Tag: food sovereignty

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Which comes first, the chicken or the worker?

So here’s the issue. I love eating chicken, but I can’t say I love chickens – they’re scary little beady-eyed peckers. Yes, I’m a city girl if ever there was one, but I wish them no harm, after all they produce that most sacred of foods: the egg. I’d best not start on the egg or I won’t stop.

Vegans, look away now! I love eating poultry in preference to the meat of larger animals, but I still want to know that, however short the lives of animals I eat, they do not suffer unnecessarily. Live sheep exports are particularly abhorrent. I buy hideously expensive organic eggs, because I want to know that my potential chicken in a shell is the product of a parent who was well-fed and cared for: free-range. Besides they’re huge and frequently double yolked:

Okay I broke one!

I won’t go near Steggles and am ashamed of the days, (many years ago) when I bought a pack of their discount pieces. I stupidly wondered why these pieces were so misshapen. Many years have passed since then, now I do know that they were deformed due to their cramped conditions. Free-range certification is a nightmare and consumers are rightly confused about the real living conditions of the chooks. Buying certified organic means you can be assured that the facility is monitored to ensure they do have reasonable access to the great outdoors.

Here in WA buying free-range chicken means buying Mt Barker, by and large. They don’t look so flash. Then one glorious day I saw this in my supermarket fridge:

It looked like a proper plump chook. It cooked a treat, none of that slimy stuff you find on supermarket chooks. I thought I’d hit the jackpot. The massive 1.964 chook pictured cost just $11.64. I wondered how this was possible and then I bought it anyway.

So there I was happily roasting these fab chooks – 3 days of good eating per chook (hey, I’m a Jewish mother – roast chicken means there will be soup) Now fast-forward to May 4 and the Four Corners  expose on the exploitation of workers right here in glorious Oz.

The program concerned food companies that force unreasonable schedules and pay unfair rates and who should get a mention, amongst others, but Lilydale . I was angry. I was horrified. I was confused. Here I am buying these chickens because they treat the animals reasonably, but not so the poor buggers employed to process them.

Cheap food and the quest to keep it cheap, is wreaking havoc on our farm sector. I would happily pay an extra $3 per kilo for these chickens. Perhaps your everyday chicken lover might not, but shouldn’t the selling point of a free-range chicken be its provenance not its price?

If this reads like latte-luvvy thinking, that I’m an urban elitist let me be clear. I’m a casually employed academic on a low income. Food is expensive but most of don’t even spend 20% of our income on our food, including take-away, while our grandparents spent more like 30%. My students complain about the high price of food whilst frantically checking for messages on brand new I-phones.

We hesitate to spend $15 on a free-range chicken, which can actually feed a family of four (and soup the next day). Meanwhile a Red Rooster “dinner” for four will cost $20. For this you will get an inferior chicken, copious chicken salt, soggy chips by the time you get them home and a great deal of grease. We readily fork out $20 to see a movie, never mind the popcorn. Our priorities are so skewed. I say us because last week I bought another Lilydale chicken.

So here’s my problem, which comes first the chicken or the worker?

I picked the chicken didn’t I?

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Berry Angry

The contaminated Nanna’s berry outrage is making me want to tear my hair out. Finally we may see clarification of those confusing country of origin disclosures. How long have the Australian Food and Grocery Association and the big 2 wholesalers been getting away with this? By that I mean squeezing Australian farmers out of business in favour of overseas produce.

Berries from China? Really? And let the mug punters think “Nanna” is an Aussie Nana. This isn’t jingoism or Luddite thinking…we are experiencing global food shortages, shouldn’t we in this wide, brown land be focused on feeding ourselves and providing an excess for our neighbours?

If you’re on a low income then of course choosing between local and imported foods will come down to a question of price, but Australian consumers have every right to expect these products to be safe and ethically produced. What do I mean by ethically produced? The minimum standard would have to be, not produced by slave labour. That is another issue.

