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Food quality – a holistic view
Food regulations concentrate on ‘safety’ issues. We all want food free of contamination and we should be grateful that a responsible authority supervises the use of food additives, and pesticide residues. We don’t want BSE, BST, salmonella or HUV either and we need laws and monitoring systems to keep these out of our food.But ‘food safety’ is only one aspect of food quality.
Conventional food markets tend to define food quality narrowly – food safety issues are acknowledged and ‘appearance’ dominates any other considerations.
Take an apple. The conventional market classifies the apple according to the following:
- Size - eg will it fit through the 54 – 55 mm grading slot
- Colour - basically three choices here – red, yellow green
- Roundness – is the fruit a uniform shape – does it have a lumpy appearance
- Freedom from blemish – are there marks from fruit rubbing, or russeting
Unfortunately the appearance demands of the food industry severely limit the choices of farmers. The potato which produces the ‘fry’ which McDonalds want may not be ideally suited to cultivation, or produce the highest yield. The round, uniform apple variety may not perform well in an organic growing regime. A traditional variety may produce three times the level of antioxidants and twice the level of vitamin C, and grow successfully without artificial fertilisers and pesticides.
Surely good food should be good for you.
"...it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons"
Wendell Berry, The agricultural crisis as a crisis of culture
Australians have the best food of any nation and we should be thankful – but that does not mean there can’t be further improvements to the system. We still have environmental problems from food production and processing, a rising toll of diet-related diseases, and food that “doesn’t taste like it used to”.
Can top quality food come from a system that keeps animals in inhumane conditions?
Is it OK to add dye to a yabby or a salmon so it looks ‘fresh’, ‘natural’ and ‘high quality’?
Aware consumers believe that the internal characteristics of the apple are more important that the external ones:
- Is it free from pesticide residue?
- Does it have good nutritional qualities?
- Does it have a good aroma, texture and taste?
- Is it produced in a responsible, low input, non-polluting system?
- Is it produced in a ‘humane’ system?
"...eating is an agricultural act"
Wendell Berry, The pleasures of eating.
