Within a month of returning to Sydney I witnessed another exciting move in community food systems—the launch of Sydney Food Connect. At last, it seemed, the idea of community supported agriculture (CSA) was catching on across the nation.

Sydney Food Connect's superb birthday cake... fruit and vegetables tumble from the horn of plenty as they tumble from the fields thanks to the hard work of Food Connect's farmers.

Fast forward a year to late-April 2011 and I find myself on a minor street in Rozelle, a street of industrial buildings quite close to the old coal burner that once fed electricity to the city. That power station lies dormant now, its windows smashed and its monolithic facade a testament to a fading age.

That street is deserted on a Sunday afternoon but follow the music and inside an anonymous industrial building you find festively and celebration. The occasion—the celebration of Sydney Food Connect’s first birthday.

Social business, social outcomes

Food Connect is no ordinary business… it’s what’s called a social business or a social enterprise… a business that has social goals. This gives it a value that run-of-the-mill businesses don’t have, a special social value. Social business uses business methods to achieve worthwhile social goals.

It takes time to establish a small business and Sydney Food Connect is still striving to establish itself as a viable economic entity. The purpose of Food Connect is to make the produce of regional farmers and food processors, such as bakers, available to city people who subscribe to the weekly box of mainly organic, local food. Sure, some foods like avocados and bananas come from further north in NSW, but as organic food entrepreneur, Tsung Xu—one of the people who has assisted Food Connect says—to some extent you have to supply people with what they want and those fruits are not farmed near Sydney.

Unlike other community supported agriculture (CSA) start-ups, Food Connect sources its produce from a larger number of farmers. This provides security of supply and avoids seeing the system collapse when a farmer who is the sole supplier to a CSA decides its time for a career change or to move on. This happened to an earlier CSA in Sydney.

This farming family supplies Sydney Food Connect from their urban fringe market garden.

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When farmer’s produce comes into the Rozelle packing facility a convivial crew divide it into small, medium or large boxes and these are taken by refrigerated truck (to keep it fresh and reduce wilt in Sydney’s summers) to the City Cousin pick-up points throughout the city. There, in the early evening, subscribers collect their boxes of organic, local food and in many City Cousins enjoy a few minutes of conviviality with other subscribers. Some bring their young children—at our Randwick City Cousin, the young boy of a subscriber usually insists of being taken outside to see the ‘windmill’, the wind turbine that spins high above the community centre.

The Sydney Food Connect crew.

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Pure permaculture

Avocado farmer, Sandra Fishwick of Red Plateau Organic Produce on the Comboyne plateau, supplies organically grown avocados to Sydney Food Connect. Comboyne is the closest supply of avocado to Sydney.

From time to time I get disappointed with environmentalists. You would think that they would know that food is a keystone resource and that food choices have a direct impact on the generation of greenhouse gases, on waste going to landfill (where it breaks down to release methane) and on water consumption, and that they would rush to join Food Connect because food procured closer to where it is eaten and that is grown organically reduces these impacts. It’s good that some do this—the Greenpeace office in Ultimo, Sydney, is a City Cousin and that makes a pleasant change to the organisation’s usual hobby of attacking Apple. What’s not good that many environmentalists don’t, either because they have no local City Cousin or they’re happy to shop in the supermarket.

Environmentalist failure to support social business is not new, as the case of EcoForest Ltd showed some years ago. Rather than invest their surplus income in an ecologically-managed forestry operation, they preferred conventional investments.

The argument that permaculture people should support Food Connect is a no-brainer. Food Connect epitomises permaculture founder, Bill Mollison’s statement that it can be better to buy your food from someone who has produced it ethically than to try to grow your own.

Because Food Connect buys from regional farmers (returning up to 40 centre in the dollar to the farmer, in comparison to the supermarket’s five of so cents) it supports Bill’s edict that we should return food production to the city, in this case to the market gardens on the urban-rural interface.

Bill and permaculture co-founder, David Holmgren, also said that permaculture initiatives should be financially viable. And, as a permaculture-influenced enterprise (Julian Lee, founder of Sydney Food Connect, is a graduate of the Permaculture Design Course), that is exactly what Sydney Food Connect is attempting at the moment. Food Connect is precisely the sort of social enterprise the two were talking about.

