The real food revolution

Thriftiness is one thing, but cheapskates are a farmer’s pest, says agri-consultant Belinda Hazell

IT all comes back to the value of scratch cooking. That’s what they call dinner prep with fresh and staple ingredients in the UK.

“It’s become a thing,” agriconsultant and Tasmanian Women in Agriculture chairwoman Belinda Hazell says.

In Brexit-battered Britain, economic uncertainty is driving more people into recessionary-type behaviours. Good old home-cooking is one of them, saving households a quid on convenience foods.

Belinda was bamboozled when she first heard the term on a food-systems study tour of the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and New Zealand, funded by a Churchill Fellowship last year. She approves of the trend, though.

It’s not all about the price point. Another driver identified by the UK Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board last year is a rise in cooking for enjoyment (consider the rise of YouTube cooking tutorials) and cooking for health (delivering greater control and choice).

Belinda wants to see more pots and pans rustling around

Australia every night, seeing it as good for health, good for the vibrancy of our primary production sector and the best way of reducing food waste.

Each year, the average Australian household bins $3800 word of food groceries, according to food rescue group Oz Harvest, with the Federal Government estimating that food waste costs the Australian economy $206 billion annually.

Food waste is at the heart of Belinda’s quest to change the supply chain model in Tasmania — and around the country — to recognise the true cost to farmers of producing fresh food.

She absorbed a lot from European practices on her study tour.

“They recognise that for future food security farmers need to be paid what it really costs to produce the food,” she says.

“If we want Tasmanian farmers to grow in an agroecological way then, as a society, we have to be prepared to enable that.”

And a vital piece of the puzzle, she says, is strongly encouraging scratch cooking and backing it up with cooking education. A little bit of effort can go a long way, and competence in the kitchen begets thriftiness.

“There is so much food waste,” Belinda says. “We are losing the ability to understand good practical ways of purchasing and cooking food so that you can get a range of meals out of it, and not go, ‘well, I’ve eaten half the zucchini, I don’t think I need that anymore’ and throw it out.”

If people cook from scratch, she suggests, the reduction in food waste will offset a moderate price rise in fresh produce that will more fairly compensate the farmers, whose prices are so often driven down by the major supermarkets.

This in turn will enable the farmer to embrace more sustainable practices, even when that means some reduction in productivity.

Belinda thinks Tasmania needs policy change to help premium small and medium growers to flourish while maintaining their scale and focus on quality over volume.

“Policy has generally been around this doubling of food production, but we need to enable an environment where smaller producers can thrive without having to get into the corporate side of farming.”

Let’s make it easier for the tourists, new residents and export markets — who all come to Tasmania to connect with niche farmers — to do so, she says.

“We need that ability built into policy. Sometimes it’s about changing process around planning to enable value-adding to happen more easily with, say, on-farm experiences.”

Belinda loves sharing farmers’ rationale for their practices with the broader community wherever possible.

Her study tour investigated the way farmers can use quality assurance systems to stay ahead of social licence demands.

Generation Y is driving a shift to more ethical purchasing and, as climate change accelerates, the push towards a sustainable worldwide food system is on in earnest. For better or worse, consumers are agri-business’s biggest disrupters, Belinda says.

The problem as she sees it is that consumers expect farmers to change their ways without understanding a thing about farming, nor considering how they are to fund such changes.

She attributes the unrealistic demands to a city/ country disconnect, but fixedmindset farmers also do themselves no favours by viewing quality assurance systems as a compliance cost and nothing more.

“Compliance can be used as a business asset, and used to address the growing issue around social licence,” Belinda says.

That said, it’s hard to move beyond compliance when you are cash-strapped.

“There are a lot of farmers out there doing best practice, but we have a low-cost food model and we can’t sustain that,” Belinda says.