If enthusiasm to do something positive in the world is anything to go by, then the last Living Smart cohort to graduate from the ten-topic, 24-hour Saturday afternoon course marks it as a success.

Living Smart was developed by Murdoch University’s School of Behavioural Psychology and was first adopted by the City of Fremantle. The course has a strong goal-setting component and is structured in an interactive format.

Graduates of Randwick Council's Living Smart and Sustainable Gardening course-summer 2011.

a

Living Smart is presently being localized in Sydney by Randwick City Council’s Sustainability Education Officer, Fiona Campbell, assisted by solar energy specialist, Susie Hunter. Fiona is an approved trainer authorised by the Western Australian owners of the course to present it.

Guest presenters make an appearance, including Transition Sydney’s Peter Driscoll, who presents the personal health content; Council’s transport officer, Jacqui Symond; waste officer, Guada Lado; council Bushcare officer, Matt Leary; John Caley, an engineer by trade and a water systems consultant; Terry Bail, an architect specialising in the design of sustainable buildings; Steve Batley, landscape architect and permaculture educator and the author, who presents the component on global issues and food systems.

Randwick Mayor, Murray Matson (in suit) and Costa congratulate Living Smart and Sustainable Living course participants as they receive their certificates.

a
This is a practical course full of activities. From the first meeting, much focus is put on making course participants a cohesive group. Making people comfortable with each other enables open conversation and group bonding as participants investigate opportunities for sustainable living in the areas where they live. Topic areas include Move Smart (transport), Power Smart (energy), Water Smart, Waste Smart, Smart gardens for productivity/biodiversity, Healthy You, Healthy Home and Community Smart, which encouraged participants to become active in their communities.

Snapshot Talks, five minute presentations on a topic of a participant’s choice, have proven a popular component. These allow people to get to know each others and their interests better and has helped develop the cameraderie that becomes evident as the course progresses.

Coast tells the course participants that they cannot hide away from the facts anymore and are now ready to go out and influence others on sustainable living.

a

The Living Smart course this session was held at the same times as Council’s popular Sustainable Gardening course, which goes for five Saturday afternoon sessions of four hours each. Timing allows the two participant groups to mingle at afternoon tea and scheduling the courses simultaneously produces a buzz of excited activity at the Randwick Community Centre, where they take place.

Fiona briefs Costa on the certificate award ceremony.

A great benefit to both courses this time was the availability of the PIG garden (Permaculture Interpretive Garden, designed and constructed by Steve Batley’s Sydney Organic Gardens). The PIG was built as part of the sustainability makeover of the community centre. This included a state Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water, and a Sydney Water funded energy and water retrofit of the Centre and includes educational features around these topics. A schools program around the energy, water and gardening/food elements is under development by Mary Bell, a sustainability education specialist with a certificate in Permaculture design.

It was impressive to see the large circle of participants gathered in the community centre hall on the last day of Living Smart. They were joined by the crowd from the Sustainable Gardening course for the closing ceremony in which Randwick mayor, Murray Matson, and telegardener, Costa Georgiadis, presented certificates of completion, after which there was an organic feats supplied by O-Organics.

From left... telegardener Costa; Sustainable Gardening course trainer, Steve Batley; Randwick Council's sustainability courses designer and coordinator, Fiona Campbell.

Having got to know each other during their time together, people hung around for quite some time after the proceedings to further enjoy each others’ company. But that might not be the end of the friendships that were created through the course. Some said that they want to stay in contact and to do something more at the Centre. Participants set up an email list so that they could stay in contact with each other. To enable this, Council has engaged well known sustainability education consultant, Greame Collier, to design and set up a Living Smarties group, an opportunity to further develop skills and deepen relationships created during the living Smart courses (see other article).

For Fiona, doing this will help her set up the Centre, now also known as the Randwick Sustainability Education Hub, as a ‘third place’, an informal centre where people can come to participate in the garden and engage in peer-to-peer education, as well a participate in further educational and community opportunities at the Hub. The idea of the third place is that of US academic,   , who said that a sense of place and community is developed by setting up locations like this. They complement the ‘first place’ of the home and the ‘second place’ of the workplace – the other places where people spend much if their time. according to —–, third places should be cheap to visit, located reasonable close by where those that visit them live and informal in structure. Third places are locations where people can hang out with those with similar interests. Clearly, the potential for the Randwick Sustainability Education Hub to become such a third place would provide not only a sustainability education and demonstration centre for the area but would also fulfill informal educational and social needs.

An important part of the awards ceremony - delicious organic food supplied by O-Organic Produce.

a

The idea to develop the hub as an educational-social space would make real a proposal of visiting sustainability communities development catalyst and ex-NASA astrophysicist, Dr Robert Gillman, who during his visit in the 1990s said that what was needed by sustainability advocates were centres where people could see and learn about sustainable solutions so that they could introduce the ideas and the technologies at home.

This Living Smart course was the latest in the pilot series designed to localize the course in Sydney. Initially, Council funded the course through its Environment Levy, but now funding for the pilot series has come from the NSW Climate Change Fund.

What is interesting about Living Smart is the number of people involved in the planning and training who have Permaculture in their background. Few of these are associated with Permaculture organizations… most practice it through their employment or community work. This is surely a legacy of Permaculture education that will make the Randwick Sustainability Education Hub a Permaculture education node for the city east region.

For those who might be interested in experiencing Living Smart, your opportunity comes up in May this year. Enrollment is through the City East Community College.

Clarification: The author teaches in Randwick City Council’s Living Smart course.

From left... Randwick Mayor, Murray Matson; trainer and photovoltaics expert, Susie Hunter; Sustainable Gardening course trainer, landscape architect Steve Batley; Council courses coordinator, Fiona Campbell (front); Sustainable Gardening course trainer, Rob Alsop.

“Food Connect Sydney connects farmers with city folk”, says Enterprise and Produce Coordinator, Julian Lee.

“We believe in food with integrity and care about where your food comes from, who has grown it and the impact on the environment of producing it.

“We source ecologically grown produce from local and regional farmers.”

