I say tomato

This month we finally bit the bullet and had a go at improving the ethics of our preserved tomato consumption.

I have known for quite a while that there are major ethical concerns about tinned and bottled tomatoes but doing anything about it just seemed too hard. Cheap preserved tomatoes are so easy to grab off the bargain shelf! But they are also almost always imported, with concerns about the working conditions of tomato pickers in other countries. It is ridiculous that we don't eat our own tomatoes: Australia has the ideal tomato-growing climate, with the things even surviving as weeds in abandoned gardens.

So after a week of unseasonal rain here in late January, Tyson was on the look-out at the farmers markets for over-ripe, excess or slightly damaged produce being sold off in bulk, and came home with a large box of very ripe tomatoes ready to bottle. (He also brought home peaches for jam, so it was a busy weekend!)

Our method was: Wash and quarter tomatoes (ends removed).

Squash tomatoes into oven-sterilised bottles with wooden spoon, removed air bubbles. Add a teaspoon of lemon juice to cover the top of each bottle before putting the lid on.

water level was much closer to the lid prior to boiling

Place bottles in water not quite up to their lids and boil for about an hour.

The bottles seal themselves as they cool. It was a very hot weekend, so we boiled them fairly late in the evening and sat them outside to cool so their heat wasn't added to our house.

We forgot to weigh the tomatoes, but think it was about 12-14kg of fruit. We ended up with 23 bottles of tomatoes. This should see us through about six months (although as Australians each consume on average 25kg of processed tomatoes a year, perhaps I have over-estimated how long they will last us!). 

The second part of our tomato commitment, therefore, is to buy Australian when our home-processed stores run out.

Initial Time: two hours

Initial Cost: $14 for one large box of tomatoes

Ongoing time or cost commitment: approximately the same again, once a year; about 50c more per tin of tomatoes once our home supplies run out and we are buying Australian (perhaps $26 more in a year?)

Impact: 

Almost 80% of processed tomatoes purchased in Australia are imported, mostly from Italy. Italy is a journey of around 9,200 nautical miles from Perth (17,000km), taking 39 days at sea. That is a lot of food miles. Despite apparent improvements in recent years, workers' conditions are not as well protected in Italy as in Australia and there are many documented instances of tomato workers, many of whom are African migrants and often without valid work visas, being treated not much better than slaves. Quality standards for farms and processing plants are also less rigorous in Italy than in Australia. 

The import from Italy has over the last decade nearly destroyed the Australian tomato industry. Several processing plants have closed (eg Heinz, Rosella). Due to the high Australian dollar, oversupply in Italy, and European Union subsidies to tomato farmers, it was possible for Italian growers to sell tomatoes to Australia at less than their own production cost. This is called 'dumping' and is actually illegal. About 18 months ago an inquiry finally blew the whistle on the practice, and last year the government established tariffs to stop it. As a result we are probably not going see as many 59c tins of tomatoes in the grocery aisles (and should be grateful, not grumpy, about this). Woolworths responded in August 2014 by signing a five-year deal with SPC Ardmona to source Australian tomatoes for their store-brand tomato lines. SPC is now looking to double the size of its tomato processing plant, which two years ago was under threat of closure. But for this hopeful news to become a good outcome, Australians need to abandon our baseless infatuation with 'Italian tomatoes' as a synonym for value and quality, and support Australian growers and producers.

Supporting Australian food producers is not charity. It is in MY best interests to have a robust domestic food industry. It is in MY best interests to have a healthy local economy with plenty of rural and manufacturing employment opportunities. For the reasons outlined above, and drought in tomato-growing regions of Australia for most of the years of this century, Australian tomatoes are generally more expensive. This is despite Australian growers being literally twice as efficient as their Italian competitors in how many tonnes of tomatoes they produce per hectare (150 tonnes compared with 74 tonnes). I am prepared to pay a little more for my tomatoes to support food security and Australian economies. Tomato farmers at present make about 4-5c profit on each 400g tin of tomatoes sold ($100-$125 per tonne after production costs) which is a pretty slight margin to be living on. At the bottom of this post is a bit more information about how to identify Australian tomato products.

So after all those reasons to support Australian producers, why are we bottling our own? Several reasons:

- 'Local' is a bit of a stretch for us here in Perth. The three surviving Australian tomato processing plants are in Echuca and Shepparton Victoria and Jerilderie NSW - at least 3,300km from me (Echuca). West Australians grow tomatoes too, and I would like to buy their produce when I can, which means buying it fresh from our local farmers' markets. (Supermarket tomatoes are not necessarily fresh or local: check out this short video from Local Harvest).