Music, food and a good time

Social entrepreneur and founder of Sydney Food Connect, Julian Lee.

Old industrial streets in the Inner West take on an empty, forlorn aspect on a quiet Sunday afternoon in mid-Autumn. But everything changed once I walked through that door… here was live music, dancing, the conviviality of the good company of fellow City Cousins, of Food Connect staff and Food Connect subscribers an their children and partners. Here too was more food than could be eaten at the event—the left overs were packaged as take-aways—here were brief and unplanned testimonial speeches and here was the Food Connect’s superb birthday cake.

That cake, I have to say, was more an edible sculpture than a common cake. The cabbage with its veined leaves was a true work of fine art…  culinary art, and the carrots were made of carrot cake, the lemons of lemon cake… it was a case of having to destroy the art work in order to enjoy it and its varied flavours.

So, one year on and Food Connect has built its own social network of City Cousins and city eaters but there remains more to do to increase the number of subscribers and recruit new City Cousins to take this innovative social idea into the suburban heartland.

Food Connect Sydney: http://sydney.foodconnect.com.au/

Food Connect accountant Margaret, on left, presents Lena, now leaving Food Connect, with flowers.

Bondi Food Connect City Cousin, Lance Lieber.

Robert Pekin, from the Food Connect foundation, started Food Connect in Brisbane in 2004.

Fiona Campbell, Randwick's Food Connect City Cousin, has a few words.

Food Connect Foundation's Robert Pekin conspires with Randwick City Cousin, Fiona Campbell.

Growcom wants one. So does the Public Health Association of Australia and sustainable agriculture expert at the University of Sydney, Bill Billotti. A national food policy, it seems, is something of a catchy idea. But what kind of policy are we talking about?

Growcom’s proposal focuses mainly on big agribusiness and food exports and it is the likely form of any food policy that would come from our national capital-amid-the-sheep-farms. For small business and the rural smallholder, and for the growing number of community groups gathered around food, where would their voice be in a national policy on food?

Some might argue that a national policy should consider only macroeconomic issues and that consideration of food policy questions around urban food security, access to good, affordable food and the sustainable production of food are really matters for state and local government policy. A counter-argument says that national policy should set the broad agenda on these questions that would be implemented through state and local government policy.

The recent spate of proposals for a national food policies have seemingly come out of nowhere in a very short space of time. All of those mentioned appeared within a period of three months in 2010. Yet, it is to local – not state or national – government that we must look for the genesis of food policy in this country. That was 1997 and it was the work of South Sydney Council.

Still a good model

Passed by Council, the policy – called What’s Eating South Sydney – proposed support for greater access to local retail sources of fresh foods and to self-help, community food initiatives such as food co-operatives and community food gardens. In these gardens, it was thought, people could grow some of their own perishable foods, primarily the vegetables and herbs and perhaps some fruits, that supply the nutrients needed to maintain health.

In the few years between the formulation of the policy and South Sydney Council being absorbed into the City of Sydney, the policy encouraged no food co-ops but did enable Council support to flow to community gardens in the area including those on Housing NSW’s Waterloo Estate, the first of their kind. Seeking to tap into community-based expertise, the policy enabled Council to enlist the co-operation of the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network.

South Sydney was closely followed by a food policy adopted by Penrith Council, these being, as far as is known, the first in Australia and a sign that as far back as the late 1990s people were starting to think differently about Sydney’s continued access to fresh foods. Now, local government in other states, as well as in NSW, has decided not to await federal or state food polices and to initiate their own.

Food summit

After the initial flurry of innovation in the late 1990s, the idea of food policy as a means of enacting local and state food security and food access initiatives went into hiatus until it was resurrected by the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance (SFFA) in 2009. The Alliance organised an ambitious event – a food summit – spanning the months between its launch in NSW Parliament House in May to the Food Summit – known as Hungry For Change – in October.

Lead-up events were held through the Greater Sydney region to identify regional food issues and to pass action items on to the Food Summit. The lead-up event in the Illawarra, south of Sydney, was organised by Food Fairness Illawarra, an organisation that came into existence around the same time as the SFFA. Lead-ups also took place in the Blue Mountains and in the Macarthur district south-west of the city. They were supplemented by those on the Central Coast to the north and the inner urban/city east area.