Food Connect Sydney's Julian Lee

Julian is assisted by a crew that includes economics graduate and member of Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, Tsung Xu, who is the Warehouse Coordinator. Tsung sees quality food as a potential focal point in local communities and operates a small business supplying organic produce to market stalls and homes around Sydney.

Food Connect Sydney takes its name from Food Connect Brisbane, which developed what has proven a successful model that addresses a number of limitations faced by farmers interesting in supplying the CSA market..

According to a Victorian Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation assessment of CSAs as a market for farm produce, farmers have difficulty in dealing with the marketing, communications and customer service aspects of CSA operation. By providing those services and by distributing farmers’ produce in metropolitan areas, Food Connect makes participation in the CSA model more viable for regional farmers.

Point of difference

In the conventional CSA model, city eaters make contact with a city fringe farmer who produces the vegetables, culinary herbs and, perhaps, fruit that they want. The farmer delivers weekly to a collection point in the city from which the CSA members collect their boxes of food. It may be the farmer who packages orders into individual boxes for collection, or that the farmer delivers the produce to the collection point where it is packaged into individual orders by CSA members.

Members pay an annual, quarterly or monthly fee for the food, depending in the structure chosen. This is why CSAs are sometimes known as ‘subscription farming’ systems.

Food Connect differs in that it sources its produce from a number of farmers rather than a single farm. This provides security of supply as well as the opportunity to source a wider range of farm produce.

2009 brings replication

Replication is a property of any good model because it can be copied and adapted by people elsewhere.

And that is just what happened… when the people with the interest were there in other cities… when the time was right…. the Food Connect Brisbane model started to spread… rapidly. The Brisbane crew had developed a workable system, debugging and refining it, preparing it for replication, adaptation and multiplication.

The year 2009 proved to be the breakout year for Food Connect. Brisbane’s Robert Pekin met with interested people in other cities and the reproduction of the Brisbane model got underway.

The Coffs Harbour region plans its own version of Food Connect (with a different name) in the coming year, and Robert has inspired potential start-ups in Tasmania, Adelaide and Melbourne.

In late November, a group of ten or so people met at Coffs Harbour to develop a means of assisting new  enterprises to gestate, based on the Food Connect model.  Coming from Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne (from CERES, the sustainability education centre in East Brunswick that already runs a variety of food initiatives), Coffs Harbour and Sydney, the group established the Food Connect Foundation, for which a business plan is now being developed.

The Foundation will:

• assist the start-up of new enterprises based on the Food Connect model and provide a starters kit that includes systems, logo, visual identity, marketing plans, software and so on
• form partnerships to develop farmland trusts
• run campaigns to encourage people to buy from producers and distributors who introduce approaches compatible with sustainability principles.

According to the Foundation’s Robert Pekin, the structure is quite different to the corporate business model which would have set up subsidiaries in other states.

“These Food Connects are regionally autonomous but nationally aligned. They agree to co-develop better systems and to share financial and other important information”.

Food Connect Sydney will be the city’s third attempt at a CSA, however the structure of Food Connect and Julian Lee’s background as an organic smallholder in the Hunter region, and in assisting urban fringe farmers for a south west Sydney council, bring him a comprehensive overview of the industry from growing through distribution to marketing.

Earlier Sydney CSAs failed because, in one case, the source farm was too distant from the city (it was at Berry, almost 200km south) and, in the second attempt, because the farmer, who was based at Mangrove Creek just north of the city, moved interstate.

By taking on the distribution and marketing and by sourcing supply from a number of farms, Food Connect should avoid those earlier difficulties.

A new community food system

“As a Food Connect subscriber, you receive a weekly box of fresh fruit and vegetables that you pick up from your neighbourhood City Cousin”, explained Julian.

Negotiations are presently underway with Sydney people to set up regional collection points where CSA members can collect their food. Julian says that a number of collection points have already been found and asks that anyone willing, and with the covered space such as a garage, to become a City Cousin register on the website.

Visitors to the website will also find a registration form to make an expression of interest in participating in Food Connect. As soon as there are enough in an area and a City Cousin comes forward, Food Connect will start deliveries.

Food Connect Sydney adds a new sophistication to community food systems, combining the best of small business practice with social enterprise. It is another way that people can exercise some level of control over what they eat.

Why not try it for yourself and sign up for a weekly food box? To find out more and sign up for a box: http://sydney.foodconnect.com.au

IT HAS BEEN JUST OVER A YEAR in the making, from community consultation to construction, but Carrs Park Community Garden is now reality.

Untying the ribbon around the plaque to officially open the community garden are (from left) Cr Annie Tang (Deputy Mayor); Rod Logan, Director Planning & Environmental Services and Mayor of Kogarah, Cr Nickolas Varvaris.

a

Food, a jazz band, Kogarah City Council’s mayor and general manager, councillors, directors of departments, various staff, community gardeners and representatives of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network — they all came together in the warm Spring sunshine for the official opening on 19 November this year.

The strawbale classroom.

Design for participation

The project began when Faith Thomas (Living Schools) and I were hired by Council to start a community garden and to develop policy directions for Council to enable community gardening in the region.

During a community consultation in the different parts of what is a large local government area, Faith and I gathered together people who were to form the initial, core group of gardeners. This was followed by two on-site, participatory design days during which the core group were guided through social and site design. Included in social design was planning how the gardeners would make decisions, deal with disagreement and ensure the smooth functioning of the community garden.

Louiza, with her first harvest. Louiza is a younger member of Carrs Park Community Garden.

The site design day brought a participatory site and needs analysis and the development of a number of concept plans. These went to Council landscape architect, Anthony Parker, who produced a final design for the community garden from them and negotiated it with the gardener group.

Including the core group in the process all the way through was designed to encourage a sense of participation and ownership of the project, something Faith and I have found of value in previous community garden and other projects.

The site is an old bowling green that demographic change has left in disuse. The soil is loamy, the site flat with good solar aspect and drainage. Participants cover a broad age range, from the twenties to retired.

