Back to basics

The second season of Farm To Fork focuses on where our food is coming from – host Courtney Roulston tells Danielle McGrane why that matters to us now more than ever.

T his year really marked the return of the home cook.

It’s been a silver lining to 2020, according to Farm to Fork host Courtney Roulston.

“I think it’s the first little bit of therapy people turned to, baking bread and cooking with their kids,” she said.

“And people that never cooked because they’ve been too busy, all of a sudden had six sourdough starters on the windowsill and have become expert bakers.”

It’s something the chef gets excited about because that’s what she’s trying to encourage in the TV show.

“That’s what Farm to Fork is all about. We’re all about home cooking and hopefully it will inspire people to get into the kitchen and to get a little glimpse into where the produce is grown on farms, and how it ends up on their forks at home,” Roulston said.

For a while, because of this strange year dictated by the pandemic, Roulston wasn’t even sure the show would get made.

“It was all up in the air for a little while this year as to whether we could or couldn’t film so it’s been made doubly nice that we even managed to get filming done this year,” she said.

It matters to her because of her passion for cooking, which she’s been doing since she was nine years of age, growing up on her family farm in country NSW.

When she filmed the first season of this show it brought her back to the farm, reminding her where the produce comes from and just how much effort it takes to produce.

“In season one, we travelled to a lot of farms down in Werribee, the cauliflower farms, the big Montague Orchards in Victoria – but with COVID we weren’t able to get onto farms for this season. But I think we were lucky we did a lot of it already and we could still tell the story of where the produce is coming from,” she said.

It was still an eye-opener even for her, to be reminded just what it takes to produce the food we buy in the supermarket.

“I’d never been to an apple orchard. I had no idea that