Slow Food Australian international councillor Amorelle Dempster, in Hobart to participate in a national Slow Food conference 26-28 April, said people wanted to know where their food came from.

‘We are setting out a strategy to educate the consumer to make the connection of what is local, then source and use it,’ she said.

The food mapping project highlights the importance of food produced by small farmers.

‘Small farmers are essential, especially in Tasmania, because they grow and produce a variety of sustainable food. We can not afford to lose them.’

The grassroots Slow Food movement is creating a national database for a smartphone app.

‘People can then access what is local and seasonal’ Amorelle said. ‘The project is good for farmers because it creates a new market for them.’

‘It connects farmers, producers, cooks and consumers, and tells the story behind the food.’

Slow Food Hobart spokeswoman Jenny Dudgeon said it was important for groups to work together to defend the country’s food diversity and heritage.

More information
Amorelle Dempster
Australian Councillor
Slow Food International
Slow Food Hunter Valley Convivium leader
M 0427 548 886

The perry — inedible, small, astringent fruit — has been used for centuries in the English western counties of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire to make a fermented alcoholic beverage similar to cider. Varieties were brought to Australia during the Victorian gold rushes in the 1850s and 1860s.

The announcement of the fruits’ inclusion in the Ark was made by Slow Food International secretary-general Paolo Di Croce in conjunction with Australian Ark Commission chair Cherry Ripe at a Slow Food Australian dinner this evening at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) near Hobart, Tasmania.

The perry varieties listed include the Yellow Huffcap, Moorcroft, Gin, Red Longdon and Green Horse.

The Australian Ark of Taste was established in July 2003. It aims to protect and preserve quality, small-scale production of culturally significant foods that are threatened with extinction, including critically endangered breeds of animals and heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables. The Ark works to recognise and preserve listed foods’ heritage and taste and to promote and encourage agricultural and horticultural biodiversity.

In its first seven years, four products were listed in the Australian Ark, some of which were included the MONA dinner menu, including Tasmanian Leatherwood honey, bull-boar sausages unique to Victoria, Kangaroo Island Ligurian bee honey from South Australia, and the Bunya, an indigenous nut native to Queensland.

Since 2010, two further products have been added to the Australian Ark, both rare breeds of domestic animals of European origin: in June 2011 the Wessex Saddleback pig, extinct in its native England, and in April 2012 the Dairy Shorthorn, which is ‘critically endangered’.

The pear listing today brings the number of listings on the Australian Ark to 11. Australian Ark Commission chair Cherry Ripe hopes that many more will come to fulfil the goal of 10,000 international Ark listings by 2017.

However, the five criteria for inclusion in Slow Food’s Ark of Taste are quite stringent.

1. A product must have distinctive sensory qualities. ‘Quality’ is defined by local traditions and uses.

2. The product must be linked to the memory and identity of a group, and can be a vegetable species, variety, ecotype or animal population that is native or well acclimatised over a medium-long period in a specific area (defined in relation to the history of the area). The main ingredient of transformed products must be locally sourced unless it comes from an area outside the region of production, in which case it must be traditional to use materials from that specific area. Any complementary ingredients (spices, condiments, etc) may be from any source, but must be of a type customary in the traditional production process.

3. Products must be linked environmentally, socio-economically and historically to a specific area.

4. Products must be produced in limited quantities, by farms or by small-scale processing enterprises.

5. Products must be threatened with either real or potential extinction.

The perry pear

Perry is a product from which a beverage has traditionally been made in England and Wales for more than 500 years — which is known in northern France as Poiré.

Formerly wild pears, originating in the Forest of Dean in the Wye Valley in the west of England, these particular varieties of pears were propagated, grafted and domesticated by local farmers as early as the 1500s.

The fruits, otherwise inedible, were pressed for their juice and transformed into an alcoholic beverage, records of which exist in John Gerdard’s The Herball or Genereall History of Plantes [sic], published in 1597. Significantly, in historical times, it was safer to drink a fermented beverage than the local pond or river water. Farm workers were also paid with it by a measure of ‘gallon per day’.

Traditionally the beverage was made from the juice by crushing the pears in circular stone mill by pulled by a horse or mule. In Australia in the 21st century the juice is extracted through matting by pressure, not dissimilar to traditional methods but through nylon rather than horse-hair matting. The main perry production community is at Harcourt near Bendigo in central Victoria. Orchards are also being established in Tasmania.

Oral history relates that the perry pear varieties now listed in the Ark of Taste were introduced to the goldfields near Bendigo in the early 1860s or earlier. It provided a low-alcoholic beverage, as an alternative to beer, for miners during the Victorian gold rushes.

More information

Cherry Ripe
Chair
Australian Ark Commission
M 0419 438 014

Jenny Dudgeon
Slow Food Hobart Convivium leader
M 0438 283 872

Amorelle Dempster
Australian Councillor
Slow Food International
Slow Food Hunter Valley Convivium leader
M 0427 548 886

The event, hosted by Slow Food Hobart, includes a programme of discussions and workshops to develop new national projects and celebrations of the region’s finest sustainable produce.

The meeting will provide an important occasion to discuss major challenges for the development of a good, clean and fair food system in Australia and how Slow Food can further its work in support of these aims. Of key concern is that producers committed to providing sustainable quality food can receive a fair income, and are assisted to combat issues concerning food sovereignty, food provenance and food distribution chains.

Leaders and members of Australia’s 26 Slow Food convivia (local branches), with representation from all the States and territories, as well as guests attending from the Slow Food International in Italy, will discuss the development of the association locally and globally.