Construction starts

First to be built was a set of shared gardening beds edged, like the Randwick Community Organic Garden, with roofing tile seconds. A local source for these was located. A row of citrus was established along one border of the garden. These were brim full of vegetables on the day of the official opening, and lettuce, carrot and zucchini were harvested.

As the shared beds were being established, work on the council-funded strawbale classroom started. This is to be a facility open to general community use so as to maximise its usage. Designed by strawbale building specialists Huff n/ Puff and constructed by Living Spaces, community gardeners participated in the building of it and Council offered places in an on-site, strawbale building course offered by Huff n’ Puff.

Kogarah Mayor, Councillor Nickolas Varvaris, makes a speech at the opening ceremony.

The building features:

• rendered strawbale construction
• two separate enclosed spaces, one the classroom/meeting room, the other a small kitchen and toilet with disabled access; the rooms are separated by a covered breezeway
• a timber deck on the northern side has been edged for sitting
• timber used in construction was certified as the product of sustainable forestry with the exception of a repurposed telephone pole that was put to use as a structural element
• recycled doors and windows were installed
• the iron roof harvests water from where it flows into two rainwater tanks and is used for garden irrigation
• the building was designed by Envirotecture’s Tracey Grahame and crew.

The classroom now complete, the gardeners are to start construction of allotments, enabling the community garden to offer both shared and allotment growing opportunities. Like the shared gardens, the allotments will be of the mulched, no-dig type.

The process

The approach to the community consultation and participatory design process originated with Faith and my  experience in community garden planning, design and training, and from our experience as community gardeners.

Community gardeners Gill Whan and Gisela Fleischmann with the opening day harvest of lettuce.

The processes we employed borrowed from landscape design, community engagement, facilitated processes (such as the World Cafe that we employed in part of the site design process), permaculture design and action learning. The task was to use these to create an overall process that was inclusive of the gardeners. We wanted to create, with the gardeners, a social design that would encourage gardener self-management in cooperation with Council,  as gardeners developed their organisational skills over time. As in any consultation of this type, our aim was to select tools appropriate to meeting the needs of the gardeners, who are the main users of the site, rather than apply some pre-existing process in a template-like manner.

As well as Anthony Parker, credit must also go to Council’s Sustainability and Waste Education officer, Fiona Stock, who smoothed the way through Council for Faith and I and the gardeners. General manager, Paul Woods, also deserves credit for his support for the garden idea.

The Carrs Park Community Garden stands as  an example of what can be done when a local government wants to enhance the recreational and community facility options available to local people an acts decisively to make it happen.

The process that took the community garden from good idea to reality shows that the mantra CREATE > SHARE > COLLABORATE > DESIGN > MAKE can lead to community initiatives that improve social options and opportunities in an area and enable a new, participatory approach to citizen engagement with public open space.

With plaque recording the opening of the garden are (on right) Cr Annie Tang (Deputy Mayor), Mayor Nickolas Varvaris (to left) next to community gardener; Evan Hutchings, Director Governance & Corporate Services and Paul Woods, General Manager (at centre back) with Director Planning & Environmental Services, Rod Logan (left back); Sustainability and Waste Servcies staff in front (Fiona Stock in white shirt).

The outdoor classroom provided welcome shelter from the hot sun on the opening day of Carrs Park Community Garden.

Outdoor classroom, showing the breezeway. The room on the left houses a small kitchen and a toilet with disabled access.

The strawbale classroom features recycled windows and doors.

Community garden representative, Tony Lavorato, addresses visitors while the General Manager and Mayor look on.

The strawbale classroom in its setting, with the old bowling club building (now used by Council's childcare centre and a community services agency) in the background left, the community garden's water tanks on the right and some of the shared garden beds in the foreground.

The community garden's tanks store rainwater harvested from the roof of the strawbale classroom. The tanks are gravity filled and the water irrigates the garden.

Mary Cassimatis is new to community gardening but plans an enthusiastic involvement.

A local band entertained those attending the opening day with jazz and popular tunes.

The market has become something of a tourist attraction but this has not deterred local people from shopping here. Walk the alleys between the stalls and you find local food, local arts and crafts including photography, seeds and more. There’s fresh fruit and vegetables, soft and sweet Bruny Island fudge, Gillespie’s fizzy ginger beer — another local product — and the products of local craftspeople who specialise in working with Tasmanian timbers, as well as sellers of unique clothing and second hand books.

Development with authenticity

The Tasmanians have taken advantage of one of Australia’s still-intact heritage streetscapes. Three to four storey stone buildings, once warehouses where goods from the nearby wharfs were stored, have been repurposed as art galleries, cafes, bookshops and other enterprises specialising in Tasmanian-made. For the bibliophile, there’s The Hobart Bookshop situated in Salamance Square, behind Salamanca Place. It’s a crammed place with narrow aisles selling new and second hand books where the staff shelter behind a counter so encroached by books that it seems more like a barricade.

Gillespie's Ginger Beer, a local beverage.

The alleys, streets and Salamance Square behind Salamanca Place are a labyrinth populate by small shops with intriguing products. Strangers to the city might find them a somewhat confusing network to navigate, however this merely adds to their charm and interest.

Although the link is not made, the old warehouses stand as testament to the prominence of the sea in Tasmania’s history. As an island and as the second place to be settled in Australia’s European history (Hobart is a mere few years younger than Sydney), the sea and shipping have been crucial to the development of the state. Take a short walk from Salamanca over to the docks to see some vintage ships, including tall ships and a few engine-powered. There are even operating fishing boats that tie up at Constitution Dock, something unique for most city centres.

Best of all, Salamanca Place’s repurposing has been accomplished without making it tacky. All too often, historic precincts are ruined by being overdone and by selling low-grade, low-quality junky products. They become charactertures of themselves and, in doing so, lose any authenticity they might once have had. Not Salamance Place.

Salamanca's old warehouses, with Mt Wellington dominating the city in the background.

Finding local foods

Having an interest in the way that cities can increase their resiliency through developing an industry based on foods that can be grown, processed and marketed locally, I naturally gravitated to the food sellers. At the Salamanca Market, market gardeners are grouped together although food sellers are found throughout the marketplace.

