THE Australian Ark, Food Cultures, Traditions and Biodiversity Commission information collection project 2009-2010 engages Slow Food Australian convivia and members to document local agricultural and marine biodiversity – their food cultures, including food traditions, and foods at risk of loss – as candidates for the Australian Ark. The involvement of ethno-botanists is also needed to document traditional Aboriginal knowledge of plants and animals and their use. In future, praesidia may be established to assist groups of small producers in quality control and marketing.
Background
In Slow Food – The Case for Taste (Columbia University Press, 2001), Carlo Petrini described the progressive contraction of the whole complex of natural environments and living species of animals and plants. Metaphorically this was seen as the Great Flood in anticipation of which Noah constructed an ark. Since Petrini’s Manifesto dell’Arco in 1997, more than 500 foods have been placed in Slow Food’s metaphorical Ark of Taste using defined selection criteria. In parallel, many groups of small-scale producers have been assisted to form praesidia with expert help in quality control and marketing. Some foods overlap with the Ark although selection criteria may differ.
Together, the Ark and praesidia aim to assist the survival of food cultures and related biodiversity of foods at risk of loss from several factors including greater urbanisation, non-sustainable population growth, habitat destruction and increased predation by multinational corporations. According to Slow Food’s Foundation for Biodiversity, the Ark ‘identifies over 500 animal breeds, fruit and vegetable varieties, prepared foods and specific dishes and offers a resource for those interested in sourcing and promoting quality foods’.
The Australian Ark of Taste dates from 2004. Four foods have been included – the bunya nut from south-eastern Queensland, the Victorian Goldfields’ bull-boar sausage, Tasmanian leatherwood honey, and Kangaroo Island ligurian bee-honeys. The small number approved by the International Ark Commission can be attributed to several factors – a small number of nominations, inability of members of the Australian Ark Commission to meet, and possibly difficulty in conforming with international criteria. No praesidia have been established in Australia.
Beyond the two potential categories of Ark and praesidia, there is much cultural biodiversity in Australia that must be recognised and preserved. Both food genes and the knowledge embedded in food cultures are at risk of extinction from the global spread of industrial food production, including its monocultures, chemical herbicides and laboratory-based genetic modification of plants and animals.
Gary Nabhan, in Nabhan GP: Where our Food Comes From (Island Press 2009), quotes from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation: ‘Agricultural biodiversity is embedded in every bite of food we eat, and in every field, orchard, garden, ranch and fish pond that provide us with sustenance, and with natural values not yet fully recognised. It includes the cornucopia of crop seeds and livestock breeds that have largely been domesticated by indigenous stewards to meet their nutritional and cultural needs, as well as the many wild species that interact with them in food-producing habitats. Such domesticated resources cannot be divorced from their caretakers. These caretakers have also cultivated traditional knowledge about how to grow and process foods; such local and indigenous knowledge – just like the seeds it has shaped – is the legacy of countless generations of farming, herding, and gardening cultures’. To this should be added marine biodiversity where the majority of species consumed by humans have been excessively harvested with the collapse of many traditional fisheries.
The resources of our planet have been used unsustainably as a result of population growth out of control, and a culture of exponential economic growth. These are the underlying causes of global warming and loss of biodiversity which our political and religious leaders have fostered in the past and which many now choose to ignore. Biodiversity of food will assist adaptation to future climate change.
The Ark’s role
The Ark, Food Cultures, Traditions and Biodiversity Commission will report to Slow Food Australia and to the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity in Tuscany. They have approved its establishment as a programme of Slow Food Australia and its convivia. It will establish links with other organisations in Australia such as The Rare Breeds Trust; Seed Savers Foundation, the Country Women’s Association; local and national government departments; and universities concerned with food, agriculture and fishing.
Food biodiversity: producers and produce database
Documentation of the very large number of species and cultivars of plant and animal foods produced in Australia, is necessary for providing regional guides to quality produce, for identifying related food cultures and traditions, and for selection of candidates for the Australian Ark.
Indigenous foods that are hunted or gathered are a separate category because many of them are not botanically identified and although this is necessary, priority should be given to documenting the traditional knowledge associated with them. This is because the holders of such knowledge are generally old with few years of remaining life.
All convivia are asked to compile information about quality produce from small producers in their geographical areas, where produced and by whom. Two websites are examples of information to be collected - www.localharvest.com.au and www.localharvest.org . The latter collaborates with Slow Food USA. The website is worth exploring in depth – it contains a wealth of information about producers and produce, and includes the USA Ark and Presidia foods
Recording data on producers and produce
Two forms for producers and produce are currently being tested. They will be subsequently distributed to interested convivia and members. Form 1 has information about a producer and where the produce comes from, soil type, micro-climate and form 2 with information about a product. A separate form 2 will be used for each product. A judgment of taste quality should be made if possible.
Food cultures and food traditions
Food cultures involve people and what they do with produce. Cultures are not static and their content varies with time. Much of contemporary food cultures involves industrial foods. They certainly are not Slow Food which promotes real food and not what Michael Pollan refers to as food-like substances found in profusion in supermarkets. Documenting food cultures is part of other projects of Slow Food Australia, but cultures can be identified at the same time as the produce of an area.
Food traditions may be a declining part of contemporary food cultures, although many survive. For example, the ‘pie floater’, a hot meat pie inverted into a bowl of thick pea soup, is a traditional street food still popular in Adelaide. Other food traditions are more widespread – for example lamingtons, which are rectangular pieces of sponge cake, coated in chocolate and rolled in dessicated coconut. They are named after Lady Lamington, wife of a former governor of the State of Queensland. The central coast of NSW has Gramma pie, Gramma being a sweet pumpkin used instead of apples or stone fruit which grow poorly on the coast. Signs are still seen, simply advertising Gramma. Other traditions are damper and pavlova. The Country Women’s Association is likely to be an excellent source of local food traditions.
Australian Ark nominations
From the above information and other sources, Ark nominations will be made and assessed using the Slow Food Biodiversity Foundation’s five international criteria for the Ark of Taste. All of these are necessary, although circumstances in Australia may give more weight to some. The criteria are listed below, with comments in brackets on the bunya nut.
- Outstanding taste quality (in the terms of local tradition and uses): [yes].
- Linked to the memory or identity of a group: [yes, the Aboriginal people of historical south-eastern Queensland, ie from Grafton to Gladstone].
- Linked environmentally, environmentally and historically to a specific area: [Bunya pines grew in rain forests from Maleny to Gympie and west to the Dividing Range. Large numbers are found in the Bunya Mountains National Park in south-eastern Queensland].
- Produced in limited quantities by farms or small-scale processing companies: [yes, now, but Aboriginal harvesting preceded agriculture].
- Products must be threatened with either real or potential extinction: [threatened by clearing of forests and plantings in public spaces due to concerns from public liability and increasing costs of insurance for injury from falling cones weighing more than five kilograms]
Data collection forms
PDF version
Word version available by contacting the chairman and the points listed below.
Information
Emeritus Professor Robert MacLennan
Chairman
Australian Ark, Food Cultures, Traditions and Biodiversity Commission
T 07 3289 0160
Email