‘We are honoured to have Slow Food International secretary general Paolo Di Croce and Asia-Oceania Program Director Elena Aniere attending the meeting,’ says Jenny Dudgeon, Slow Food Hobart convivium leader. ‘Their role at the meeting is to discuss the Slow Food objectives for the next four years, including a focus on the networks in defence of food biodiversity — the Ark of Taste and the Presidia — as well as Terra Madre, a world network of food communities that unites small-scale producers, chefs, academics and youth in more than 150 countries.’

The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity’s Australian Ark Commission chair, food writer and broadcaster Cherry Ripe, will provide an update on the Ark of Taste project — a worldwide catalogue of artisan foods, edible plant varieties and animal breeds at risk of being lost. She will also present a challenge to food communities in Australia: to help increase the Australian contribution to the international Ark of Taste catalogue during the next four years, a goal set last October at the Slow Food international congress.

Other projects to be discussed include food and taste education, building food networks and community advocacy. Across all of Slow Food in Australia’s work, the emphasis is on connecting farmers, producers, cooks and consumers to work together to defend the country’s food diversity and heritage, both introduced and indigenous.

Delegates will enjoy at MONA an Ark of Taste dinner created by chef Philippe Leban to showcase Tasmanian Ark products: Dairy Shorthorn cattle, Wessex Saddleback pigs and the island’s iconic Leatherwood honey. Slow Food Hobart will also showcase local Tasmanian produce during a Taste of Our Island dinner in collaboration with students from Hobart’s premier hospitality training college, Drysdale House, and chef Nick Cummins.

The Hobart Slow Food convivium has been part of the international Slow Food movement since 1998.  It regularly organizes events to promote local farmers and food producers and develops projects such as school gardens to educate young people in how their food is grown. In 2014 Slow Food Hobart plans to lead a Tasmanian delegation to the biennial Terra Madre world meeting in Italy to showcase Tasmania’s unique food communities.

Hobart meeting 26-28 April 2013
Programme

Information links
Slow Food
Foundation for Biodiversity
Australian Ark of Taste
Slow Food Hobart facebook

Australian media enquiries
Slow Food Hobart convivium leader
Jenny Dudgeon
Email
M 0438 283 872

Slow Food Australian international councillor
Amorelle Dempster
Email
M 0427 548 886

International media enquiries
Slow Food International secretariat
Paola Nano
Email

Dairy farmers face ruin amid supermarket war — ABC News report

Michèle Mesmain of Slow Food International presented the website, which will be available in five languages and includes sections on health risks and benefits, local campaigns, ‘Raw Milk Heroes’, legislation, education and animal welfare. Italian researcher Roberto Rubino talked about the importance of maintaining the biodiversity of milk, which naturally contains many dozens of strains of positive bacteria.

One of the countries with the strictest legislation against raw milk is Australia, which produces 12 percent of the world’s cheese. Exporting, producing and selling raw-milk cheeses, with a very few exceptions, is illegal. ‘We’ve been fighting for change since 1996 and the government hasn’t really listened at all,’ said Australian cheesemonger Will Studd. ‘It just announced last week that they’re recommending no major change to the current situation.’ He said the sale of raw milk would become a criminal offense. ‘Our example might be followed in the USA, perhaps in Europe. It is worth
fighting for the right to a choice.’

The situation for raw-milk cheesemakers in the United States is indeed precarious, as cheesemaker Mateo Kehler explained. ‘The Food and Drug Administration is proposing doing a risk assessment which will lead to changes in the next 12 to 18 months.’ Currently cheeses can be made from raw milk if they are aged for at least 60 days, but that could change. However,he  was generally optimistic. ‘There¹s a revolution happening outside the control of the government. People are voting with their forks and making choices about how they want to feed themselves and their families.’ He
concluded: ‘If it’s possible to sell sushi and oysters, it should be possible to sell safe raw milk.’

Elisabeth Ryan coordinates a campaign in Ireland against proposed changes to the law that would make it illegal to sell liquid raw milk. She said the Irish authorities wanted an international image of Ireland as a safe food country. ‘This ‘sterilisation’ of food trumps quality,’ she said. ‘We need to find a way to convince the government that we can minimise the risks relating to raw milk. It’s estimated that 100,000 people in Ireland consume raw milk and we’ve only had two cases of illness from raw milk in the last 10 years.’

Ryan works for Ireland’s Sheridans Cheesemongers, and one of its founders, Seamus Sheridan, also gave his perspective. ‘Here in the Langhe you produce beautiful wine. I don’t think it should be pasteurised. In Ireland we
produce the most beautiful milk in the world and I believe that farmers should have the right to sell it safely however they want,’ he said. ‘We must fight for the biodiversity of our farmers, foods and agriculture and for pleasure and taste.’

The Netherlands’ aged artisanal gouda presidium coordinator Marjolein Kooistra described a different set of concerns. The sale of raw milk was not a big issue in her country, she said, but the main problem raw-milk cheesemakers faced was cheeses being made with heat-treated milk and being falsely sold as raw milk.

Piero Sardo, president of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, brought the discussion to a close with some final words. He blamed industrial dairy producers for imposing pasteurisation and lobbying against raw milk. ‘We had 10,000 years of raw-milk cheese before Pasteur, and we’re still here,’ he said. ‘Europe hasn’t been stricken by  epidemics. We’re the only  ones who can stand up against this. They can’t force us to eat sterile food, but nobody is going to defend us. We have to do it ourselves, by choosing, protesting, organising events, campaigning and refusing to eat plastic cheese.’