Chatter 43 Eating

An opinion piece, reproduced here with the authors permission, published in a medical newsletter called Australian Doctor set me off on this track.
Before long I'm going to write a sort of meditation on the subject of eating, cooking and dining which has spawned a small revolution in our lives. It's an endless subject filling our TV screens and newspapers, creating celebrities, turning housewives into authors, making would be thin children fat and demonstrating the wonders of globalization. That, how ever, is for another time.
This is what he said

Spots on the apples 23-Sep-2011

Dr Jon Fogarty

I have given up buying fruit and veg from supermarkets. I’m not convinced they really are the fresh food people.

I have a growing feeling that as the oranges become spot free, and the tomatoes redder, and the strawberries bigger, they all simultaneously become more tasteless.

In fact, I wonder if I did a blind test taste on supermarket fruit if I could pick a pear from an apricot.

I’m happy to buy toothpaste and baked beans and margarine from the big two, or three, or four, but I now buy my fruit and veg from the small organic shop.

Admittedly I can afford to do this. I don’t have three kids in tow with a need to do hit-and-run shopping. If organic food costs an extra few dollars I don’t care. Others don’t have this luxury.

I now buy meat from a small butcher’s shop where the butcher can tell me which farm the meat came from. He sells chutney made by a local. His wife makes casseroles ready to go.

The organic shop is a bit of a 60’s hippie affair. Joni Mitchell would have approved… there are plenty of “spots on the apples”. The shop keeper tells me that the oranges come from the last commercial orchard in this area.

Maybe I’m deluding myself but I think they taste great and they smell great. There are fair dinkum free range eggs from a farm, complete with the occasional remnant of hen poo on the shell. These are not fake “free range eggs” where free range means two square feet per hen.

In the organic fruit shop I can shop and get a coffee (organic), sit in a comfy chair and read the Saturday papers. The owners are not too purist. They provide a plastic bag without looking snooty.

I like it. I prefer the food; I prefer the taste; I prefer the smell. I like the conversation with the butcher and the organic hippie bloke and I don’t care a fig if it costs a dollar or two more.

I’m not sure if it’s healthier, but I think it might just be that too.

What do you reckon?