In relation to the SPC cannery, someone recently tweeted, in summary:
- Canned food is old-fashioned
- SPC needs to modernise (and produce more relevant products, which people will want to buy)
- The only people who buy tinned food are the ‘price sensitive’. (The implication being, tinned food buyers are either peasants or bogans, or both.)
Unsurprisingly, the person who made the comment lives in a capital city – our second largest.
Who does buy canned food these days?
- People who are extra busy, especially if they have a horde of children to feed and are out in the paid workforce
- Campers and travellers. Only so much free-range, organic, gluten-free, hand-picked, hand-ripened farmer’s market produce will fit in the esky. And maybe its simply unavailable en route or at the destination.
- Anyone who likes to eat fruit or vegetables out of season, yet still eat Australian produce rather than imported.
- People who live too far away (for time & expense reasons) from food sellers to be trotting in regularly for fresh produce.
- People who live on roads that become tricky or impossible to traverse during the Northern Australian wet season, which can cut roads to some remote residents for not just days or weeks in some instances, but a couple of months or even longer.
- Anyone living in a cyclone-prone part of Australia, who will face a food shortage lasting days when a big rain event closes roads. Even if they live in a city of a couple of hundred thousand people, such as Townsville; where supermarket shelves empty of non-perishable items even before big rain hits, and can take many days to refill.
- Anyone who doesn’t feel the need to fork out extra money, for ‘gourmet’ tucker (regardless or whether or not they can afford to do so).
- Anyone whose idea of ‘meal planning in advance’ means opening the fridge & pantry half an hour before a mealtime, and assessing the options available. (me)
The above list would undoubtedly cover the majority of Australia’s 23 million residents.
If ‘nobody buys tinned food anymore’, then why have Australia’s two supermarket giants split their sides to emulate the packaging and contents long produced by independent Australian food canneries? Proof of saleability is on the supermarket shelves.
Until recently, holier-than-thou vegetarian and vegan lecturing was the most obvious food snobbery in Australia. Yes there have always been ordinary food snobs around – probably dating back to when one pontiferous caveman told his neighbour he wouldn’t eat anything except triple-smoked mammoth fillets from two mountain ranges away. (A couple of decades ago they started calling French Sticks baguettes, but unfortunately the rest of the population caught on, so the one-upmanship was short-lived.)
But since the explosion of cooking competitions, moving food preparation way beyond the efforts of the practical and economical TV chefs of old, the rise in food snobbery amongst omniverous Australians has risen to embarrassing heights.
No doubt the person above thought nobody eats tinned food any more – because nobody they know does. The larger the city, the easier it is to centre ones life entirely around like-minded work colleagues, friends and neighbours. Thus leading to a false belief that everyone living in the rest of Australia, thinks and lives likewise.
Since when did barbequeing a few chops or steaks and downing them with a basic salad or cooked veges, become a food crime? About the time people started believing that what Pete and Manou (My Kitchen Rules) were harping on about, was essential everyday tucker rather than special occasion fare, requiring an unsually high cost and time investment.
Farmers Markets that are genuine (and not filled with fruit and vegetable resellers or cupcake and ‘special sauce’ makers) are fantastic. But when a sizeable percentage of the world’s population would be grateful to simply have enough food to feed their family, the rise of Australian food snobbery is becoming increasingly embarrassing. A slice of the population is looking very over-indulged, overpaid, underworked and self-obsessed.
Stop being so princessy about what you eat, and what you think others should be eating, Australians. If you do want to criticise what others are eating, whop it up the fast food franchise stuff many people seem to consume every other day. And drink industries. And stop casting judgements on whether someone is eating tomatoes grown in a paddock and trucked down the road to the Shepparton cannery, or whether they are eating some fancy tomato variety fed who-knows-what hydroponically in some greenhouse somewhere, handpicked by angels and flown in by faeries to the Farmers Market 3 blocks away.
I hope our fruit cannery survives. The last thing I want to be eating during a cyclone, is imported tucker or fancy gourmet fare.
PS: Like most of my blog posts, this one will undoubtedly be tweaked and added to over the next week or so, as I think of new points and comments from others precipitate new trains of thought.