Well known nutritionist, chef and author, Rosemary Stanton, was a keynote speaker at the Illawarra lead-up and Michael Shuman, visiting US economist and attorney, working for the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, was keynote speaker for the inner urban/city east event at Circular Quay. That event was organised by a team from organisations active in SFFA including Leichhardt, City of Sydney, Randwick and Waverley councils, Transition Sydney and the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network. Participating in the event were representatives from the Local Food Futures Alliance on the mid-north coast around Coffs Harbour/Bellingen.

Keynote speaker at the two-day Food Summit was Jeanette Longfield from UK food education and advocacy organisation, Sustain, an effective organisation seen as something of a model by the SFFA. Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, also appeared in her role of local food system advocate.

Food as a focus for sustainability

Just as the rise of the environment movement in the 1980s saw the blossoming of a multitude of community organisations, so is the blooming of food as a social, environmental and policy issue creating a forest of organisations to take action on it.

With food choices instrumental in a household’s energy and water footprint as well as contributing to the incredible volume of food waste produced by both households and industry, the growing social milieu around food is something the established environmental lobbies seem slow to recognise, though there are exceptions such as Friends of the Earth. These new food groups are in some ways starting to supplant the earlier focus on the natural environment.

The growing social food agenda takes two forms. One is made up of the educational and advocacy groups like SFFA. The other is formed of the organisations actually going out and creating an alternative food production and distribution chain in our cities. This includes a still-small but somewhat bewildering array of initiatives as diverse as food co-ops, community supported agriculture (CSA) schemes and community gardens. In terms of legal structure, these range through incorporated associations, co-operatives and social enterprise. The latter are essentially small businesses trading as not-for-profits as well as for-profit ‘social business’. Both have primarily social goals, any operating surplus (the non-profit equivalent of profit) being poured back into the organisation rather than being distributed to shareholders or owners.

Whereas the suspicion of business by environmentalists has in some cases held back the development of the social or ethical investment movement in Australia, the business model is being embraced and repurposed towards achieving social goals around food by the small, community food system start-ups such as some food co-ops and Food Connect, an adaptation of the CSA model that makes it more resilient and viable. Making its start in Brisbane’s warm and sticky subtropics, Food Connect replications are now underway in Sydney, Adelaide and at Melbourne’s CERES centre.

The value of policy

Policy enables government at all of its levels to act on something. It enables funds, resources and staff time to be allocated and for resources to be distributed to other organisatons. This is what makes developing food policies something that is worthwhile despite the possibility of their hijacking by government and industry to serve the agendas of those groups. In this regard it will be interesting to watch the Tasmanian Food Security Council, recently formed within the Social Inclusion Unit of the Department of Premier and Cabinet and chaired by Social Inclusion Commissioner, Professor David Adams, to see how it goes about developing a food security policy for the state.

There is a suspicion among community-based food advocates that policy would simply support existing food producers and distributors, leaving little or no room for communities to help themselves or for small business, social enterprise or the rural smallholder to find a niche. Nonetheless, if the emerging community and small business/social enterprise food formations are to truly influence policy, they will have to seek creative and positive avenues to do this. And if government chooses not to listen and to open space for their participation, then those groups can make this known in their advocacy.

Wait … or go it alone?

A current discussion among the community food milieu is whether to wait for government to decide to develop a policy and seek participation in it or, alternatively, to take the proactive approach and start the process themselves in conjunction with other community, small business/social enterprise, farming and professional bodies and ask government and industry to join them.

At least, if government and industry choose not to participate, the outcome might be the development of a citizen’s food charter that puts the community/small enterprise agenda before the public and that may provide balance to any future government policy. This could become a major collaborative effort for the community/small enterprise sector were it to take it on the road and elicit public input through various approaches from the deliberative democracy toolkit.

We already have the genesis of this in the form of the SFFA’s declaration on food stemming from the October 2009 Food Summit, which the organisation presented to state parliamentarians, and the declaration that emerged from Adelaide’s Plains To Plate food convergence.

Creating a role for community food interests in government policy will require collaboration between organisations and influential individuals, but that is something that can be done if there is the will to make it happen.