- The biggest Australian producer, and the one it is easiest to find on supermarket shelves, is SPC-Ardmona (based at Shepparton - the 'S' of 'SPC'). SPC-Ardmona is owned by Coca Cola, a company with boycott calls on it due to its involvement in torture and murder of union leaders in Latin America (who were protesting terrible Coca Cola work conditions) and destruction of water supplies for communities in India, as well as varied complaints in many other countries. I want to support Australian producers but I don't want to support Coca Cola, so I am balancing out buying some SPC with doing my own bottling.

- The amount of packaging used in commercial products leads me to want to do my own processing at home - even if much of the packaging for tomatoes is recyclable, not all of it is, and it still carries the energy use of producing and transporting that packaging. The jars we uses were saved from shop-bought tomato products and will be used many times over.

- Although tomato farmers pay their picking contractors appropriate wages, it is not always clear that the contractors pass a fair wage on to the individual pickers who, in Australia as overseas, are often migrants, minorities, non-English speakers, etc, who don't always have the ability to speak out if they are not being treated fairly.

total waste from our box of tomatoes: approx 1kg of ends and two bad fruit

- Buying bulk over-ripe fruit saves food from going to waste. It also means we are bottling the tomatoes in season, at the peak of their flavour, which is not always the case for commercial products. We have the option to use organic produce (although on this occasion we did not) and we know exactly what goes into the jars and don't put any chemicals or additives in (like the mysterious 'thickening agent' in one brand of tinned tomatoes on our shelf).

- Its fun! Really. Eva and I had a lovely afternoon together working on the tomatoes. She insisted on being involved for the entire process, long after I expected she would get bored. She loved getting thoroughly tactile with juicy, squashy fruit. She enjoyed the challenge of getting as many chunks of tomato into each jar as possible, and removing all the air bubbles. She is learning kitchen skills, like handling a sharp knife, as well as a sense that all manner of challenges are very possible to achieve. Being involved in processing our own food also teaches our children where their food comes from and, in my opinion, gives them a greater appreciation of what comes out of packages.

Links: 

The best article I read on the tomato industry (although note this is from May 2012, before the inquiry into dumping and the Woolworths deal, so things were looking very grim at the time)

Findings of the inquiry into Dumping  (Dec 2013 draft; April 2014 final)

A more readable analysis of these findings

About Woolworth's deal with SCP-Ardmona (August 2014)

Local Harvest - Melbourne-based group allowing you to enter your postcode and find 'local food' options near to you

A current social media campaign called 'No farmers No food' captures something of my reasons for trying to support Australian food growers and producers. (They also have plenty of catchy, shareable graphics to pass around)

How to identify Australian tomatoes:

Australia's three tomato processors are:

SPC-Ardmona, based at Shepparton Victoria; owned by Coca Coal Amartil. Tomato products are mostly branded 'SPC', but SPC also supplies to some other companies, such as Woolworths (but not all Woolworths tomatoes are guaranteed to be from SPC).

Kagome, at Echuca Victoria; a subsidiary of the Japanese tomato company of the same name. Kagome claims to be 'Australia's largest grower, harvester and processor of tomatoes'. They only sell wholesale to other producers, so you won't find anything on the shelf labelled 'Kagome'. Their website http://kagomeechuca.com/ has a graphic at the bottom showing specific products that are 100% Australian tomatoes.

Billabong from Jerilderie NSW, a family business who claim to be 'Australia's ONLY wholly owned, made, and grown cannery'. Their products are branded 'Billabong Produce'. I am investigating whether they can be obtained in Western Australia (check comments for updates).

Brands that are using 100% Austalian tomatoes (mostly supplied by Kagome):

MON

SPC

Beerenberg

Maggie Beer

Sabrands (Rosella)

HJ Chapmans (POPs Sauce)

Edlyn (Wood relishes)

Della Rosa Foods (pizza manufacturer)
Masterfoods 100% Australian Grown Ketchup
Dolmio Pasta Sauce from 100% Australian Tomatoes

Brands that use Australian tomatoes but sometimes blend with imported stock (depending on availability):

Simplot (Leggos)

Mars (Masterfoods Ketchup, Dolmio)

Symingtons (5 Brothers, Raguletto)

General Mills (Latina Fresh Pasta, Old El Paso)

Cerebos (White Crow, Fountain)

Campbells

Vesco 
Heinz

There may be others this list has missed, so its always worth checking with the supplier. Enjoy your tomatoes!

