City east becomes the epicentre for community food systems

COMMUNITY FOOD SYSTEMS are really happening in Sydney’ eastern suburbs. There’s recently been a blossoming of them as more and more people seek ways to obtain the foods they really want.

This is evidence of the increasing interest in the food we eat, an interest that is becoming manifest in the form of community food and home gardens, community food buying groups, organic home delivery services and in participation in local government training such as Randwick City Council’s Sustainable Gardening course.

It is also reflected in events such as the Sydney Food Fairness Alliances‘ Food Summit of 2009.

Connecting with food

Before Brock sets out from the Blacktown depot, the produce delivered by farmers from the Sydney region has been packed into boxes and stacked ready for loading into his van. That takes a little hard work that can be more than a little sweaty in summer, but soon the boxes are stacked in the somewhat aging van and then its on the road to meet the challenge of negotiating the chaotic and congested traffic arteries of the metropolis.

Setting up the feedback board at the Food Connect city east City Cousin.

This happens weekly as Brock sets out for the City Cousins to deliver the food boxes pre-ordered by Food Connect members. The City Cousins are drop-off points for Brock but collection venues for members where they pick up their box of largely organic, largely local and seasonal foods.

Food Connect Sydney is the latest community food initiative to take hold in the Eastern Suburbs. It’s still in its early phase and is striving to improve the content of its weekly food boxes.

As Food Connect Sydney organisers, Julian Lee and Tsung Xu point out, theirs is a little different to other food box systems because it sources most of its supply from farmers within the Sydney region. In adapting the community-supported-agriculture (CSA) model and drawing their supply from many farmers rather than the single farmer that CSA’s usually obtain their supplies from, Food Connect escapes the vulnerability that comes with the traditional model.

The organisation’s mission is to provide fresh, good food to the city’s eaters and at the same time provide the region’s farmers with a fair return so as to sustain them economically. Julian reminds us that the average age of the Australian farmer is in the mid-sixties and younger farmers are not being recruited in sufficient numbers to ensure the future of the family farm. An industry that is economically unviable is an industry unlikely to attract new, young farmers. For Julian, doing what he can to sustain the smallholder is a motivator of his involvement in Food Connect.

Because Food Connect supplies only local food that is in season, members face the challenge of learning to make a meal from what they receive in their food box. They get a little help from the recipes Food Connect distributes and, anyway, it is a challenge that some members enjoy. Evidence for this comes from comments by Food Connect subscribers.

Feedback solicited from members at one City Cousin collection revealed a range of attitudes towards the contents of the weekly Food Connect box. One woman said that the box forms the core of her family’s weekly food supply and that she supplements it with purchases elsewhere. Another member explained how he likes going online to hunt down recipes for what he finds in his food box and to learn about some of the less common vegetables. Another said that the contents push him to think about what to cook — last week there were a number of eggplants, so he stuffed them and made a meal of it. Another discovered the culinary joys of amaranth leaf sauteed in olive oil. One said that some vegetables in an earlier delivery were a little squishy while others have noted the improvement in contents. A woman subscriber explained that Food Connect is in its start-up phase and so she accepts variation in what is supplied from week to week and, anyway, what is delivered depends on the growing season.

So as Brock drives away from his City Cousin dropoff points, he leaves not only the food boxes for members. He also leaves a little challenge to members in devising creative ways to make a meal of what they receive. It is in accepting this challenge that Food Connect increases the food literacy of city eaters.

Food Connect Sydney boxes of mixed vegetables and fruit are supplied in small, medium and large sizes.

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Rhubarb for the east

Soon, Rhubarb may be growing behind an Eastern Suburbs beach. It’s not the plant we’re talking about — though that possibility must remain open — it’s the food co-op that borrows its name from this far-too-neglected vegetable. Meet the Rhubarb crew and you quickly realise that here is an energetic and determined bunch who are as fresh as the vegetable they name themselves after.

Rhubarb has not yet come into existence but it is on its way. Their’s is not the vision of the once-a-week type of food co-op, the traditional model. Their vision is more like a regular greengrocer that is open through the week. You will notice the difference when you shop there — members will receive a discount on their purchases and, if they volunteer time and skills to keeping the co-op running, they may get a further discount. Such details are yet to be worked out, though this is the model that you find at Sydney’s other shopfront food co-ops — Alfalfa House in Enmore, Green Tucker Store in Forestville, Blue Mountains Food Co-op in Katoomba and Manly Food Co-op on the northern beaches.

Like most of these, Rhubarb plans to stock foods in bulk, with members bringing their own refillable containers so as to reduce packaging waste. Waste minimisation is an ethic that pervades many food co-ops.

Food co-operatives are not something new in our cities. They are are member-owned enterprises and some, like the Clarence Park Food Co-op in suburban Adelaide and Sydney’s Alfalfa House have been around for decades. They were social enterprises on the social fringe when they started all that time ago, and now they are social enterprises that are part of the social mainstream. Why? Because innovative ideas that capture the public imagination travel from fringe to mainstream over time, and because those social innovators of the early 1970s who started those first food co-ops are today’s mainstream suburbanite. The idea has traveled with them through life.

