Fresh? Kidding! Food Deserts Are Created.

Watching this video on Youtube in which the host presents multiple ways to peel garlic. There are some methods I’ve tried and hated (shaking in a jar or bottle or two bowls sucks, bruises the garlic, and leaves a huge mess of skin pieces you have to remove, for instance) and a few I’ve not seen before.

Soaking garlic cloves in water does allow skins to be removed more easily. Cutting the base off a head of garlic frees up all the cloves for peeling, yes. But the one that I’d never seen before was the holding a clove lengthways between thumb and forefinger and squeezing, which splits the skin allowing it to be removed easily. Those cloves rebounded from the flexing and looked extremely fresh and unbruised despite the seemingly rough handling.

And then I realised why I haven’t tried some of the methods. The host had really well grown garlic and it’s reasonably fresh. Most of those methods don’t work so well for the rather ordinary garlic I can get here. The garlic I get would turn into a mess if I used some of those methods. “So,” you ask me, “where do you live?” And you may be surprised.

I live on the Bass Coast in Australia, just below South Gippsland, and the regions to either side and north of here are one large foodbasket region. Yep. It has hundreds of dairy farms, great creameries making beautiful cheeses, a dozen apiarists producing some excellent honey, and there are market gardens and farms growing fresh vegetables all the way from the humble spud to . . . Garlic.

Some of the nicest garlic varieties do well in the hills to the north. Also many varieties of not-so-humble beautiful potatoes. And almost every European vegetable you can imagine as well as many of the more exotic international ones.

You’d think I could get everything I wanted – cabbages the size of a basketball, carrots of every rainbow hue and sweet and crisp, capsicums, beans, peas, cukes, squashes – you get the idea. And what I get is crap-grade supermarket vegetables at their extortionate prices.

(There was one person that intended to open a F&V store but roadworks outside the store, the extortionate rents and rates, that F&V only had one mediocre supplier from the look of it and tried to make up the shortfall in exotic spices and foods. It didn’t end well for them.)

Two hours away by freeway, in Melbourne, in markets in and around the city, is where the exceptional produce ends up. The mediocre goes to ColesWorth. Here in a town some 200km away, we get the latter.

This is the definition of a “food desert.”

Food Deserts

There are some areas where fast food places and supermarket chains crowd out the smaller shops and establish themselves – because if the makings of a salad, good bread, and cheese meal cost $15-$20 and a Cheerful Burger Pack costs $11 (and there’s no prep involved) it’s a no-brainer for most people.

Ironically, one of the attractions of where we moved to all those years ago was that it’s in a foodbasket region. We were sure some local produce stores would spring up, after all there were great farmer’s markets all over the place and a clean produce organisation organising vegetable box deliveries, a farmer’s co-op appeared online and then another one – sure-fire, right? Hmmmm…

Because then COVID happened, all the farmer’s markets closed, the produce box delivery struggled to make ends meet, and even the online co-ops had a rough time of it. Many of the farm gate stores / restaurants closed for a year or more and came back severely restricted, the creameries ditto.

And of course COVID is far from over. While people are refusing to believe it and acting like dicks and not wearing masks and getting social, it’ll take just one good outbreak to blow even that tiny bit of progress out of the water again.

The last choice is the little deals that always go on between local farms and the local small stores in their districts. But that’s not a hard and fast relationship and some producers sell their produce to local stores, other stores in other districts, and supermarkets like IGA.

The long and the short of it is – if you’re up for walking around to every small shop and store in every town for miles around, you might find one store that sells Blue Tree honey and another that has products from Prom Country Cheeses or Bassine Cheeses. I can maybe find one butcher in that 80km radius that sells Colin & Sally Organic Lamb, or has their own herd like our local butcher Mitchell’s.

But once you’ve spent two years researching all those stores and compiling a list, you’d need to form a co-op of your own to make monthly shopping trips for everyone in the group into an economical option.

So if we (speaking personally for my wife and myself) want fresh food, we either grow it ourselves, try and remember which farm gate stores might sell it and driving out there hoping they’re still operating and selling the produce you need. And of course sometimes you waste the time and fuel and pollution sometimes only to come home with less than half of what you set out to buy.

And so the supermarkets have basically won. Because I forgot to add – some things come at a price way too steep for pensioners – for instance, when our butcher (that has their own herds and abattoir and facilities) sells steak at – and I am unfortunately not exaggerating – $68/kg, they can roll it up and shove it up their nether regions.

For our small meat protein needs I’ll for to ALDI and buy theirs. Also their vegetables which along with that meat, are for some reason of so much better quality and better priced than the ColesWorth offering.

Yep – the irony of all ironies is that we have a Coles, a Woolies, and an ALDI – and both the ColesWorth stores are pricey and their produce is pretty shoddy, while ALDI is eating their lunch with good products at reasonable prices.

And for the things that we need that I can’t get as fresh from ALDI, our garden gives us the occasional very fresh supplements – and it’s at a price I can’t argue against. My advice – grow parsley. Just a pot of it in the kitchen windowsill. Watch what it does for the flavour and nutrition of your meal, and before you know it you may have half a dozen pots on that window ledge.

Decades –

. . . that’s how long I’ve been railing against the supermarket duopoly in Australia. It was among the first posts of my blogging career. Often there were stretches where it was every third or fourth post I made. Supermarket misbehaviour was one of the reasons I adopted the “Keep The Bastards Honest” slogan.

And we still need to keep the bastards honest. Share the stuffing out of this post. Help me keep it going with a donation.