One of the market garden stalls at Salamance Market, loaded with vegetables and culinary herbs.

Here, like the Evandale market near Launceston in the north of Tasmania, the dominance of Asian faces suggests that the market gardens that feed the city are dominated by immigrant families or their descendants. This accords closely with the Sydney experience where not only Asians, but Lebanese and others feed the city with much of its fresh produce.

Let’s hope that the Hobartians don’t follow the example of the NSW government and plan to pave and build over the gardens that feed its people.

Exploration by foot

Despite being promoted in tourism literature, Salamance Place is worth a few of your hours or more when you’re next in Hobart. Find it adjacent to the city centre and just to the west of the city’s watefront.

Travel by foot remains the best way to explore a city and Salamanca Market can form the starting point for a walk that takes you into the nearby residential precinct of Battery Point.

For those with an interest in architecture, the Georgian buildings are sure to be an attraction, however there are buildings from other periods too. It’s not a long walk and there are side streets to explore as well as Arthur’s Circus, a ring of Georgian houses around a village green. Continue through Battery Point to the shores of the broad Derwent for the long view down the estuary and, when the weather is right, to feel the wind and to see, in your imagination, those nineteenth century clipper ships tacking their way upriver to the docks, then, after unloading, sailing north to China to load up with tea for the English market all of a world away. Battery Point’s main street has a number of cafes clustered at the Salamanca end.

A seller of seed of vegetables and flowers at Salamance Market.

Standing again in Salamanca Place’s busy Saturday market, you look up to the ramparts of Mt Wellington that so dominates this southern city, then your gaze returns to the line of old stone buildings and the busy scene surrounding you. Then you realaise that one of the ideas you will take away is that the Hobart local foods scene is an active and innovative one that, even by itself, is an asset to the people who are fortunate enough to live here.

Fresh produce on a stall. Many of the products at the market are labeled as 'local food', 'home grown' or 'no sprays'.

A rare find these days — milk in glass bottles.

TO JUDGE BY THE SIGNS on farmer’s market stalls, food grown locally seems to be something of a specialty at Evandale market. A recent visit disclosed sign after sign on a number of stalls advertising the localism of fresh vegetables, herbs and fruit.

Some stallholders sell organic fruit and vegetables although these are not certified organic, leaving it to the buyer to decide whether or not to trust the seller. Like Sydney’s urban fringe farmers, most of those selling at Evandale are from non-English speaking backgrounds, mainly people from Asia.

If you come here at the right time of year, look for the stallholder selling heaped, overloaded punnets of Tasmanian berry fruits, including delicious redcurrants, strawberries and raspberries. At any time of year there are jams made from local fruits, Tasmanian honey and other bottled preserves.

An island set up for locally produced food

Tasmania, as an island with a decentralised population (approximately half, around 200,000, live in the capital, Hobart; around 70,000 occupy Tasmania’s second city, Launceston; the remainder are scattered through Penguin, Burnie, Huonville and lesser centres), is ideally suited to the development of small, family owned farms that could feed its population centres with perishables, dairy and other foods. In comparison with the mainland (the rest of Australia, that is) the soils are fertile and the island is well-watered. Occupying a cool temperate climatic zone, a wide variety of culinary herbs, fruit and vegetables can be produced, as well as dairying and fisheries including the fish farms that are already established. The good news for orchardists is that there is no fruit fly in Tasmania.

Evandale market features several fresh food stalls.

Evandale is not the only source of fresh foods available from weekly markets. Tasmania’s renowned leatherwood honey, so-called for the leatherwood tree that the bees harvest and that grows in the cool temperate rainforest, is readily available. A local apiarist was found enthusiastically selling his product at Exeter market in the Tamar valley, approximately 20 minutes drive north of Launceston, not far from the popular Exeter Bakery.

In Hobart, too, food localism is a selling feature with stallholders at the Saturday Salamanca Place markets having notices advertising ‘local grown’. ‘No Spray’ was also noticed on products.

Finding Evandale

Evandale markets are open every Sunday morning. A charge of 20 cents is made for entry.

Evandale is about a 20 minute drive south of Launceston. Follow the highway past the airport and watch for the turnoff sign.

It is an old town and those with an interest in history and architecture might like to walk its streets to view the Georgian buildings, both domestic and commercial. The town also has a number of antique shops, art galleries and, for the hungry, cafes.

Tasmania's soils grow tremendous potatoes. Here's some freshly dug.

Evandale is no the only market near Launceston. Here, Fiona buys localy made jam at Exeter market, north of Launceston in the Tamar Valley.

How Tasmanians buy potatoes.

Local product for local eating. All cities and towns should be able to feed themselves with perishables and other foods grown locally.

AROUND A DOZEN PEOPLE are walking the long, straight footway through Hyde Park where the lines of overaching native figs form a vegetative tunnel. They pass Francois Sicard’s Archibald Fountain, opened in 1932 with its classical, sculptured figures and animals that spray water skywards. Exiting the park, they enter Macquarie Street and make their way to an old sandstone building with a long verandah. Here, they are to hand over the state’s first Declaration on Food.

The delegation includes visiting food advocate, Jeanette Longfield MBE, who is co-ordinator of the UK’s national food education and advocacy organisation, Sustain.

…a regional food future that is, in part, based on access to local, fresh food produced by city fringe farmers on land zoned agricultural in pepetuity, using sustainable farming methods and receiving a good financial return for their product…

Sustain UK's Jeanette Longfield MBE (right) with food journalist, Joanna Savill.

A brief ritual follows during which the Sydney Food Fairness Alliances’ (SFFA) Catriona Macmillan hands the Declaration to state parliamentarians including Ian Cohen, MLA (The Greens) and Paul Pearce MP (Labor). ABC radio records the proceedings and speaks to Jeanette Longfield, who was a keynote speaker at the SFFA’s Food Summit, of which production of the Declaration was the last day’s activity.

The Declaration will be mentioned in Parliament and entered into Hansard. Contained in its pages are ideas for a sustainable food supply and for equitable access to food, among other topics. Hopefully, it will also form the basis for an ongoing program by the SFFA and others for a regional food future that is, in part, based on access to local, fresh food produced by city fringe farmers on land zoned agricultural in pepetuity, who receive a good financial return for their product and who make use of sustainable farming methods.

