30 From Consumer to Citizen
FAKE FOOD
Is the human species being given a bit of a hint about something at this point? Amanda draws a long bow between viral pandemics, dust storms and fake food and decides that the consumer needs to get a grip. She has a few suggestions involving a Refractometer and a Brix reading that could give power back to the people at the storefront.
It’s all feeling a bit apocalyptic outside. In Geraldton on the WA coast we are hours into a dust storm with the constant clatter of Norfolk Island seeds on the roof and the smell of dust in my nostrils. So far none of the promised rain.
PUNISHING
I’m feeling a bit picked on. A viral pandemic, and a dust storm on a biblical scale. As a member of the human race, I think it is time for my mea culpa moment.
Dust obscures the silos from a house in Beachlands, Geraldton
I had time to clean out my pantry early on in the iso phase and have been living with some of the products that didn’t make it back onto the shelves. Particularly four packets of noodles-in-a-cup called something like Flavours of the East. I peeled a few layers of plastic and a metallic cover off four Styrofoam cups and arranged the contents on a plate. Four crispy stiff cones of noodles garnished with 8 gay little plastic packets of additives. I have been eyeing them off ever since. Six weeks in and nothing has changed. A few of those tattered, secretive little moths that live in dry foods have certainly hung around the cones, but no signs of life. It seems even moths have dismissed them as food or habitat for their larvae.
FOOLISH CARELESS BEHAVIOUR
You would have to think that any species that produces stuff like this and markets it as food is in trouble. And I am only talking about zero nutritional value, I’m not getting into the non-recyclable packaging all destined for a half-life of dozens of years in landfill.
Do you think it is over the top to link the massive dust storm now battering WA’s shores with fake food? With the dark mood that I am currently entertaining …I am thinking we deserve to be punished.
REDEMPTION
Now that’s out of the way, fellow sinners – and I mean sinners in the Eckhart Tolle meaning, as in those who have ‘missed the mark’ or ‘missed the point’; given that many of us don’t want to continue with our foolish, careless behaviour - where does salvation lie?
There is no one true path. But here is a useful direction. Soil as our true wealth. And food as medicine. It’s a start.
DR BRIX AND THE REFRACTOMETER
Here is what I suspect might be coming - a handy little tool that will enable the buyer of fresh food to get a nutritional reading on the fruit and vegies they buy. This is going to separate the sheep from the goats. I have been hearing about refractometers and Brix measurements for a while. There is a long and interesting history here – but I will simply make the jump from a German, Professor Brix who died in 1870 – to a US researcher, Dr Carey A Reams who carried what Brix discovered out of the vineyards into the whole fruit and vegie world, a hundred years later.
Professor Brix was the first to measure the density of plant juices in response to vintners and citrus growers looking for a way to determine quality in their produce. And produced a large machine – a hydrometer - which worked, but was cumbersome and required a lot of plant juice to get a measurement. A nuisance for the grower in the field who wished to get a quick reading from say, a single growing grape, to judge its potential quality, in the place it was growing.
Cut to the 20th century and Dr. Carey A. Reams, a Florida native and agricultural engineer who ran a large lab in Orlando from 1930s to 1960s. In his college years, Reams discovered huge differences in the mineral content of fruits and vegetables, depending on how and where they were grown. Reams was aware that citrus crop quality was directly proportional to juice richness. His years of laboratory experiments proved, over and over, that the mineral content of a crop marched in lockstep to the "heaviness" of the juice it contained.
He also noticed that although growers were talking about higher quality food production, no one had a method to measure and monitor such quality.
REAMS’S BIG IDEA
At some point, Reams had the idea to combine the refractometer with a Brix chart,that he had developed to cover most of the common fruits, vegetables and forage crops.
The story goes that Dr Reams walked into the office of ACRES USA and placed a simple chart on the editor's desk in the early 1970's. That chart correlated brix numbers with four general quality levels for most fruits and vegetables. Copied innumerable times, it has made its way around the world over and over’….you can probably tell that is a quote from my internet informer.
HOW DOES A REFRACTOMETER WORK?
Which brings me to the mechanics of getting a Brix reading. The process involves putting a few drops of plant sap onto a prism in the gadget and holding it up to a light source. Light passes through fluids at different speeds due to its density, and this creates the measurement. The Brix measurement is a sum of the weight of sucrose, fructose, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, proteins, hormones, and other solids in plant juice.….
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Now for the next step. How about these handheld refractometers, the gadget that can get a Brix reading, being made available to the shopper? Let’s put these gadgets in the hands of consumers and start a revolution.
This is the tool that theoretically enables me to make the best choices – between nutrition-less produce and food that will be absorbed and act as medicine for the ecosystem and my body. All to be established by an easy and immediate test. Shopping with science.
At the shopfront you can understand that this will be easy to do with a grape, or even a bit of mandarin, trickier to get liquid from a cauliflower, hence the garlic crusher and possible problems with the vendor.
DELICIOUSNESS
Everything tells me that deliciousness is what I am looking for….but here it gets complex. I have been assuming that deliciousness in a piece of fruit or vegetable is a fruit or vegetable in a really, really good mood…that fruit and vegetables are like us. When we are well cared for and given loving environments packed with interest, good nutrients, biodiversity above and below ground and the space and opportunity to grow as we wish – we too end up bursting with vitality and healthful nutrients (first choice for any shark, lion or crocodile).
Until now, I believed Dan Barber’s notion that nutrient-density has a direct relationship with deliciousness. Dan is a New York chef and food writer – read The Third Plate if you want a really entertaining ride around the world with Dan as he looks for regenerative farming practises. His aim, to support his local farmers to grow with whole-of-landscape sensibility, by reflecting all they grew in his menus. The last chapter of the book delivers a menu that works for his upstate New York restaurant while supporting farmers to grow with the rotations and bio-diversity essential for carbon building practices.