Grapes in a rental garden

Grapevines are wonderful. They provide good shade in summer, drop their leaves to allow sun in winter, don't need much water or loving care, and best of all: they grow grapes!

But in a rental garden, are they possible?

We started with a cutting in a pot. As it turns out we have been in the same rental house nearly seven years, but while our lovely vine was getting established in his pot, we could have relocated with him if we needed to. In the photo below he's been settling in for about six months.

By Mr Vine's second summer he needed something to grow up, and we helped him with bits of makeshift trellis in the raised garden bed - mostly recycled items heading for bulk waste, like a rusted clothes drying rack. 

 

But what I really wanted was for the vine to provide shade for the front of the house.

Our lounge heats up not just from direct summer sun, but from reflected heat off sunny bricks. So the challenge was to build a trellis so the grapevine could grow over the garden entrance as far as the roof, without putting up any permanent fixtures.

The main support was a branch salvaged when trimming the gum tree. The trellis comprises two lengths of thick wire, each with loops twisted into them, one lying along the gutter and one connecting the gutter to the gum tree support. Loops between the two wires are connected with pieces of clothesline.

Our vine has now spent two summers growing up the trellis and I am thrilled with this addition to our garden, and to our passive cooling measures for the living area. Grapevines need firm pruning but its not an excessive task. Thus far, only pruning a couple of times a year, the vine has been easy to keep away from the tiles and causes no problems along the roof line.

We know the vine has been through the bottom of the pot for years now. If we need to we can dig it out to remove it when we leave (but why would any landlord want it gone?). Hopefully it can be left to bless future residents.

The grapes are delicious, although they come ripe each year exactly when we are away on our summer holiday. Eva spent the weeks before we left this year telling all our friends to come and eat our grapes while we were away and we were delighted that one good friend did just that, so the harvest was not wasted.

Initial Time: well now... Putting a grape cutting in a pot took about five minutes. Building the trellis took me about five minutes (erecting the gum tree support post) and Tyson about an hour (twisting wires). Growing a grapevine has taken five years so far. We got edible grapes from the fourth summer.

Initial Cost: Zero. We were given our cutting by friends.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Zero cost. We water with recycled bath, shower or washing machine water through summer, top up the soil with home-grown compost and mulch with leaves off other plants around the garden. Pruning takes about half an hour two or three times a year. As its in a well-mulched pot, there are hardly any weeds.

Impact: Our bricks are shaded a little more of the day and reflect less heat in our lounge window and front door. I don't know if the temperature is actually much cooler but I feel cooler to have a green space rather than the glare of a brick driveway when I look out the window. As it takes so long to be cold enough for leaves to fall here, I have actually cut most of the leaves off to let autumn sun through. And we get to eat home-grown grapes! Which is cool, and also saves a bit on  food miles/ pesticides/ packaging/ etc.

This picture was taken last July - not much sign of leaves dropping off despite it being the middle of winter! Last year we had only one week between the last leaf falling and the first spring shoots emerging. Ah Perth. Not really a climate of four seasons. 

Australian native jam

Do you know Lilly Pillys? Those bright pinky-purple berries that grow in many Perth yards, in hedges and public gardens, and on rambly old overgrown properties? I love the way they look and I like their name - its sounds quirky-romantic to me. 

As of last month, I now also love that they are edible, that they are an Australian native, and that they grow in our neighbour's yard between our two driveways.

So we were making jam again.

Eva was so excited by the idea that we could harvest these beautiful berries and make something edible that she was the main motivation for the project.

It was Greg's idea, though, and he put me onto this recipe, which we followed. I checked the internet to be sure I had lilly pillys and found there are over 60 different species of lilly pilly and all of them are edible.

The recipe calls for one lemon and 1kg of sugar per 1L of lilly pilly pulp. We doubled the amount of lemon, and wouldn't have wanted any less.

Next time I think I would go for a 3:4 ratio of sugar to pulp, as the 1:1 ratio has given us jam that is sweeter than it needs to be.

pulp coming through the sieve - it really is that colour

BUT: it is surprisingly delicious, and very beautiful. 

no it didn't boil down that far - I tipped it into a bigger pan so I could supervise it less closely

Six jars of lovely jam - 2L of pulp, about 2.5L of jam once sugar and lemon juice was added.

As I put too much water in when boiling the lilly pillys, I was left with a couple of litres of bright pink liquid once they were all scooped out. 