The ceremony marks the culmination of the Sydney Food Fairness Alliances’ (SFFA) Hungry For Change, a Food Summit itself the culmination of a series of Summit lead-up events that have taken place over the previous months. Those lead-up events had packed the Sydney Customs House (the inner-urban, Inner West and Eastern Suburbs event) and attracted people to regional gatherings in the Blue Mountains, Macarthur region, Illawarra and Central Coast.

Signifying food‘s importance in a world in change

Sustain's Jeanete Longfield's participation in Hungry For Change was entertaining and inspiring.

The fact that Jeanette Longfield was awarded an MBE for services to food policy in the 2007 New Years Honors List signifies that food and the growing number of issues around its production, supply and consumption is a topic whose time has well and truly come.

Sustain involves itself in similar work to the SFFA but has been in existence much longer and its program is more ambitious. It’s probably no secret that some in the SFFA would like their organisation to eventually acquire the same status that Sustain enjoys.

A petite woman whose blonde hair shows off a newly acquired Australian suntan, on the first day of the Summit Jeanette had stood on the stage in the auditorium at the Teachers’ Federation Convention Centre dressed in a bright floral frock. Hers was a light, animated and sometimes humourous presentation during which she told the audience that the adoption of a food policy does not always lead to action by government.

Listing cities that already have food policies (London, Vancouver, Toronto), she described London’s food strategy as “really good” and told the audience that London’s previous lord mayor, Ken Livingstone, had also been “really good” and the new Lord Mayor of London had surprised many with his interest in a viable food system. She said that Sydney is fortunate to have a lord mayor like Clover Moore who has an interest in simulating a sustainable food supply for the city.

Jeanette mentioned an innovative, City of London project to expand the area of the City devoted to food production — a plan to identify 2012 new community food growing spaces by 2012.

Jeanette said a high level political support is crucial in advocating a more safe and secure food system and that support from a mayor or deputy mayor was advantageous.

Clover champions local food

The Sydney Food Fairness Alliance's Food Summit was opened by the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore.

Opening the Hungry For Change Food Summit, Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore (Independent), started by pointing out facts about Sydney’s food system.

“Eighty percent of NSW’s food comes form the Sydney Basin. The region is 30 percent more productive that farmland in the rest of NSW. The Sydney Basin has a more reliable water supply than regions west of the [Great Dividing] Range and it is accessible to the city, producing food that is local and seasonal”.

Clover’s city government has moved on food. Last year, the City of Sydney started a grower’s market in the centre of the city adjacent to Hyde Park to bring some of this local food to city workers. The City is also expanding the number of community gardens and has employed a Community Gardening and Volunteer Coordinator. Clover Moore went on to criticise the loss or city fringe farmland to urban development, the developers’ lobby and its influence on state government.

Tying the intellectual threads of Hungry For Change together was Lyndey Milan, a food writer and broadcaster. Part of her role as MC was to introduce the SFFA’s President, Lynne Saville. Lynn was earlier involved in the creation of the Hawkesbury Food System and serves as a councillor on Willoughby Council.

Food journalist Joanna Savill, manager of the Sydney International Food Festival, addresses the Summit.

Lynn continued the themes introduced by Clover Moore, stressing the importance of the city fringe farmland to the security of the urban food supply and the industry it supports, and the need for a policy on food that underwrites sustainable production, food affordability and access by those who most need nourishing foods.

“By 2050, we will need to produce twice the amount of food we presently produce and on the same amount of land to feed an expected global population of nine billion”, she tells the audience. “Yet, 52 percent of Sydney’s vegetable farms are to be developed under the state government’s Metropolitan Strategy which will bring urban growth as large as the city of Canberra in the region.

“Climate change is a threat to our food supply and agriculture in Australia is respected to decline in productivity by up to 27 percent over the next 75 years. At the same time, greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture account for something like 24 percent of all emissions when non-farm sources coming from food processing and transport are included.

“The role of the SFFA is to put food security on the agenda. All Australian governments need a food policy and by 2030 we need to provide Sydney’s projected six million people with access to affordable, healthy food produced by a sustainable agriculture”.

Climate change and its likely impact on our food systems was a theme picked up on by Josh Wyndham-Kidd, the speaker from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, who is soon to leave for the climate talks in Copenhagen. A little less nuanced in his criticism of government than other speakers, Josh said that the federal government’s policies “are lacking… they won’t reward farmers for carbon sequestration and, when it comes to climate change, agriculture and food, the government has no clothes.

“We are talking about the food my generation will live off”.

Josh Wyndham-Kidd, the speaker from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition.

Food waste a food issue

The NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Waters’ Bernard Carlon described how much of our food ends up in landfill.

Formally dressed in dark suit and tie, the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Waters’ (DECC&W)Bernard Carlon described how much of our food ends up in landfill.

“A total of 1,100,000 tonnes of food is lost to waste a year in NSW. Around 38 percent of household food, by weight, is wasted. That’s 800,000 tonnes a year, 315kg per household per year going into landfill. And that excludes food wastes that are composted.

“An additional 300,000 tonnes a year of food waste comes from the commercial food sector of which approximately 76 percent is lost during food processing. That excludes post-consumption waste from restaurants.

“In landfill, of course, food wastes are converted into methane, and methane is a greenhouse gas. It is estimated that food accounts for something like 23 percent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions”.

Bernard did not have encouraging news on household composting.

“Composting is decreasing in NSW. It has declined from 58 percent in 2000 to 38 percent in 2009. Now, there are more people who have never composted. This is attributable to urban consolidation and the lack of motivation to compost in multi-unit dwellings”.

Why waste?

Bernard outlined reasons why people waste food:

• lack of time to adopt other practices regarding food waste
• lack of time to organise and plan food purchases
• cooking too much food for a meal
• lack of knowledge of what to do with leftovers
• failure to check food stocks before purchasing
• being tempted by food retailers’ specials.

