Welcome back to First, We Eat.
Soon after I sent last week’s newsletter about food regulations and raw milk a subscriber messaged to say that in their community trading raw milk is “widely accepted”. I was asking, in the newsletter, whether you’d consider breaking food safety and various environmental protection laws for the sake of your diet, and this subscriber responded that in their tight-knit community “no one would be offended or worried about breaking the law if someone asked for it [raw milk]”. There, trading is a way of life: meat, vegetables, milk – it’s all given back and forth among the families.
I asked if this trading network was limited to farming families or whether people from the nearest town(s) were included. Their response: “most people… would have access to the grey market if they wanted to.”
The grey market – trading and gifting foods outside of the regulatory and commercial system – has a long history in New Zealand, where I live. And in recent years, especially during the Covid lockdowns, the system has kept food on many people’s tables.
Recently, I had a conversation with a local kaumatua (Maori elder) about employment opportunities for young people in our district (for another project) and he mentioned that during the hardest months of Covid, hunters were going into the hills to cull deer (a pest in the New Zealand bush) to bring back “tonnes” of venison that ensured families had meat on the table. The quantity may have been exaggerated but the fact of food insecurity was very real.
There are countless stories I can recite about the benefits of the grey market, but when thinking about food justice — the theme for this week’s newsletter — it is, I think, an unreliable fix. For one, the grey market works well for people that have access to land because they have the means to grow or source something to trade or gift. But what if you don’t? What if you’re living in a large city, in a food swamp, to use Dr Christina McKerchar’s term? What you need then is a system change, not the phone number of a hunter.
The reason for system change is obvious: families are struggling to meet their weekly food bill. Fresh food purchased from New Zealand and Australia’s duopoly supermarket system is expensive. And despite recent supermarket reviews and calls for the creation or overhaul of National Food Strategies, the pace of disruption is glacial.
My weekly delivery from Misfit Garden is a budget saver, and look at how good these so-called “reject” vegetables are!
In the conversations I’ve had recently about food justice, the focus has been on consumers, or rather eaters. But if the goal is to create a system that provides universal access to nutritious, affordable and culturally-appropriate food while also ensuring the safety of those involved in the food production process then the farms, growers and landowners are central to the change.
A while back, I met Robert Pekin, the founder of the Brisbane food enterprise Food Connect. He shares my enthusiasm for food justice, and has been trying to shift the system for decades. Food Connect started as a retailer with a difference. Pekin created a direct farm-to-food hub system cutting out the middlemen: the wholesalers, processors, distributors and large retailers. The produce — bought as individual items or in a weekly box — was roughly the same price as what you would buy from the supermarket but the difference was that 40 to 50 per cent of the retail price went back to the farmer, rather than the typical 10-14 cents on the dollar. It’s a model that helped spawn food hubs around Australia.
Now, you might be thinking that it’s the consumer not the farmer or grower who most urgently needs a better return on their food dollar. Yet affordability is just one goal of the food justice movement. Nutritious, culturally-appropriate food produced safely are the others. Pekin told me that putting more money in farmers and growers pockets has the potential to disrupt the entire system.
Traditionally, producers have little to no negotiating power because there’s only one or two buyers willing to take their product ( I am writing specifically about Australia and New Zealand here, two countries that have ridiculously high retail concentration with just two companies controlling 80+ per cent of spend). In this duopoly, fresh produce is typically graded by aesthetic standards: no blemishes, no misshapes, nothing too ripe, nothing too big or small. But aesthetic perfection isn’t a measure of nutritional value, so the dumping that occurs when produce is rejected is a heart (and budget) breaker – for the eater and farmer/grower.
By taking produce supermarkets won’t sell, Pekin was giving the farmer the chance to forecast return, plan for improvements on the farm, grow a diverse range of crops that are suitable for a localised system, and pay themselves and their workers a living wage.
The food hub system draws on the learnings of community supported agriculture (CSA) – a style of food production that allows consumers to buy into a single farm, giving the farmer capital to produce food for their subscribers. But they’re broader. Pekin told me he wanted to change the whole foodscape so working with a range of farmers struggling to make a profit under the rigid retailer contracts was more impactful, and beneficial for consumers who “hated Coles and Woolies” (the two main supermarket retailers in Australia).
Today, one of Food Connect Foundation’s key initiatives is helping people set up Bulk Buyers Clubs with the express aim of reducing food bills. They’ve produced how-to guides to help people make the first step.
For those who aren’t tapped in a grey market, food hubs and bulk buyers clubs are an opportunity to disrupt the inequitable food system just a little. And I’m here for it. Is this what food justice looks like in 2023?
If you’re already part of a buyers group I’d love to hear how it’s working for you, the pros and cons.
In the meantime, I’m off to the supermarket to spend about $100 on the ten items I need before we receive our Misfit Garden vegetable box delivery this evening. That veggie box, full of rejected fruit and vegetables (see photo above), is the only thing keeping our food budget in check at the moment.
If you like what you’re reading here, please consider listening to my latest podcast First Eat, which I made in collaboration with Nakkiah Lui. It was recently shortlisted for an Association of International Broadcaster Award and two Australian Podcast Awards. All to say, it’s good.
Hacking the dairy trade: why you don’t need to pay $15NZD for a kilo of cheese
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