Now, the Rhubarb Food Co-op crew is searching for a shopfront premises from which to trade.

Shopfront food co-ops offer social values other that cheaper access to good food. They are a means through which members learn to cooperate and make decisions together. Co-ops also offer work experience to members that seek it. Sales, stocking, ordering, display and all of the other skills that go into operating a small food retail business are to be gained. There’s also accounting, promotion, marketing and communication roles to be filled. These roles the Rhubarbians have yet to fill.

Established systems

There’s a public school in Randwick where, if you visit around 6pm on a Monday evening, you encounter something of a busy scene.

It’s like this… there’s a table stacked with open boxes containing a variety of fresh vegetables and fruit delivered earlier in the day by an organic food wholesaler. Around this people move is a minor flurry, taking vegetables, herbs and fruit from the boxes on the table and counting them into large laundry baskets arrayed in a circle around the central table. When this whirlwind of activity ceases, members of Sydney Organic Buyers Group Randwick pack the contents of the laundry baskets into boxes or large bags they have brought along. This is something of a social activity; people talk and catch up while moving fresh food from box to box. Surely no workplace was ever so convivial.

Sydney Organic Buyers Group Randwick has been trading for around three years and is one of three such enterprises in the city — the others are in Kirribilli and Leichhardt. Although the group might appear similar to Food Connect Sydney, there are two points of difference: the first is that it is the members who come along early who pack the food delivered by the wholesaler into individual orders, whereas Food Connect boxes are packed at their depot; the second is that Sydney Organic Buyers’ members do not always know where their food come from, whereas Food Connect’s policy is to source as much food as possible from growers in the region. This gives Food Connect the edge with buyers wanting their money to support local growers and a local food industry.

For some Sydney Organic Buyers Group Randwick members the arrival of Food Connect presents something of a dilemma — stay with the buyers group or migrate to Food Connect. That, as they say, is the question.

Not all that far from Sydney Organic Buyers weekly food box pack-and-pickup is Thoughtful Foods Co-op on the UNSW campus. Walk into their small shopfront on their weekly open day and you find that this place, too, is busy, though in  a less intensive way than Sydney Organic Buyers. People decant dry goods like lentils, chickpea and grains from bulk containers into their own reusable jars and bags while others collect their preordered boxes of fresh foods on the table outside.

For new social enterprises like Food Connect Sydney and Rhubarb Food Co-op, breaking into the community food market in the city east will mean developing their own niche in what seems to be an increasingly fragmented mix of enterprises.

The DIY food approach, community style

If you want to know why some people would rather grow some of the food they eat rather than simply and more conveniently, perhaps, buy it, you would have to wander down to the Randwick Community Organic Garden on a weekend day. Trouble is, you would probably get as many different answers as there are gardeners to be asked.

Randwick is the oldest community garden in the city east, tracing its evolution back to a permaculture design course in 1994. The garden moved to its present site just over three years ago according to Emma Daniell, who has been with the community garden almost since its inception. In that short three years she has seen it bloom in both plants and people and, with a memembership of around 90, a third of whom could be classed as regular, enthused gardeners, the garden is very well used. Now, with an additional four community groups knocking on council’s door seeking assistance in finding land, council is responding with the development of a policy on community gardening and a process to accept and make decisions on applications.

Farming in the suburbs — Randwick Community Organic Garden is an edible forest.

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Randwick is one of three community gardens in the urban east. There is one in Waverley Council area and a new one — Paddington Community Garden — that received the assistance of Woollahra Council to become established only a couple years ago.

Creating food literacy

Food literacy is the understanding of how the food gets from the farmers paddock to your plate. It is also a general knowledge of the trends in food production and distribution in the city, country and planet. Interestingly in the city east region it is Randwick Council that is developing the food literacy of citizens.

Council is doing this through its Sustainable Gardening and Living Smart courses. The gardening course, now in its fifth year, is suitable for community gardeners as well as home gardeners wishing to gain basic skills in growing. It also caters for home growers of native and exotic plants, however, a substantial portion of the course focuses on food growing and features topics such as soil improvement, compost making, managing a worm form and basic botany. The Living Smart course, presently in its pilot mode, does not teach food growing but introduces broader issues to do with food such as the future of Sydney’s food system and the regional food economy it supports.

A food future in the urban east

Together, these community and council-based food initiatives are starting to create the basis of a community food culture in the urban east. This is not a gourmet culture or one based on convenient visits to the supermarket. It’s a socially aware food culture that seeks its own type of intervention in the food system. Sure, it’s early days. These things take time to evolve and, like any other social movement made up of diverse streams, there’s no way of telling how it will shape up.

For Brock loading his van to make his Food Connect delivery to the city east City Cousin, for Emma cultivating the soil of her allotment at Randwick Community Organic Garden while she keeps a keen eye on the whereabouts of her daughter, to the convivial scene as members of Sydney Organic Buyers Group pack their weekly food boxes, the awareness of being part of some larger trend in urban food systems might not be prominent as they go through their work. But that, exactly, is the reality… it’s as yet an incipient reality, but an authentic reality none the less.

When it comes to food, something different, something new is stirring in the city east.