Terra Madre 2010 > food stories

Underground funding
06 Oct 2010 – WARM spring evening. Moths in the spotlight. Kangaroos below the garden wall, munching. You can hear them beyond the circle of the light. The mopoke must be perched again on the front gate. You can catch him through the dark, still air, calling for a mate. Saturday looms. We are hosting a lunch to raise the last of funds for Western Australian farmers, chefs and students heading to Terra Madre. It’s to be at New Norcia, Australia’s oldest monastery, deep in the heart of the wheatbelt. One of the monks, a former abbot, is to join us at the table among the splendours of some of Italy’s finest post-renaissance religious art. They have collected it for generations. There is a hunter in them. There is a little hunter in we all of us. The monks have hunted God and the spirit through an icon. We’re hunting money. Terra Madre is hunting shared ideas. And people will be hunting lunch.

It’s the night for mincing the wild rabbit, the first course. It was hunted, too, properly trapped, at Yealering. There are ten of them, and it’s taken more than half of yesterday and last night and today to defrost them. They’ve travelled a few ‘food miles’, but in Western Australia little distance at all. They are plump, shiny rabbits, with bright sinews and round, pink shoulders. They smell of freshly-killed fish and a hint of chicken. You can almost smell the fur of them, that edge-of-wild, yet soft, enticing coat that they have lost since they were trapped.

We have bolted the mincer to the old garden table. There are scales. The dog has found that it likes the rabbit bones and scraps of flesh that run down to the paws. The dog hunts rabbits in the paddock in the fading light of each afternoon. It is a game, not sport. In seven months he has caught just one. He was a rescue dog, a suburban dog, who probably never knew what it was to chase a wild creature. Now a farm dog, he is transformed. He seems a ‘thinker’ dog, reserved, yet bold when there’s a chance. He sits back from the table on the grass as the mincer-handle turns at the table’s edge. There’s the soft sound of gristle as the flesh threads below the screw. It is an old mincer with a small mouth.

Two rabbits, eight hundred and seven grams of mince. Rabbit meat from eight frames to go. The chef is to combine this slowly-gathering mince with organic berkshire pork raised by Annie Kavanagh, a Terra Madre delegate-farmer from Spencers Brook: ‘underground mutton’ and rare breed pig, together in a meat ball, with local prune chutney. As the handle turns, you wonder at the loss of this to many people. For most, as close as they come to raw food is that on a styrofoam tray, wrapped in cling-film, stamped with a barcode and bleeped through a check-out. It is the product of our industrially-farmed age. It is not a fat, springtime rabbit caught with a traditional snap-jaw trap. In some Australian places you can no longer hunt them, legally. Let alone eat them, this wild-food. They come not with a hygiene certificate, not with a barcode.

– Jamie Kronborg
Paulls Valley, Western Australia
Slow Food Perth convivium co-leader
ABC Pool Slow Food Pilgrims’ project co-ordinator

Can we meet?
07 Oct 2010 – THERE is some discussion going on across Australia about trying to make contact with our Slow Food neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region: New Zealand, Papua, Indonesia, East Timor, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Russia, Alaska, Canada, California, Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and the Pacific island states, with a view to opening up relationships and connections for the future. Rather than wait until we are all in a massive crowd, where we might well miss the opportunity of meeting with many of these people, we would very much like to make contact beforehand in order to be sure we plan to make time for each other when we get to Turin. We don’t want to miss this opportunity!

– Peter Kenyon
Slow Food Sydney member and Terra Madre food community delegate
Turramurra, New South Wales

Radio
14 Oct 2010 – BRADLEY Almond, producer of 7ZR Tasmania, is interested in doing an entire programme around the Slow Food movement next weekend on his programme. We just spoke then about the connection between Rodney Dunn and Séverine Demanet, The Agrarian Kitchen and the Slow Food movement.

– Jonathon Hutchison
ABC Pool website producer
Sydney, New South Wales

The core of it
21 Oct 2010 – WALKING back from Palaisozaki, we stop at one of ‘the Coles’ of Torino – Carrefour – a branch of the French supermarket chain. It is a massive supermarket, here in the land of the farmers’ market. Sydney organic grocer Peter Kenyon wants to feel the fruit. I want to buy an apple. Here is granny smith, fuji, and golden delicious. Delicious, but the fruit in the top crate are badly bruised. The Sydney organic grocer knows the trick. Lift up the top crate and check the apples in the crate beneath. Pale lemon-green apples which, like someone pleasantly surprised, have a blush of rouge on their upturned cheeks, rest in crate No. 2. Take two. Weigh two. A barcode, priced, spits from the scales. Eighty-three euro cents for the pair. Fifty-nine Australian cents each. Lunch in about thirty bites. The apple becomes a shadow of it’s former self.

– Jamie Kronborg
Slow Food Perth convivium co-leader
ABC Pool Slow Food Pilgrims’ project co-ordinator

Parca salata
21 Oct 2010 – ON a traffic island, in the centre of Torino’s busy Corso Unione Sovietica, slow food grows unkempt among the grass. Silene, hyssop, red clover, sage. Not sprayed, clipped and kempt. Just growing. Unfast.

– Jamie Kronborg
Slow Food Perth convivium co-leader
ABC Pool Slow Food Pilgrims’ project co-ordinator

Tcherni Vit green cheese
24 Oct 2010 – There are endless opportunities for meeting and learning. I tried a piece of what I assumed was, being at the Bulgarian stand, a feta and was instead hit by a smooth cheese that tasted like Roquefort. This is one of the few cheese that forms moulds naturally rather than being injected and is made in a small town in Western Bulgaria. Like many traditional foods by the time their discovered or finally valued, their producers are close to dying out themselves. The man in the man is Tsvetan Dmitrov who’s a biologist and town mayor. He’s taken responsibility for the cheese and encouraging others to make it – there’s no single technique so the more people making it, the more opportunity for diversity and success. The cheese itself is also being used as a mascot for efforts to get smaller production methods recognised in a state system that favours larger operations. They’re making progress and the cheese is getting attention and vistors for the small mountain village. It’s also one of the many small artisinal foodsfrom around the world protected by Slow Food Presidia. Tsvetan says it’s not financial help, but the moral support for his ideas and the opportunity to promote his cheese to wider audiences like the festival in Bra. And his is just one of hundreds of similar stories here…

– Anthony Georgeff
Editor spice magazine, Fremantle, Western Australia

Imperial honey
24 Oct 2010 – This is Japanese honeybees’ honey. This is actually from cherry blossom in the Japanese emperor’s palace in Tokyo. They have a special garden and we cannot enter, but the honey bees can. So this is imperial honey.

– Transcript of an interview between a Japanese beekeeper at Terra Madre and Peter Wolfe
Chef, Belli Park, Queensland
Terra Madre chef delegate