Resources:

* Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network, http://communitygarden.org.au

* Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, http://sydneyfoodfairness.org.au

* Food Fairness Illawarra, http://www.healthycitiesill.org.au/foodfairness.htm

* Plains To Plate Food for the Future, http://futureoffoodsa.ning.com/

* Sustain UK, www.sustainweb.org

The conference was in Reece High School, just across the road from Devonport Community Garden of which we had a guided tour. The mayor of Devonport opened the conference and said good things. Devonport Council was a conference supporter.

At the Tasmanian Community Garden Network annual conference were (from left) local Greens MP, Christine Milne, telegardener Costa Geogiadis an the Network's Nel Smit from Eat Well Tasmania.

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It was good to go back to Devonport after decades of absence. A small city on the Bass Strait coast of northern Tasmania, it is not exactly a bustling metropolis and it retains that lonely air that you find in this part of the island. That comes from a perception of isolation thought it’s only 45 minutes flying time from Melbourne. The perception also stems from the presence of Bass Strait which, for Tasmanians, forms a psychological barrier with the mainland and helps them define themselves as somehow different to  those to the north over the grey seas. This forlorn feeling is especially noticeable as you stand on the small beach at the mouth of the Mersey and gaze out into the Strait… grey sea, grey clouds, grey sky and a feeling of distance from the big landmass to the north.

Attendees at the conference tour the Devonport Community Garden.

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That the city has a community garden speaks volumes of how the practice of community gardening has grown tremendously and spread far and wide across the continent. It’s quite a nice garden, there are allotments and a range of fruit trees and berry fruit vines — Tasmania produced superb berry fruit of many varieties. There’s a path that connects both ends of the community garden and the public can walk through during opening hours.

For the conference, the theme given to me was food security and I was one of four on a ‘mentors panel’ that started the event by making presentations and engaging in Q&A around the theme.

Others on the mentor’s panel were:

- David Adams, professor of Management in Innovation at the Australian Innovation Research Centre at the University of Tasmania and chair of the Tasmanian Food Security Council (part of the Social Inclusion unit of the Department of Premier and Cabinet)
- dietician and UTas lecturer, Sandra Murray, who looked at how Tasmania could produce the food types that would supply a balanced diet
- Jennifer Alden, CEO of Cultivating Community in Melbourne.

A Sydney-based telegardener called Costa Geogiadis opened the event and stayed for the two days. Turns out he lives close by us here in Sydney city east and I had a bit if a talk with him although, not having a TV, I have never seen his program. We agreed to catch up in Sydney.

A local politician, Christine Milne (Greens), did a talk and stayed for the whole first day.

Of great interest were the displays at the conference — the local, organic fruit and vegetables and the displays of different organisations.

Community gardening and social inclusion

It was good to met the Social Inclusion commissioner, David Adams, who heads the new Tasmanian Food Security Council. The council will develop a food policy which looks like it will promise support to community gardens as well as social enterprise. Professor Adams seems to understand the problems associated with the grants system and talks of investment instead. Net Smit, who works with Eat Well Tasmania and who is an Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network Tasmania contact, has been elected to the Tasmanian Food Security Council.

The good news is there is now a CSA (community supported agriculture) looking to start in the north west of the state. It’s amazing how the CSA idea has cought the public imagination these past couple years.

The crew and their new brickoven — The Source

Making fresh even fresher

In Hobart, we were warmly welcomes to a new citizen initiative called The Source.

This is a demonstration/training centre on UTas land in Sandy Bay. It’s on the side of a hill and in the distance you glimpse the wide Derwent estuary and the low hills of the Eastern Shore beyond. When I lived in this city some decades ago, urbanisation was only then starting its spread along that shore. Now, it’s progressed and, with the expansion towards New Norfolk along the highway beside the river on the northern edge of the city, Hobart is starting to sprawl. It remains a linear city, however, that follows the path of the Derwent and whose westward expansion is blocked by the bulk of Mt Wellington that stands high above the city.

The Source wholefoods setup features a strawbale and recycled timber food co-op building with gardens of vegetables surrounding it. People pick the vegetables they buy, making fresh even fresher.

The Source is housed in a purpose-built building of rendered strwawbale and salvaged timber. The building is surrounded on three sides by a cascade of food-growing terraces that descend the slope.

