A Month Ago: celebrating Australia Day with a Fair Feed Breakfast

Thinking back of a lovely day in the park with a true South Aussie barbie brekkie...

Every year on 26 January Australian friends and family get together to celebrate being Australian, living their good lives in the land Down Under, and 'celebrate what's great about Australia'.*  It is a day to get together in parks and on beaches, to organise pick-nicks and barbies, or to attend one of the many events that are being organised in local communities. The Drover and I attended such a local community event, organised by Slow Food Adelaide & Barossa, where we did not only celebrate what is good about Australia, but also what is good about eating local food.

A philosophy of Good, Clean and Fair
Slow Food Adelaide & Barossa is one of the 31 local Slow Food chapters, called convivia, in Australia. The convivium is part of the international Slow Food movement, that has about 1.300 convivia worldwide, connecting over 100.000 members in 153 different countries. Slow Food is an international grassroots organisations that promotes good, clean and fair food for everyone and that believes that good food should be accessible and enjoyable for everyone. To give you a better idea of what this means I quote the SF international website:

GOOD a fresh and flavorsome seasonal diet that satisfies the senses and is part of our local culture.
CLEAN food production and consumption that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health.
FAIR accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for small producers.**

This philosophy of producing and consuming food is a philosophy that I believe in for years already. Eating food from your local area, preserving traditions and food culture (while also looking for modern innovations), eating what is in season because of the richest nutrients in the food and the lower environmental impact, knowing your local farmers and producers and supporting them in the difficult competition with multinational companies and massive supermarket chains, having fair conditions and prices for farmers for all their hard work on the land... To me it all just sounds like pure logic and common sense!

A Fair Feed Breakfast
Since I have been very actively involved in the Slow Food movement in the last years, and in particular in attracting more young people to the organisation by co-founding the Youth Food Movement in the Netherlands, I was very curious to visit a local Slow Food (SF) event here in Adelaide. It would be a good way to get to know some new people, to get an impression of what is happening in SF on the other side of the globe and to taste some beautiful local products. Aussie friends have become active for the local SF chapter a few months ago after all their great travels in Europe where they explored local food cultures and traditions, and they took the initiative to organise this Fair Feed Breakfast in the park next to the Botanic Garden of Adelaide.

It was a beautiful day, a great location and the food was just delicious! About 50 people attended this breakfast in the park and the atmosphere was great. I really liked the mix of young foodies, families with children and people of a slightly older age (very diplomatically said!). For me it was great to see that we were definitely not the only ones celebrating Australia Day with a breakfast or pick-nick in the park. Everywhere I looked I saw groups of friends and whole families laughing and smiling and being happy to be Australians. Now I have to tell you that I am not really the type to be very nationalistic, but at home in the Netherlands there is for me only one day a year that I do celebrate all things good about being Dutch and I do wear an outfit in our national colour, orange. This day I just mostly recognised this feeling of fun and happiness that I also felt all the years that I celebrated our Dutch national Queensday with my friends and family members.

Anyway, back to the Fair Feed, we had a lovely breakfast of sourdough bread, free range Berkshire bacon and free range eggs, great jams made according to granny's recipes and the best apple juice you could imagine made of organic apples from Kalangadoo. Alex and Alex were frying bacon and eggs on a big mobile barbecue, Rebecca and Liz told stories about the jams, bread and juice while making coffee and welcoming all the guests and the Drover and I, just like all those other people, enjoyed a nice chat with friends, an interesting talk with the SF committee members and shared experiences of living in Europe and Australia with other immigrants and 'new Australians'. It was absolutely a great morning!

Products and Producers
So a little bit more info about the products and the people behind the products.*** I tasted three different types of bread, a white one, a whole meal bread and another one with olives in it. Lovely! The bread is being freshly hand shaped and baked every day by Polish baker Voytek Sadlocha. Although Voytek gives the impression that sourdough baking is simple and only asks for flour, water and salt, it is actually a real skill that asks for an eye for detail with changing circumstances in different seasons and different weather conditions. Voytek bakes his bread in his bakery at Stepney, but does not sell to the public from there. On his website you can find the retail outlets to buy his delicious loafs.

Rohde's Free Range Eggs

The eggs that we ate that morning came from the Rohde family that run the Ruradene Farm near Tarlee in the Clare Valley. They have been grain feeding their hens for over 50 years now and they supply 20% of South Australian produced free-range eggs, with 40.000 chooks roaming freely from paddock to laying shed. Ruradene is the only RSPCA accredited free range egg farms on mainland Australia, because of the specious and animal friendly conditions in which the hens live their lives and lay their eggs.

The bacon comes from black Berkshire pigs, that are being raised and fed by Col and Joy Lienert. The breed of pigs would almost have gone into oblivion, because of the market wanting standard fast-growing large white pigs. But the Lienerts did not give up, and still today they make this bacon of happy little black pigs running around freely and getting time to grow slowly. It is Jose Coutinho, originally from Portugal, that cured the meat and wins various state, interstate and national awards with his smallgoods, sausages and Australian made prosciutto of San Jose Smallgoods.

Dirty Girl Kitchen

Dirty Girl Kitchen is a beautiful little company founded by Rebecca Sullivan, a South Aussie that lived for many years in other places in the world, of which her cottage in Gloucestershire, UK, was called home for quite some time. While she lived in the UK I met Rebecca at a meeting of Youth Food Movement NL and UK, where she already inspired me with great stories of food events that she had organised. Rebecca loves her grandmothers and the preserving skills that she learnt from them and with Dirty Girl Kitchen she tries to safeguard Granny Skills and promote more social, environmental and sustainable food choices. I have tasted some beautiful jams made of strawberries and basil or apricots from her neighbours tree, made in her kitchen in Mallala. Keep an eye out for more news on Dirty Girl Kitchen, with pop-up restaurants and a food hub in Adelaide coming up soon!

Eating all this good food on a warm Australian summer day makes you thirsty, so what's better than a refreshing little bottle of apple juice, made of organically grown apples by Chris and Michelle McColl at Kalangadoo, near Panola in the South East of SA. Last year I already tasted their beautiful, juicy apples and freshly made apple juice at the Adelaide Showground Farmers Market and I absolutely loved it. The McColls are bringing older and neglected apple varities back into production and together with thier two daughters they love to tell you everything about all the specific characteristics of the different varieties. Not only do they love their apples, they also love their heritage Wessex Saddleback pigs.

More good, clean and fair events coming up
Do you like the sound of this Slow Food Adelaide & Barossa event? There will be more events and activities coming up in the next weeks and months. Young Slow Foodie Liz has been working on the new website of Slow Food South Australia which unites Slow Food Adelaide & Barossa, Adelaide Hills and Fleurieu Peninsula. Join a 'Books, Words and Ideas' discussion night about fish Tuesday 28 February (registration closes the 25th) or keep an eye out for what is coming up next! www.slowfoodsouthaustralia.org

 * www.australiaday.org.au
** www.slowfood.com
*** The information about the products and their producers was provided by the organisers of the event.