The Department has taken the initiative to allocate a total of $7.7 million in funding to regional food projects such as those of Wollongong Council and the Northern Rivers councils of North Coast NSW. Propelling food wastes as an issue for our food system will be a DECC&W website devoted to the topic that will come online in the new year.

The farmers perspective

Ed Biel is a Sydney region, urban fringe commercial farmer whose address focused on a number of themes coming from a farming perspective.

Sydney urban fringe foodland farmer, Ed Biel.

“In a city of 4.5 million there is competition for water, and water is needed for farming too.  The reliability of the water supply in the Sydney Basin is greater than it is in the Murray-Darling Basin”.

The anticipated greater reliability of water in the Sydney Basin during a period of climate change, compared to regions west of the Great divide, was a topic that other speakers raised in advocating saner farmland policies for the Sydney region foodlands.

Ed listed trends affecting the viability of farming on the city fringe:

• the rural conflict that comes with urban expansion into farming areas where new residents clash with the established farming industry over noise and odour; Ed said that there is a need to protect farmers
• farmers receive too little return for their product; this is in part due to the way the supermarket duopoly works, to the importation of subsidised farm product from overseas and the low labour cost in some countries; Ed said that like the supermarkets, farmers have a right to a reasonable margin on their product
• land, said Ed, is becoming scarce and rezoning land for agricultural use won’t automatically lead to its use for that purpose — that needs economic viability and the support that comes through the market
• fragmentation among farmers, especially along the lines of farmer ethnicity, is another limiting factor and response to farming issues due to this is lacking.

Finally, Ed raises the issue of how city eaters are to identify Sydney Basin produce — there is no branding such as an identifying label or logo for the city fringe farm product. Developing one would increase the value of the local product, says Ed, and attract a premium on local produce. A ‘brand local’ would bring market power, he tells the audience, and it should be recognised by the supermarkets.

Ethnicity and city fringe farming

In a breakout session at the Hungry For Change Food Summit, the University of Western Sydney’s Dr Francis Parker, a researcher and an authority on Sydney’s urban fringe foodlands, returned to the ethnicity of the region’s farmers previously mentioned by Ed Beale.

Francis explained that:

• 90 percent of the region’s small, family-based farmers have a non-English speaking background
• 90 percent cannot read English
• they produce 90 percent of Sydney’s perishable foods
• they are entrepreneurial
• they include many young farmers (in contrast to the aging of the Australian farming demographic)
• the number of market gardens supplying the city is in decline, having shrunk from around 2000 only a short time ago to around a little over 1000 today.

The popular idea that immigrant farmers come from peasant backgrounds is a misconception. Many do not have a rural background and some are professionals, says Francis, but they lack a capacity with English. Commonly, they start by leasing farmland, working long hours and eventually buy the land, mainly by borrowing from friends rather than the banks. Francis says it is true that there is fragmentation in the ethnic farming demographic.

Suburban fringe dwellers as CAVE people

Planner and urban fringe farming advocate, Ian Sinclair.

Ian Sinclair is a planner and planning educator specialising in the rural-urban fringe. A neat man in suit and tie, his presentation was so packed with information that it must have been quite a challenge getting through it in the time he was allocated.

Ian started off reiterating the food security and economic value of Sydney’s urban fringe farmers.

“The fringe is a significant food production area”, he tells the audience. The value of Sydney’s foodlands, Ian says, is easily recognised through its combination of:

• supplying 91 percent of Asian vegetables to the greater Sydney region
• 12 percent of the state’s farm production takes place on this tiny portion of its agricultural land
• 5 percent of the nurseries in Australia are found in the region
• the presence of a substantial turf and cut flower industry.

All of this is worth around $1 billion a year. As for climate change altering the rainfall pattern: “We have water in the Sydney Basin”, says Ian, emphasising the likelihood that the region will retain significant rain as other parts of the state become drier. This possibility alone makes retention of the Sydney Basin farming industry more than just a good idea.

Recreational lawnmowing on new urban lands

“Rural residential development displaces agriculture”, says Ian in reference to housing lots of 2ha or more on the urban fringe where the land is not used for food production or other agricultural development. Around 78 percent of western Sydney landuse is now rural residential and, as well as creating more urban sprawl, rural residential impacts the environment.

…What’s needed… is a rural landuse study to identify prime and marginal agricultural lands and to zone landuse accordingly…

“Recreational lawn mowing”, says Ian, is one of the fringe suburbanites favourite activities, yet it produces no useful product from the rich farmland those people occupy. Urban development of once-were-farms on the urban fringe also brings suburbanites into conflict with the remaining farms. Seeking a ‘rural’ lifestyle, these new fringedwellers move to the urban fringe foodlands then complain about farming activities and the noise, night activity and odour that is part of farming. This gives rise to what Ian calls complainant CAVE people: Citizens Against Virtually Everything.

What’s needed, according to Ian, is a rural landuse study to identify prime and marginal agricultural lands and to zone landuse accordingly. Ian’s long experience as a planner in urban fringe development, including periods with local government, gives substantial credibility to his proposal that a ‘cluster subdivision’ model be adopted, where subdivisions are surrounded by agricultural landuse.

This sounds very much like the idea proposed by the UNSW’s Dr Ted Trainer in the 1990s. When Ted proposed it, the inspiration was less conserving urban fringe farmland as an agriculturally productive landscape and more the search for an ecologically viable way to live. Ted is an educator-come-social-philosopher-come-visionary, however his writings have lacked the ‘how-to’ element that Ian Sinclair has  clear ideas on.

Ian also spoke of land being held by land trusts to prevent subdivision, and that developers be required to set aside land in new developments for community food gardens. In New York, some of the urban land occupied by the city’s community food gardens is held in land trusts and the model has proven viable as a means of retaining land for specific uses.

Advocates of sustainable urban fringe farming and sustainable urban development need to “find an angle and press it”, he said.

Plan > do > check > act for food democracy

Flinders University School of Medicine's John Coveney raised the idea of food democracy and said that healthy food is unaffordable to many.