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Over at one end of the site is a new brick oven in which pizzas were in preparation for lunch that mild, mid-Autumn day. Notable in the garden crew working that day was David Stevens, veteran Tasmanian organic gardener. He was working on the compost system and explained that compost was something he likes being associated with. Wherever you find urban food growing in Hobart, you are likely to find David.

While in Launceston at the other end of the state we revisited the extensive allotments of the Punchbowl Community Garden in Punchbowl Reserve, where it marches over dip and hollow colonising the slope for edibles. This is a garden of large allotments, far larger than what passes for allotments in Sydney. These are family-size. If you don’t know where the garden is, you might have to explore a little until you uncover it on the slope above the forested area where families picnic in the lower part of the reserve.

Staff at The Source Wholefoods are food-savvy and organised.

Shelves of fresh fruit and vegetables at The Source Wholefoods store in Hobart.

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Once, Deloraine was a typical Tasmanian country town, a stopover for visitors on the way to the mountain walks of its hinterland. Now, demographic change has brought the opening of small cafes and art galleries… not as densely packed as those of some arty-oriented country towns on the mainland… they do not dominate here and Deloraine retains those service business, little shops that provide the day-to-day necessities.

Down by the weir, we were attracted by a woman collecting something from the ground below the bright yellow foliage of a deciduous street tree. Curious, we went over to see what she was doing. Collecting chestnuts, she said, holding out handfuls of the big brown things. So we joined in and collected them too, some fallen ripe to the ground, others still hanging from the branches.

The fruit and leaf of the chestnut.

Walking up the hill to check out what appeared to be Deloraine’s only Art Deco commercial building (two level Streamline Moderne, for aficionados of the style) we wandered into a fruit shop to check out what was being sold, a strange habit we have acquired over the years. Lady of the Snow apples… never heard of them, so we bought a couple to try… a smallish but crispy, sweet fruit.

That wasn’t the only thing that caught our eye.

Strange looking apple, Fiona said, holding up a firm-skinned, red fruit, oval shaped and pointed towards the bottom. But, no, it’s not an apple, the shopkeeper said. It’s a Spreyton pear. We explained to the shopkeeper that we had not seen a pear like this before, and she explained that it was a local variety, Spreyton being a small town on the Bass Highway not all that far from Deloraine.

A Spreyton pear, a local variety.

Our visit to the island state to attend the conference, we realised, had turned into a tour of edible gardens and species.

Good people

Tasmania is this sometimes strange place given to throwing up truly innovative people. Bill Mollison comes to mind — yes, on the way back from the icy summit of Mt Wellington with its gale force blasts we drove down Hobart’s Strickland Avenue where all that permaculture stuff began over 30 years ago in Bill’s house. Going down that winding road, I recalled reading in Bills autobiography, Travels In Dreams, how the powerful bushfires of 1967 burned down from the incinerated forests of Mt Wellington into the Avenue. I recalled, too, other notables from this island —  the actor of the 1930s, Errol Flynn, and writer Christopher Koch.

Tasmanians, of course, are a creative bunch and it is to Nel Smit and her fellow organisers that thanks go for organising a superb community gardeners’ conference, one that took community gardening further into the realm of food security.

Then there’s the graceful Hannah Maloney from Hobart, dressed in her stylish but earthy clothing, who gave perhaps one of the best introduction to permaculture talk I have heard. And Nick, a doctor active with TransitionTasmania, too… it was good to sit in on the transition team’s meeting.

And then there’s all the others, too — far too many to name even if I could remember all of their names.

The Good Food Future was a good conference truly done good. Thanks Tasmanian community gardening crew!

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.

This has been a question occupying the thinking space of some who have been sourcing their fresh vegetables, fruit and culinary herbs from Sydney Organic Buyers Group Randwick. One or two, perhaps more, have moved over to the Food Connect delivery for the Coogee/Randwick area.

The two community food systems are similar at the same time as they are different. So, what’s the differences between them? There’s a couple.

Sydney Organic Buyers Group operates in Leichhardt and Kirribilli as well as in the Eastern Suburbs, the City East region. I should make it clear that I am talking only about the City East versions of the two food systems. Presumably though, almost certainly, the characteristics for other locations of both systems are much the same.

