Food Fight

Thursday 6 - 6.30 pm

In English

Food Fight serves a weekly feast of slow food for thought for guerilla gardeners and grassroots gastronomes.

Presented by Leanne McLean, Pauline Rankin, Rachel O'Connell, Helen Lobato and Louise Merrett.

Past presenters Andrew and Hannah are pictured above.

Email Food Fight

CRAM Guide June 2008

Greenwash The White House and you might get a greenhouse, but not the kind you’d like to raise your seedlings in. Unless of course you like your patented plants genetically engineered to be sterile, drug-dependent and manufacturing pesticides and pharmacueticals.

Fortunately 3CR’s Food Fight is taking apart the corporate spin and exposing the corporate hi-jack of sustainable agriculture. From the UN’s industry-sponsored pro-biotech World Food Programme feeding GMOs to schoolkids in Nigeria via the school meal programme to attempts to silence dissenting scientists through to DIY permacultural alternatives, Food Fight serves a weekly feast of slow food for thought for guerilla gardeners and grassroots gastronomes.

Food Fight lead the way in promoting sustainable, seasonal eating.

Tuesday Breakfast presenter Elanor McInterney had a chat to Louise Merrett about why she joined Food Fight in 2006….

“I started volunteering for 3CR. I just wanted to learn about community radio, because I think it’s one of the best organisations in terms of how it’s been able to survive over thirty years without funding. And I was asked to join Food Fight because I’m part of a group called the Preserving Ladies’ Guild and because I’ve been working in the organics industry for about ten years now.”

“Organics is all about seasonal, and it’s much better for our health. It’s much better for the world in general for people just to be eating seasonal foods. You go crazy when it’s in season - you preserve it, cook it, make jams out of it, freeze it and you also eat it as much as possible during that period!”

The Preserving Ladies’ Guild is a group started by Louise and six friends. “We meet quarterly, or seasonally. We preserve on our own and then we have a meeting. We bring seven jars of what we’ve made plus a tasting jar. And then we give each woman a jar that we’ve made and we have one to taste that night. So we just eat and drink, talk about life.”

A commitment to eating seasonally will require more of your time Louise has found.

“I’ve had to slow down my life to be able to do those sorts of things in my life. Something will take three or four hours to prepare, to actually get the whole thing done, sterilised, cooked, sealed and put away. It takes a long time and I think it’s hard, when people are busy. I think we all expect so much of ourselves, to be doing so much more than what our parents and what our grandparents would have been doing so of course we go for the most convenient option which will be pre-packaged food or just a quick meal instead of eating seasonally.”

It may be time consuming, but Louise thinks it is necessary that people change how they consume food, and how they think about what they eat.

“I absolutely love food and organic food is incredible, but another reason (for my eating seasonally) is there are these networks that are set up where you help a farmer with their farm by buying their produce - the most local farm - you help a shop stay in business by buying from that shop - which is a local shop you can walk to - all that sort of stuff. So if anything really does go wrong where we can’t use transport anymore, because it’s too expensive or if there are these major catastrophes that people are talking about with global warming, the impact on our lives will be much less because we’ve already worked out what are the most important things in our lives, and all those things are already in place.”

It’s not a new temperance movement, but Louise sees benefits in the restraints of eating seasonally.

“Eating seasonally is good because it gives people an idea that you can’t always get what you want just because you want it. And when you do get what you want, you might as well just go, ‘That is fantastic and I love it, but this will pass’. That season will pass then you go into another season. There’s certain vegetables or fruits that you love about that season, and you enjoy that season. And so I think that there are good things that people learn about life in general by eating seasonally. And then learning - like if you’ve got an overabundance of zucchini, - how many different meals can you make with zucchini?! And so we also like to present recipes, and different ways you can cook the food that’s in season so that you’ve got as many ideas as possible when food’s in abundance.”

Educating consumers about organics, farm-to-table, is also part of Food Fight's role.

“On Food Fight we like to talk to farmers about their farming just so people have a better idea of why farmers make the decisions they do. What actually goes in to farming, how difficult it is, and how much money it actually costs, so that when they do go to the shop and they see the price of the produce they go, ‘that’s actually quite reasonable, considering.’ Just talking to farmers is really good because then as consumers we can find out about all the work that goes behind our food.”

Consumers are getting the message more than governments about the importance of supporting local organics networks according to Louise. “The best way to vote in a capitalist society is how you spend your money.”