John Coveney has a public health and nutrition background and came to Hungry For Change from South Australia’s Flinders University School of Medicine. An innovative thinker, he raised the idea of “food democracy”, a term that reframes the commonly-used ‘food security’ as the right to safe, nutritious food while producing a fair economic return to growers.

Healthy food, John said, is unaffordable to many. Whereas most people commonly spend around 12 percent of their income on food, those less affluent spend around 30 percent.

Food advocates should “celebrate and record small successes”, says John. He recommends the Action Learning methodology as a basis for food advocacy. This is envisioned as a loop of action consisting of: plan > do > check > act.

Partnerships ok on Coffs coast

Although Jeanette Longfield said she has a hesitancy about forming partnerships, the experience of Nick Rose in creating the Coffs Coast Local Food Futures Alliance, an equivalent organisation to SFFA, has turned out differently. Established in 2008, the Alliance is made up of Coffs Harbour Council, North Coast Area Health Service, Landcare, CROPO (an organic producers’ agency), the Bellingen Local Food Network and local citizens. This, according to Nick, forms a foundation for joint work to address food rights and access, sustainable farming practices and the development of a local food economy.

An outcome of one of the DECC-funded regional food projects, the Alliance’s objectives include:

• development of a local food strategy
• a program of community education and awareness creation
• the establishment of two model community gardens (the Bellingen Community Garden Association is assisting this objective and the author, representing the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network, is to address Coffs Harbour council and citizens in early 2010).

The region is likely to have its own community supported agriculture initiative in the new year, following the visit by Food Connect Brisbane’s Robert Pekin earlier in the year. An ‘Eden at Home’ home food growing course in association with TAFE and the local community college and the establishment of a farm gate trail are on the agenda. The educational value of the ‘permablitz’ model of mutual assistance of home food garden development is also of interest to the Alliance.

…people have formed local food and seed saving groups, a food swap has started to operate as a means of exchanging surplus production and avoiding food waste…

Good ideas are not the property of the Coffs coast folk alone. They are also gestating in the Blue Mountains, less than 100km west of Sydney.

There, says local food initiative advocate John McNiell, people have formed local food and seed saving groups (through which vegetable, herb and other seeds are collected, processed and exchanged), a food swap has started to operate as a means of exchanging surplus production and avoiding food waste and there is an existing community garden and another in formation.

“Self-sufficiency is a myth”, John tells the breakout group, proposing instead what amounts to a community-based self-reliance.

“The question is this: What do you do with garden surplus? Where do you buy local food?.

“The Blue Mountains has two local markets at which you can swap, sell or give away your excess produce. Some locals sell home-grown lettuce, parsley and other produce to local cafes and the Blue Mountains Food Co-op accepts local produce. What we need is the ‘law of large numbers’… lots of gardens producing a surplus and and connecting people locally. This would be the start of a local food economy”.

And John has an idea for doing this through an Internet-based food swap based on a simple postcode search to locate local opportunities for exchanging food. Liz Bastian, a well known Blue Mountains permaculture designer and community activist, supported John by saying that seed, vegetable and food swaps occur monthly.

Reframing the advocates message

Speaking of food advocacy, Jeanette Longfield suggests that advocates avoid adopting the terminology of those that oppose them because this merely validates the core of their opponents’ argument. Instead, she suggests reframing the issue in terms that enhance the argument of food advocates.

“How you put an idea is really important”, she says. Food advocates should think about how people are likely to interpret the ideas they put forward and select appropriate language. She offers examples from the work of Sustain:

• the statement that the present food system implies that ‘people are likely to suffer’ may be interpreted by those not suffering from lack of food as ‘not me’, believing that they have escaped this fate
• the term ‘heathy diet’ is interpreted as ‘lettuce and lentils’ and understood as unappealing
• reference to some ‘future disaster’ raises the idea ‘it’s ok now, at present’ and is unlikely to stimulate action.

Jeanette suggests finding more acceptable, more appealing terms such as replacing ‘healthy’ with ’tasty’ or ‘good’ when it comes to describing the type of foods advocates are proposing.

“Use powerful imagery” in advocating a sustainable and fair food system, Jeanette advises.

The start, not the end

Day two of the SFFA’s Hungry For Change Food Summit saw participants go in different directions. While some stayed at the conference venue to craft the Declaration on Food, others went on bus tours to the Sydney foodlands of the north west and the south west where they visited urban fringe farmers. Another tour voyaged through the inner city and out to the ends of the Eastern Suburbs to visit urban food initiatives, including community gardens, the Phillip Bay market garden in Randwick and an apartment block in Maroubra that has turned its front lawn into a vegetable garden.

Hungry For Change was the culmination of months of planning and the hard work of SFFA members, especially Liz Millen and Catriona McMillan. More than this, it was the culmination of the drive for a secure and tasty food future by the nearly seven hundred who attended the regional food lead-up events and those at the Hungry For Change Food Summit.

In handing the Declaration on Food to the politicians at Parliament House, Catriona handed on those hopes and desires, those ideas and demands articulated by all who attended the Hungry For Change events, as well as the others who could not attend the lead up and Summit event but who support its ideas, demands and initiatives.

ONE DAY IT WAS A DINGY LANE taking the curious from Broadway to Chippendale. Next day it was a food fair, offering the curious a glimpse of the emerging local food culture that is starting to bloom in Sydney.

Opinion was offered that the Chippendale Food for the Future Fair — this October’s was the second time it has been held — is more a celebration of community-based food culture than, for example, the Dank Street Festival over in Alexandria, which has more of a ‘foodie’ culture feel with restaurants and more upmarket food enterprises.

So, what was there, crammed into that narrow lane between those old terrace houses and turn of the Twentieth Century commercial buildings?

A wealth of edible ideas… and, of course, food

First, there was Clover Moore, Sydney’s Lord Mayor who, just as she had done a couple days before at the Sydney Food Fairness Alliances Hungry For Change Food Summit, opened the event. Clover is becoming more and more associated with food events and initiatives in the City of Sydney and is helping to draw public attention to the emerging urban food culture.