We know that, unlike so many smaller purveyors, the big 2 supermarkets’ focus is providing products at a competitive price. The quest for cheap food has lead to the demise of many of our primary industries. I don’t have to tell you that, or that is has also led to our increased dependence on processed food and resultant poor health outcomes.

Then there are food miles, how do we ignore the energy used to import foods? Even the most ethical of eaters struggle with this. From Vodka to Lindt chocolate, who am I to point a finger? If only I could find Australian pickled cucumbers almost as good as the Israelis make I’d buy them, but Israel and Poland seem to have that market covered. And apart from the odd desperate American pomegranate in winter &endash; and I stress the desperate as I’m usually not pleased with the results, I buy only local fruit, veg, and certainly seafood.

Which is why I particularly loved this cartoon.

http://www.skinnytwinkie.com/2013/10/i-only-use-local-children/

But apart from the food miles and other ethical concerns I am mostly concerned with, dare I say it? Common sense arguments. And sensible they are:

Shouldn’t we all feed ourselves?

Shouldn’t a big country like ours want to feed its population?

Well, with discussions of coal mining in the Hunter Valley, it would seem that the answer from government seems to be “no”. Somehow free trade is the answer to all our prayers. So dear old “Nanna” says FU to the berry farmers of Tassie and elsewhere and now we have pre-schoolers possibly infected with hep A from their smoothies.

The PM expresses concern but he says: “ more red tape and regulation of the private sector could lead to soaring food costs…’We want safe products but we want safe products at a fair price. Some price is worth paying, but it’s got to be a careful balancing act.’”

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/02/18/school-kids-caught-hepatitis-berry-scare

Yes it’s a balancing act, and what we need to balance is the right of all Australians to clean healthy food, the rights of farmers to earn a living and the right to food security for future generations.

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Slow Shopping

I recently sat on a panel dedicated to the discussion of food sovereignty – a fancy title for a discussion of the ways we Australians might have more say in deciding what we eat, where our food comes from and how it is produced. Yes, it was a slow food event.

What stuck in this member of the chattering class’s mind was a comment from a senior National Party MP on the panel. Though he was a charming and sincere gentleman, we certainly parted ways on a couple of issues. My suggestion that we take responsibility for those less fortunate, that is, those who don’t have enough to eat, being dismissed with the comment that “We’ll always have the haves and have not’s”. Should we accept malnutrition because it has had such a long and distinguished tradition?

Then there’s the role of women. The gentleman referred to a phenomenon I must confess I hadn’t heard of, he talked of the “Wednesday” shop, which he compared with the weekend shop. It went something like this:

“Well it’s been well documented the way in which women do a hasty shop on Wednesdays and then do their ‘proper’ shopping on the weekends”.

He then went on to explain the bleeding obvious – that harassed Mum’s on their way home from work will tend to buy rather more prepared foods than on the weekend, when they are more likely to shop and cook from scratch. Should we overlook his clear understanding that shopping and cooking is the women’s domain – no matter if she also works fulltime? Perhaps we’ll deal with that one later.

I’m more interested in his acknowledgement of the distinction between the fast shopping that takes place on weekdays and the slow shopping we women do on the weekends. While I’m the first to acknowledge that I’m more willing to do the food shopping than my male partner, and better at it, I’m less thrilled with the notion of shopping as leisure.

Shopping for clothes, shoes and accessories, at least for myself, is something I consider to be a leisure activity because I do it during the time which I consider to be leisure time. I’m sure you women know what I mean here, the weekend, that time when we are supposed to enjoy not being at work. This leisure time we spend driving our children everywhere, cleaning our houses, cooking, shopping and doing the laundry.

So what should I do with the remaining hours of the weekend? Would I rather go shopping or sit in the sun reading that weekend paper that takes a week to get through?

It’s quite a simple task, rescuing a few slow moments from my weekend. Slow shopping? Maybe this happens on holidays, but doesn’t that leave an awful lot of slow activity for those two-week breaks? So when did holidays suddenly become so fast?

 

Dr Felicity Newman is a member of the Centre for Everyday Life at Murdoch University