This I put in the fridge and used as a herbal tea. With half a teaspoon of honey per large mug, heated in the microwave, it was fantastic!

I am so excited that I cooked an Australian plant! OK, I don't think its native to the southwest of WA where I actually live, but at least its not from the northern hemisphere...

This is now our third jam-making session in less than a year (see posts on strawberries and nectarines). We are a big jam-eating house, but even so we are more than keeping up a supply for all our needs and gifts for friends. I am therefore now prepared to commit to NO MORE BUYING COMMERCIAL JAM.

 

Initial Time: About 3.5 hours - although the stove-top sections didn't require constant supervision, so actual labour time was closer to 2.5 hours (1/2 hour harvesting; 1/2 hour washing and preparing; 1/2 hour boiling; 1hr smooshing through a sieve to get seeds out and thin the pulp - this is the really labourious bit; 1/2 hour cooking; 1/2 hour bottling and cleaning up)

Initial Cost: About $2 for a bag of sugar. We remembered this time to get lemons from Grandma, and (with our neighbour's permission) the lilly pillys were free. She found the jar we gave her too sweet for her taste but her grandkids loved it.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Half a day every three or four months to make whatever the latest seasonal jam will be.

Impact:

Australian household spend on average about $1 per week on jam, with each Australian eating around 2kg of jam per year. We are a net exporter of 'jams, spreads, pastes, etc' - around $12mill worth per year, a small portion of the approximately $625mill annual export of substantially processed fruit and vegetable from Australia, and a blip beside the approximately $1.6bill of processed fruit and vegetables imported. Food and vegetable processing in general employs around 75,000 people in this country. (more stats here - from 2011-12). So not buying jam is not about reducing reliance on food imported from overseas. Very little if any of the jam available in supermarkets is produced in Western Australia, however, so we are reducing our food miles for produce trucked across Australia (I really hope it is trucked. Surely we don't need to fly our jam around? Actually I would love to think it was brought by rail... there is always hope, surely?)

Commercial manufacture of food products involves all manner of inputs and dependencies, such as: transport fuel, transport network, communications, banking services, electricity, gas, water (HEAPS of water is used in commercial processes!), chemicals for cleaning, preservatives to extend product life, packaging materials (including their production and transport)...

Think about it for a jar of jam:

Lid - sourcing raw materials (mining), processing them into a workable form, shaping the metal into a lid, adding labels (inks, dyes, etc and sometimes paper), at each of these stages transporting the stuff to the place where the next stage happens, at each stage a business operation with a footprint of all it takes to run an office (at bare minimum) and possibly a factory or a mine site. Quite likely a mine site that flies workers in and out every day or so.

Jar - sourcing raw materials (mining), turning them into glass (I'm no expert but that needs HEAT!!), shaping into jars. And at each stage another round of transport and business footprints.

Label - sourcing raw materials (forestry), turning them into paper, graphic design work, adding dyes etc to print and finish, glue to attach to jars. Add transport. Add business bits and pieces like the office coffee machine, toilet-flushing for all those staff, and replacing the carpets every few years...

Jam - sourcing raw materials (fruit, but also sugar, preservatives, corn syrup - although to be fair the Cottees and IXL jars I have left over in my pantry from before the jam-making began both have very few ingredients beyond fruit, water, citric acid and pectin), all the inputs required for horticulture including many pesticides, and lots and lots of water; all that is required to fit-out a factory for production.

And each piece has more sub-pieces that have their own chain of impact - Where did the glue come from? Where does the dye come from? What chemicals are used to clean all the equipment needed along the way? What materials are the machines in the factories made from?

By comparison our lilly pilly jam used:  recycled glass jars; about 30L of water to wash berries and jars, gas to run the stove; electricity to run the oven to sterilise the jars; no electricity for light or heating or cooling as we worked during the day on a nice winter's day; petrol to transport lemons from Grandma to us (but we didn't make a special trip); and all the supply-chain stuff above for commercially produced sugar - especially HEAPS of water that it takes to grow sugarcane. Our equipment (stove, our kitchen, the stainless steel saucepans, mixing bowls and spoons, plastic lemon squeezer) all comes from somewhere and has its own footprint.

Impact on my lifestyle: The only thing I may miss is ginger marmalade, unless I can find an acceptable recipe to try, and a cheap-enough source of ginger.

PS: North American friends, we Australians use 'jam' for what you call 'jelly'. 'Jelly' here is what you call 'jello'. Not so great on toast.

Bottling plums

Now on to something much more aesthetically pleasing than nappies...