Local organic farmer, Michael Champion, suggests to Sydney Lord Mayor, Clover Morre, that she should have stayed longer at the Sydney Food Fairnss Alliances' Food Summit (Clover had to get back to Parliament, which was sitting at the time).

There was Michael Champion, an organic grower from the Mangrove Mountain area just to the north of Sydney, with an array of fresh veges and herbs. Michael’s is a practical example of locally produced, low food miles foods feeding the city.

Michael was not the only local farmer. The Muscat family Farm is located near Pitt Town and at Schofields, not far to the north west of Sydney where the soils are fertile and the farming intensive in management. This area is part of the city’s foodbowl, the region that supplies the metropolis with much of its fresh, perishable vegetable foods.

Hawkesbury region market gardener, Andrew Muscat, supplies local food at a number of farmers' markets in Sydney.

The Muscat family is found at a number of Sydney region farmers’ markets, including the weekly, Saturday morning Farmers’ Market at Eveleigh. All of their produce is grown in soil rather than hydroponically because, they claim, soil-grown vegetables taste better. They also source some of what they sell from other growers in the region.

Gena Karpf, who produces delectable sweet things at Sweetness the Patissrie, appeared to do good business at the Chippendale Food air.

Gena Karpf, from Sweetness The Patisserie, explained how she uses organic and local product in her cooking — when these are available. Hers was a reality check on the move towards local and organic in which intention is ahead of supply. While there might be growing demand for products meeting these criteria, it can be difficult sourcing ingredients to make them. The ideology of local and organic is certainly growing, however it takes time for food producers to develop crops and ingredients to cater to it. Patience by eaters is needed.

Further down the lane was Barry, who is also a member of the Alternative Technology Association and who was demonstrating a couple of those technologies — tanks for rainwater storage, wormfarms for turning kitchen wastes into fertiliser and what looks like a workable, raised planter suitable for container gardening on balconies for the growing of vegetables and herbs.

compost + chicken manure + mulch + seedlings + water = food

Barry peers through the foliage of vegetables growing in his ezygrow container garden.

The recycled plastic containers, each one metre in length, 500mm in width and 700mm deep, are large enough to accommodate vegetable root growth and there are holes in the bottom that drain water into a tray. An outlet allows the water to be drained into a watering can and reused. Nearby, a couple demonstrated the economy version of a container garden by showing how compost + chicken manure + mulch + seedlings + water is the sequence to turn a foam fruit box into a vegetable garden.

Hanging on a wall was another type of garden —  a vertical garden planted to young lettuce and other leafy greens. This has been developed by Darren Craig from Delightfully Fresh Organics — he also had a stall covered in vegetable and herb seedlings — and consists of a thick, wooly matrix enclosed in netting much like that used to package fruit. The seedlings are implanted into the matrix and water fed in from the top, fertiliser being added as needed. As a woman said on viewing the vertical garden, the liquid drained from a home worm farm could be added to the irrigation water and trickled through the matrix.

Darren Craig's vertical garden is a low-tech approach to food production for people with a horizontal space deficit.

While coffee and tasty foods catered for the physically hungry, Glebe booksellers, Florilegium, catered for those with an intellectual hunger. Florilegium specialises in botanical titles as well as landscaping, horticulture and food growing books. A interesting find was Masanobu Fukuoka’s classic on sustainable, organic farming, The One Straw Revolution, now back in print in paperback.

There was music and talks, including one on the fate of bees, and there was Diane walking the alley selling copies of Sprout, a new quarterly on the Sydney food scene. The creation of Diane Jardine and Kate Marshall, the first edition carries stories on Sydney’ urban fringe market garden industry an its importance to urban food security, the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance, the square metre salad garden, planting guide and recipes, seed saving, the Randwick Organic Community Garden and more.

Food goes co-operative in the lane

The Chippendale Food air was notable for more than turning a dingy alley into a festive food site, and the sign of that was a cavernlike opening in the brickwork of the old facade that houses The Chippendale Fresh Food Co-op, a new, member operated local food initiative just opening for business. With its members sporting T-shirts proudly proclaiming The Co-op in big, black grunge lettering, it was obvious that something new was afoot.

Products lined up ready for sale, The Co-op brings community food enterprise to the inner city.

Dingy no more - the Chippendale Fresh Food Co-op is to bring new life to an old lane.

The Co-op will trade from its cave-like premises Thursday to Saturday and — who knows? — maybe one day you will be able to stop by and socialise over a cappuccino at the maybe-to-be rear courtyard as you collect your week’s fresh food. One of the Co-Opers explained how he would like to make a vegetable garden out there behind the Co-op.

A day of walking, talking eating

Diane selling the premier edition of Sprout, the new food magazine for Sydney.

We had started down that alley-come-festival where it feeds onto Broadway a mere few metres from Railway Square. After stopping to talk to people we know, to stallholders, to the Co-op folk and others, by the time we had returned to our starting point a full three hours had gone by. That’s what happens at these festivals. They offer a conviviality and a friendliness that is so enjoyable that it eats up time.

When it comes to community-based, small business and locally-farmed food, the Chippendale Food for the Future Fair 2009 was a festival of the possible that shows for certain that a local food culture based on community enterprise is just as valid and certainly more widely accessible as that of the upmarket, restaurant based food culture with celebrity chefs and foods that leave little change in your pocket. This is food of the people, by the people, for the people (to repurpose Jefferson) and it is smart, modern and relevant to the city.

The Rent-a-Chook crew were at the Chippendale Food for the Future Fair with their Isa-browns and mobile pens.

No getting away from this girl — wherever you go you find Michele Margolis selling her Permaculture Diary and Calendar.

Knitting is neither age nor gender specific. A male knitter from the knitting guild shows Gracie, a young knitter, how it's done.

The local cafe and art gallery has produced a range of preserves.

A young helper plants strawberries at the container garden construction demonstration.

Fiona Campbell has a chat with Barry at his water tanks and container garden stall.

Seen at the Fair and suitable for balcony and courtyard, now there need be no procrastination about growing a few lettuce and tomatoes at home.

It might have been a food fair but there was a place for handicrafts, too. Members of a knitters guild get busy.