BULLET PROOF PROOF
But deliciousness might be a slipperier idea that I gave it credit for. I am looking for a bullet-proof way to discern produce quality. I can’t rely on my own senses – they are crude, not always to be trusted. My senses can’t tell me for example, if it is better to buy crisp vegetables grown with the full range of insecticides and herbicides or the wilted, sad looking organic produce? Although some would claim that our senses are all we need, good luck in a supermarket getting a good reading using sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste. Especially taste.
Will a refractometer give me the real juice, literally, and answer a lot of questions I have been asking?
Will it enable me to buy a whole Queensland Blue pumpkin, confident that I haven’t just bought about 20 tasteless meals? The first problem might be how to take a reading from a whole pumpkin without annoying the vendor. That perfect looking bit of broccoli? I know from my own garden that brassicas are particularly attractive to pests which means I am likely to be ingesting pesticides in an unlabelled bit of broccoli from a large scale horticultural operation? Is broccoli worse or better to eat at certain growing times if you are worried about chemical residue? Does the goodness inherent in the vegie cancel out some of the cell damage – in me and the vegie - that will occur from the sprays? WHAT THE BRIX READING CAN’T DO
As far as I know, here is something a Brix reading can’t do. It can’t judge the amount of industrial herbicides and fungicides etc I am ingesting with my fruit and vegie intake – unless there is a direct and satisfying correlation between nutrient deficiency and chemical inputs? That I don’t know. And when it comes to chemical residues, I am making quite a few assumptions, despite my best intentions…..
Questions. Questions. Perhaps I need a bit more information before I bring out the garlic crusher and the knife to test my pumpkin. Like all discussions involving food production, fruit and vegie quality is fast turning into a multi-dimensional problem.
COMPLEXITY HITS HOME
I had a conversation with Johnny at my local Drylands Permaculture farm that didn’t help in terms of simplification- and helped dampen my every-consumer-needs-a-refractometer call. A good one apparently costs 400 bucks!
Perhaps, Johnny suggested, I don’t need a gadget so much as more information about the food I am buying. Would it be better to buy a not-so-great carrot from someone who is building soil than a better tasting carrot from a grower who is stripping natural capital from a piece of land in a short-term horticultural practise? How much does the skill of the grower count or is this something impossible to evaluate because of all the growing conditions that need to be looked at? I have been told that good horticulturist is a highly paid beast.
I’ve drilled down to get to some basic questions you can usefully ask of your produce:
WHAT TO ASK A CARROT
What kind of production system did you grow in?
Are you locally grown?
If not, where were you grown? (Food miles and freshness are important.)
Are you from WA? Australia, at least?
How elaborate is the packaging and how many half-lives does it represent? Or is it biodegradable?
Oh, and what do you cost – in dollars, to add to the environmental tally?
The first question: which production system was used to grow the produce, reminds me of a great comment I saw on LinkedIn recently. The suggestion being that instead of farmers being forced to demonstrate to a governing body that they are not using herbicides, insecticides and industrial fertilisers is to make chemical growers list the inputs used in their production systems. A great idea.
And here are some associated questions about the production system we can consider in relation to whatever system is named: be it organic, biodynamic, regenerative or industrial chemical.
Is the grower increasing soil organic carbon as they farm? Or are they farming without return for the long-term health of the soil?? And why stop at the environmental questions – let’s drill down into the social...is this produce concerned about keeping the local IGA supermarket open? Do they intend to send their kids to the local school? This is a lot of questions to ask a carrot – but the skies the limit when it comes to environmental health, our health, right?
And this brings us to another crucial question. What matters to you most in all of this?
RANDOM FILTERS
Think of the other complicating ideological, political and cultural filters that go with the term ‘deliciousness’. I wouldn’t know a good paw-paw if it landed on me (although that might be a clue). But would go head to head with anyone on apple quality and consider myself to have a highly evolved nose for figs.
In my 20’s living in Melbourne I was served a dish at ThayThays, a much-loved Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond. I insisted the food was off. My senses, strongly backing my cultural upbringing, informed me that I was eating parsley rendered inedible by this weird Asian mob. Turns out I was reacting to coriander – a flavour I had never encountered before.
And here’s another filter. Does the producer get a good price for their produce in the shops you choose to frequent? That’s a big one. The politics of food.
Luckily some things are no-brainers. Don’t buy mandarins from Israel, they grow them in WA for heaven’s sake. Or walnuts from California. Or asparagus from Peru, ditto. But yeah, I know, this is low-hanging fruit – a bit of a break from all the tougher questions the concerned citizen has to grapple with at the shopface.
CONSUMERS AS POWERFUL CHANGE MAKERS.
Consumers are powerful change-makers. Being able to rage through our local stores, demanding to be treated as citizens nested in complex ecosystems, rather than consumers unattached to any issues other than saving money…this is the gift we can offer our food producers and the paddocks suffering under the weight of our ignorance about the reality of growing food.
Paddocks on the road to Mingenew, East of Geraldton a day after the storm
Let us give our farmers the supreme gift of paying attention to where our food comes from.
Armed with in-depth knowledge about the produce and with the courage to throw our weight around – the average citizen holds the keys to a better life in their hands.
THE POWER GADGET
I’m not sure how the local fruit and vegie vendors will work it, but sometime in the future it is conceivable we will be shopping with a hand-held refractometer.
Down the track, these things won’t be 400 bucks. Eventually, the way humans like to fiddle, it will surely evolve into an app or a personal implant. Before this, it will become a device mass-produced in, say…a place like Eneabba…? so it becomes cheap enough for many people to buy.
Science empowering responsible citizenship. This is the way to go.