Plum season is at an end and once again I was looking for ways to keep plums ready for our porridge through the coming months. The last couple of years we froze them, but our freezer doesn't really have room for storing months worth of breakfast plums. This year I decided to try bottling them.

We purchased 4.4kg of plums at the end of the season.

 

I initially searched online for no-sugar bottling options, as the amount of sugar our jamming experiments had required somewhat alarmed me. I found plenty of options, including one with no sugar, but it seemed too good to be true and I didn't have a second chance, so I compromised with a light sugar syrup loosely based on the second recipe here. I dissolved two cups of sugar with 1.5L of water. Measuring sugar in cups rather than kilos (as for jam) was a good feeling.

Plums were scrubbed and quartered, then squashed fairly firmly into jars. Warm sugar syrup was poured in to fill the jars (tapping to remove air bubbles) then they were closed and set into cold water on the stove.

These were then heated to boiling, and left to simmer for 20-30 minutes. I was unsure whether the water should cover the jar lids or not, but the size of our pots only allowed it to cover two jars and these did not work as well, so next time I think no covering the jar lids.

Pot lids were balanced on as best I could, as this reduces significantly the amount of heat required to keep a pot simmering. 

 

The finished product - 8 jars of plums - is delicious. Sweet but still tart. Lightly cooked but still fresh tasting.

Initial Time: About two hours.

Initial Cost: About $17 for plums. Either we missed the week they were in bulk and super cheap, or it never happened at our market this year.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Zero

Impact: Again we are challenging the mass-production excess-packaging meet-every-whim-regardless-of-season food culture we live within. Its a little drop in a big ocean, but a good drop none the less.

The week of the nectarines

One of the best things about shopping at the farmers' market is the availability of seasonal fruit in bulk. Last Saturday whole boxes of slightly imperfect nectarines were selling for $10. Our box had about 8.5kg of fruit.

What to do with 8.5kg of nectarines? 

First project: jam

 

Tyson based the jam roughly on this recipe. About 2.5kg of nectarine flesh (after stones were removed - no need to peel) produced the quantity of jam shown above.

So many people have reacted with surprise when I mentioned making nectarine jam that it has caused me to think about how strongly our perception of what is or is not 'legitimate' food is shaped by what is available in supermarkets. There is no Cottees or IXL nectarine jam and therefore it doesn't register on the radar when a big box of nectarines is available. Unlike strawberry jam, which a box of ripe strawberries fairly cried out to me in large letters, despite the fact that I don't buy strawberry jam as it is not my favourite.

Nectarine jam is so, so good. WAY better than strawberry jam, and easier to make, as the pectin content is higher in nectarines than strawberries (the thing that helps it set - I didn't know that six months ago either).

If not jam, then smoothies: 

Two peeled nectarines, hearty dollop of vanilla yoghurt, about a cup of milk. Blend.

Or baked nectarines:

 

 

 

 

Tyson did one tray simply adding cinnamon or vanilla sugar to each half fruit and baking uncovered for around 20 minutes (pictured). He did a second tray as follows: 

Line well-greased baking tray with baking paper. Halve the nectarines, drizzle a little brandy on each half, then sprinkle sugar on each. Put a small lump of butter on each. Pour about 100ml water into the bottom of the pan. Cover with alfoil or a baking tray and bake for 20min in a 200°C oven. Take the cover off and sprinkle a little more sugar on each, then back into the oven for 10min to finish.

The brandied ones came out softer than the cinnamon ones - more of a stewed than baked finish.

Or just eat them. Many of the 'slightly damaged' nectarines in our box were much more delicious than the 'perfect' ones usually available.

 

They ran out by Thursday, so I can assure you we had no trouble putting away the whole box.

Market day today: Nectarines $5 a tray. Our tray weighed in at just short of 7kg. So the week of the nectarines is extending into a fortnight... at least...

Initial Time: Clare: five minutes to make a smoothie. Tyson: three hours for jam; about 20 minutes for baked nectarines. I love being married to a man who likes to cook...

Initial Cost: $10 (and now another $5 for week two)

Ongoing time or cost commitment: zero - in fact, a cost saving as we won't be buying jam any time soon. Or possibly ever again, if we keep up the bulk fruit jamming a couple of times a year.

Impact: As when I wrote about using bulk strawberries (jam and pulp) and freezing plums, this is more about shifting my thinking than having a large impact as a single action. Still, we have managed again to use local fruit in season and make a small reduction in the food miles and packaging required to source our food.