Fiona unpacks a 1-2 people-sized Food Connect fresh food box.

Let’s first consider structure

Both systems provide a weekly delivery of mainly organic food to members, a mix of food in season (Sydney Organic Buyers Group providing only organic foods). In neither system is it possible to order specific produce although the Organic Buyers Group does accept special orders for eggs and for boxes of particular fruits.

Sydney Organic Buyers works something like those food co-ops that do not trade as a shopfront but that meet weekly to distribute food to members. Food is delivered to the collection point — that’s a school for the Organic Buyers Group Randwick — by an organic wholesaler. In the early evening members come along and the boxes of fresh organics are packaged into the their weekly take-home boxes, people counting the quantities of fruit, vegetables and culinary herbs into each member’s box.

This can be a bit of a social occasion as people move this way and that around the circle of boxes,  placing food into each, and it is that which some members find attractive about the system.

Food Connect Sydney is an adaptation of the community supported agriculture (CSA) model and delivers prepacked boxes or mainly organic fresh, perishable foods ready for members to collect. These have been packed from farmer deliveries at the Food Connect depot at Blacktown. This system suits members with little time availability… they just turn up, pick up the size box they have ordered and sign it out. While some might stay around to talk or have a cup of tea or coffee, for most its a rather quick visit to the City Cousin collection point.

One or two who migrated to Food Connect Sydney from Sydney Organic Buyers would like to see a hybrid system introduced at the City East City Cousin. For those interested, the Food Connect depot would deliver unsorted foods as well as packaged food boxes for those interested only in picking up. The unsorted produce would then be boxed much like happens at the Organic Buyers Group.

Contents of the weekly box of in-season food from Sydney Organic Buyers Group Randwick.

Source

The source of food provided by both systems is a point of difference.

For the Organic Buyers Group, there is no way of ascertaining the provenance, the sources, of the organic food delivered. It could be from the Sydney region or it could be from interstate. There is no way of knowing.

Food Connect sources most of its supply from farmers in the Greater Sydney region and nearby, minimising the distance the food is transported. The exception are those fruits that are beyond their ecological range in Sydney — bananas from Coffs Harbour, for example.

This is clearly an attractive model to those whose prime interest is sourcing food with minimal carbon footprint and who want to support local farmers.

Ordering

There is little difference between the two when it comes to ordering.

Both have online ordering systems with orders placed up to a week in advance for Sydney Organic Buyers and several weeks for Food Connect. The advanced ordering for Food Connect is to ensure supply from participating farmers — it is a CSA, after all, rather than a distributor of foods coming from the wholesale market.

The dilemma

The dilemma facing good food eaters is which system to use.

There’s the question of food transportation and support for local farmers and it is this that will be the deciding factor for some.

Location of collection points is another factor, with proximity to home, or to travel routes from work to home, becoming factors in the decision. This may remain fluid for a time as the Food Connect Sydney City East City Cousin collection point is presently in a temporary location while one more central to Coogee is found.

Wherever people choose to get their fresh vegetables and fruit, it appears that there is sufficient demand in the City East region to support both.

Information about the food systems:

Sydney Organic Buyers
Food Connect Sydney

Declaration of interest: Author Russ Grayson has sourced food from both Food Connect Sydney and Sydney Organic Buyers Group Randwick.

FOOD CONNECT… it’s a bit like a contagion really, something that is rapidly spreading through viral replication.

The contagion has now spread as far as Adelaide and it’s sure to replicate its way further along the coast, perhaps making the hop across Bass Strait to Tasmania and to inland towns and cities as well. It’s a contagion of the positive type and it is evidence that a good idea can move quickly.

Fiona unpacks a 1-2 people-sized Food Connect fresh food box.

For some reason, Food Connect has that elusive quality of stickiness, of being able to lodge itself in people’s heads, and it’s that which drives its spread through our networks of digitally and personally connected people interested in doing something new and exciting about our food supply. This is still the territory of the innovators and the early adopters, however it is soon likely to spread into the lands of the early mass adopters.

These new iterations of Food Connect are not branch offices of the Brisbane operation. They are independent social businesses. A social business, whether for- or not-for-profit, has social rather than profit-making goals and returns any operating surplus (as return on investment or profit is called by not-for-profits) to the business.

