Edition 27
Food Chain
- Published 2nd March, 2010
- ISBN: 9781921520860
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
Food Chain explores the dimension of this looming problem, and our complex relationship with the food we eat and the food we drool over.
The source, supply and price of food is likely to change significantly. Policies to reduce the impact of climate change will have a profound impact on the food supply here and around the world. Food is particularly vulnerable to global warming. Droughts, storms, pestilence and the increasing cost of fuel are already taking a toll on the reliable supply of affordable food.
Food Chain explores the dimension of this looming problem, and our complex relationship with the food we eat and the food we drool over.
In a stimulating lead essay Margaret Simons explores the complexity of the Murray Darling river crisis and its impact on the security of Australia’s food bowl. This essay will provide a new framework to thinking about sustainable food production and contemporary policy debates on food security. Ranging from the farm to the fridge, this essay will change the way you think about what you put in your mouth.
Food Chain will range widely across the whole food chain from farm gate to supermarket shelves with a national and global perspective. It will bring the abstract discussion of global warming to the dinner table and bring it to life with new urgency and immediacy.
This issue promises to be an agenda setting contribution to the most urgent discussion in Australia at the beginning of 2010: what is to be done about climate change and how it will affect us all.
In this Edition
Beyond the recipe
‘EATING IS NOT merely a biological activity, but a vibrantly cultural activity,' the food anthropologist Sidney Mintz reminds us. Our eating and shopping choices are now frequently imbued with complex moral choices. Should we, for example, be buying locally produced foods, with all the...
Re-thinking animals
Recognising that animals have consciousness is a huge step for humans, and dangerous, too, as it might well undermine not only traditional thinking but our traditional means of survival – that is, what we eat.
Sustaining a nation
WE VISITED OUR relations in spring last year. They raise their living from the central western plains of New South Wales, near Forbes. This is not the kind of country where city folk buy hobby farms, or aspire to holiday homes. A day's drive...
Trouble at dolphin cove
IN A STORY by Ryunosuke Akutagawa called ‘The Spider Thread', the thief and arsonist Kandata is writhing in hell with all the other sinners when the Lord Buddha happens to look down from paradise. Buddha knows, as one who knows everything misses nothing, that...
Fishing like there’s no tomorrow
IN THE CITIES and the suburbs of the affluent world, the fish are waiting. Across the cold counters of supermarkets and specialist costermongers, fillets lie translucent on the ice, sparkling like champagne; effete king prawns in pretty pink piles, squid in creamy ringlets, mounds...
Food in the age of unsettlement
I HAVE THREE personas: designer-educator, sustainment theorist and forest farmer. The farmer came first. My grandfather was a market gardener who taught me to grow vegetables before I went to school. More than half a century later, I'm still doing it. The garden at...
Food security in the Arctic
IN 1847, FOUR years after being stood down as lieutenant governor of Tasmania, Sir John Franklin died at the other end of the earth trying to find the Arctic's fabled North-West Passage. He and his crew were too proud to ask the local Inuit...
Feeding the world
NEVILLE SIMPSON IS not your typical cotton farmer. He doesn't hold a university degree, nor does he command tens of thousands of hectares. He doesn't have time for cotton-industry PR, and he doesn't talk fast. He's not American or British, and neither is his...
Creating sustainably productive cities
THE SCHOOLBOYS LAUGHED when they were told apples grew on trees. ‘Well, where do you think they come from?' I asked. Looking at me as though I was from another planet, one replied slowly, ‘From the supermarket, of course, Miss.'It is a funny story,...
Backyard gardens
WE RARELY TALK sensibly about food – the throwaway line ‘food for thought' is about as close as we come to connecting thinking with eating. This isn't an attitude we can afford any longer. Our food production and distribution systems, and all the cultural...
My happy Cold War summers
SINCE EARLY CHILDHOOD, I have had a certain perception of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. Not because I showed particular interest in politics and the military instead of soccer, cowboys and Indians, but for the simple fact of geography. My maternal grandparents...
Smallgoods
TELL ME A a story, my daughter says, and even though I don't feel like telling stories tonight, I still tell her about the best way to eat smoked mackerel.First, I say, you have to travel back in time to 1974, when I was...
