ELAINE REEVES

MORE than all the hitech processing plants, the slick retailers, interviews with high-powered executives, the trade fairs and learned papers at conferences, it was Italy that got to Hazel MacTavish-West on her 10-week vegetable mission to Europe.

The Hobart food scientist and consultant to food and farming business was on a Churchill Fellowship in March and April this year to “investigate opportunities to incorporate more vegetables and fruit into value-added, convenient healthy foods”.

But in Italy she was wowed by the “huge quantities of vegetables being eaten in restaurants” and sold in markets. There was no sneaking of them into snack foods because Italians did not eat on the go (gelato excepted) between their three meals a day.

Unexpectedly, she saw vegetables she had never seen before, such as puntarelle, a chicory with swollen stems that “looks like an alien”.

Italians took a wholistic view of food and had a much better understanding than we do of where it comes from, which usually is close by.

But not always — a Bologna mushroom grower distributes widely but regionalism comes into play in that 1-3cm mushrooms go to Puglia, 4-5cm to Sardinia and the 8-10cm ones to Sicily.

Such was Hazel’s enthusiasm researching in Emilia-Romagna that one person asked her if she was “on some sort of Eat Pray Love tour”.

Italy was the last country she visited and she returned believing: “We need to get back to basics: back to growing our food ourselves, or at least more locally. Back to appreciating real and simple food.

“Back to simpler preservation procedures that work and which have stood the test of time rather than looking for the next new technology on the block.”

She feels there is a danger she will be excommunicated from the scientific community.

But Italy was not her only experience of finding modern businesses adopting oldfashioned virtues.

She was surprised by how many products in the UK and Ireland were made or packaged by hand.

This reduced capital investment and made the businesses nimble in responding the churn of new products — only 24 per cent of new products in the UK are successful.

In the UK it was rare for vegetables that were not valueadded in some way to be sold at a price that covered the cost of production. And when they were, at tiny profit margins, sheer volume of production was all that made it profitable.

And in many high-volume big companies, machines were replacing people. Producer/ processor Barfoots UK, had introduced mechanised harvesting of green beans, and reduced the workforce from 170 to four — paying for the equipment in two weeks.

The converse of this was other companies consciously resisting the drift to casualisation of the workforce. An Irish farming family growing root vegetables started valueadding as Mash Direct in 2003. Now they employ 180 staff, none of whom is a casual.

Other companies also followed this policy, feeling it gave them the ability to meet accreditation standards of the retailers “as all staff knew what they were doing all the time”.

Hazel was also surprised to see companies using tried and tested food processing equipment such as pasteurisation and hot fill rather than new technology, preservatives or gas flushing. This kept prices down.

At the Limerick Institute of Technology in Ireland, a team of home economists, as opposed to scientists, was doing product development — and using common-sense principles rather than hot-off-the shelves technology.

The Irish government provided innovation vouchers of 5000 euros before product launch, and a partnership with a local supermarket group test allowed the products to be tested in store.

“People getting vouchers were getting an awful lot of value for the money and it was making things happen — they were getting great products on the shelves and winning lots of awards,” said Hazel.

Hazel tasted a delicious Naked Burrito bowl by Wicked Healthy that contained 46 different plant-based ingredients and nothing else.

On the other hand, some plant-based foods masquerading as meat and made from microorganisms and deconstructed wheat, soy and pea proteins had complex ingredient lists, sometimes difficult to identify as food. Tofurkey anyone?