The Food Connect Foundation — set up to service the growing interest in the model — assists Food Connect replications by providing advice, planning, software and branding to support the replications to become established and to create a unified visual presence for Food Connect start-ups through the states.

Not all of those inspired by Food Connect set up a direct replication. Some take the model, adapt it and give it their own name, like the replication soon to start in Coffs Harbour

How Food Connect propagates.

Why the rapid replication?

Brock wheels a load of Food Connect boxes to a Sydney City Cousin collection point.

The question is why, seemingly all of a sudden, has the Food Connect model taken off? Why do we see Food Connects in Brisbane, Sydney, Coffs Harbour and Adelaide, with strong interest in Melbourne, Newcastle and the Illawarra?

Let’s use Chip and Dan Heath’s formula (see Made To Stick; Random House 2007) to look at the catchiness of an idea, for the needs for an idea to become sticky enough to stimulate interest, motivation and action… to stick in the mind.

An idea first of all has to be simple. And Food Connect is simple: it is a structure through which city eaters can obtain mostly organic, fresh and local fruit, vegetables and culinary herbs.

Next, the idea has to be unexpected. For a population used to taking whatever the supermarkets say they should accept as food, the notion of sidestepping the supermarket and shortening the food supply chain from farmer to eater sure is an unexpected idea.

The idea needs to be concrete. That is, it needs to be grounded in reality and not be abstract. Food Connect has the property of concreteness because it can be examined with your physical senses.

It must be credible. That is, it must appear as very likely to be true. The presence of detail helps here as this lends credence to the idea and indicates that it has been well thought out, even tested. The details about Food Connect are available through their website, through regional organisers and through members. And… the idea has certainly been tested.

Emotion is a determining factor in what people are prepared to believe. If credibility leads to motivation, then emotion leads to caring caring about our food system and the Food Connect and other alternatives to it. This can include caring about local farmers and their livelihoods, about good, tasty food and about a low-carbon food supply.

The availability of narratives about something — stories, that is — is a means of conveying meaning in a way that will stick. People remember stories more than they remember lists of facts.

Does Food Connect have stories around it or has it not been going long enough? Yes, it does have stories… stories of the lives of farmers that supply it, of its City Cousins who serve as distribution points for Food Connect boxes (and receive cheaper food boxes for doing so), of the challenges of setting it up… and  it has that grand narrative that is the story of our food system, how it is controlled and by whom and of the community-based countercurrent to it that is Food Connect.

So we see that Food Connect meets the criteria for stickiness and that this may have something to do with its rapidly accelerating take-up.

A shorter and fresher food chain

Food Connect shortens the perishable, fresh food chain… the time and distance food takes to get from grower to eater.

Farmers from the region — Food Connect’s ‘Country Cousins’ — simply deliver what they grow each week to the Food Connect depot. There it is packed into the weekly food boxes and delivered to ‘City Cousins’, the suburban collection points where members pick up their food box.

This closely-connected system can also be a conduit for information about the food, such as when Food Connect Sydney send an email message to subscribers explaining that farmers had told them that the heavy rains of February had caused some crop damage and that the produce night not be as good as it usually would be.

The Food Connect food chain is shorter and fresher.

Had this happened with farmers supplying the supermarkets, the outcome might have been rejection of the crop and consequent wastage. Why? Because it did not look as good as supermarkets demand — let’s call that veg and fruit cosmetics — despite it still being quite edible and nutritious. As for farmer-to eater-communication, well, there’s lots of things to be found in supermarkets but that sort of communication is rather hard to come by. All you seem to get there are marketing messages rather than hard, verifiable information.

As an adaption to the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model, Food Connect provides farmers with those skills they are less capable at, such as communications and building relationships with eaters. It also solves another dilemma inherent in the traditional CSA: by sourcing their food from a larger number of farmers, Food Connect is not vulnerable to a single farmer going out of business. An additional benefit is that a larger number of farmers can supply a larger range of foods.

It’s still early days for Food Connect beyond its Brisbane homeland. It’s prospects, however, are growing as fast as it it replicated.

Find out more:

Food Connect Brisbane

Food Connect Sydney

Food Connect Adelaide

Food Connect Melbourne