Scenes from life with father
PICTURE A WINTER'S evening in a kitchen in Wellington, New Zealand. An Antarctic wind stalks the house, rattling windows in its quest for a way in. I'm sitting at the table while my meal goes cold. My brothers bolted theirs down an hour ago...
Born in Vietnam, made in Australia
Selected for Best Australian Essays 2010 MY PARENTS ARE known as members of the ‘first generation' of Vietnamese refugees, who came to Australia after the Vietnam War. I, however, am known as part of the ‘1.5 generation'. Born in Vietnam, made in Australia. We are...
In the apple orchard with Win and Petal
ON THE FINAL evening of our week away, I took a plastic bag bulging with broad beans out to the veranda of the holiday house. There in the twilight I set to the fiddly task of separating the pale fleshy bodies from their fibrous...
Hunting with the boys
AS SOON AS we heard the growl, Hans released the safety on his rifle and, in the same motion, swung it from its cradled position across his chest and aimed toward the bushes. ‘Step back...slowly,' he cautioned. We took two backward paces. Behind us,...
Hospitality
I WAS FIFTEEN when I stood inside my first restaurant kitchen. My mother, who had replaced the red dirt of Mount Isa for the red lights of a different town, had organised this, my first full-time job. I had no comprehension of what was...
Between two worlds
IT IS CHILLY in Florence when we get off the fast train up from Rome. The calories from the rushed breakfast, the café latte in the dining car as the sere landscape whizzed by, are fast wearing off as our taxi crosses the river...
Food and prayer
LIKE A HINDU goddess, the scrawny old cook seems to have multiple arms. In no time flat, she's fried the prawns and the orange curry paste and is hurling noodles into her enormous wok. She splashes in a dark-coloured sauce and pumps up the...
How many miles?
AT THE DELICATESSEN counter of my local Woolworths supermarket – which promotes itself as ‘the fresh food people' – in the inner-Sydney suburb of Balmain, I saw some fillets of firm white-fleshed fish for sale. They were, said the caption on the tray, ‘Nile...
A taste of home
THE FIRST TIME I visited the Matthew Talbot Hostel, in the inner-Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo, was Christmas 2005. My husband had received a thirteen-kilo ham from his boss. As I'd already ordered a five-kilo ham, we thought we'd give the larger chunk to the...
From harvest to market
BETWEEN THE SUPER – and the farmers' markets is the middle ground – on which growers too small to deal with the supermarkets but with harvests too big to move at a once-a-week market stall find a fit with the new corner stores.Not so...
Tulips to Amsterdam
TASMANIA'S LABOR PREMIER, David Bartlett, was sensitive to the critical attention his state has long attracted on the mainland when he addressed the National Press Club in October last year. Challenging the national stereotype that Tasmania is a backwoods basket case, he pointed to...
The wedding speech
IT WAS A long time ago and we were unemployed. Me and Mike were sitting in his carport drinking. That was what we did, back then, most nights, when we were unemployed. Problem was we had Ronald Stott with us, and he was getting...
Milk
IN THE BEGINNING, my mother took the form of a book. A 220-page paperback, with a cream and orange jacket, and the imprint of a small milk-bottle-shaped bird. A Narrow Street, boasted the sans-serif title that stood in for her eyes, and at the bottom,...
The secret life of veal
SHE STRUCK ME as attractive in a certain way, the way the head of a well-made axe can be attractive, hard angles matched to a purpose. She talked about modelling, though she never called herself a model. She said her name was Destiny, though...
Featured Contributors
David Ritter
David Ritter is the chief executive officer of Greenpeace Australia Pacific.
Cameron Muir
Cameron Muir's essays and reporting have appeared in Griffith Review, Meanjin, Inside Story, Overland, The Guardian, Australian Book Review,...
Pauline Nguyen
Pauline Nguyen, is the author of Secrets of the Red Lantern.Along with recipe writers Luke Nguyen, Pauline's brother, and Mark...
Natasha Cica
Natasha Cica is founding director of change consultancy Kapacity.org. Until 2014 she was the founding director of the Inglis Clark Centre....
