. And I think that the only way that this can happen is by decentralization of the modern food industry back to the local, community roots it came from. But this is a pretty big job, and I’m not a protestor or a lobbyist, so I’m going to try and lead by example and start getting as much food as I can from my own community. To me, this means planting a veggie patch, having friends over and making sure they don’t leave without a zucchini (seriously, we have so many zucchinis) and knowing they’ll return the favour with whatever gems they’ve come across, be it Mum and Dad’s eggs, a mate’s fresh-caught fish or some chilli sauce they’ve made from their own chillies. Formalizing this into a barbeque sounded like a pretty good idea to me, and I hope that we can back this up with a small on-line community to share recipes, gardening tips, good places to buy good food, and anything else that you happen to think of.

For me, this is about a return to treating our food with respect. When we are eating we need to remember that we are using a resource, and we need to respect the people who grew it, respect the animals it came from, respect the land it was grown on, and most of all, respect our taste buds, because I can promise you: this food tastes a lot better.

To get a better insight into the sorts of things that go on in the food industry, here are some great resources.

   ‘The Omnivore's Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals’ by Michael Pollan (2006          Penguin Books)

   ‘Not on the Label’ by Felicity Lawrence (2005 Penguin Books)

   And, of course, the fabulous documentary ‘Food Inc.’.

All thoughts and inputs are welcome in the comments section, and in the weeks to come hopefully we will be putting up pictures of our kitchen co-op meets, some cheeky recipes and some seriously awesome places to shop for when we can’t grow it ourselves.