Winter, as the saying now goes, is coming. There’s been a definite nip in the air and the smell of wood smoke drifts through the valleys in the evenings.
So it’s good to get out of the cold and in front of a fire and sit down to something good and warming to eat.
That’s what I was thinking at the end of a long day after photographing football in Pemberton, so as I drove north I headed straight to Tall Timbers where I had one thing on my mind: the steak sandwich.
To be honest, I had a second thing on my mind, too: the 2011 Chestnut Grove reserve merlot. Don’t miss it. If you think you know merlot, prepare to learn a thing or two.
But I digress.
Believe the hype about the Tall Timbers steak sandwich. It is indeed just a humble steak sandwich – but wow, what a sandwich. The bread is transcendent, the meat deliciously good, and the onions… well, let me just say the onions are non-obvious.
One bite and a few things occur to you, once you recover from the swoon.
The first is that despite the fact that what you hold in your hand is a humble sandwich, this particular sandwich is the work of some seriously talented and generous people. It’s obvious that the baker, the butcher, the gardener and the chef want you not just to enjoy yourself but to feel a kind of love – the love that producers feel for the best food they can bring to the table.
It’s pride made real, so real you can put it in your mouth and take a bite and sigh softly as you realise what’s going on.
Now I have no idea if the ingredients in this sandwich are organic or not and personally I don’t care. I would continue eating it if I had to lose a limb each time I ordered it and then I would just have someone feed me, so that’s not a concern for me here.
But another thing that happens when you eat something like this is that you realise this sort of quality is important and worth defending, be it organic or not.
For organic growers, of course, it’s not just a matter of quality but of purity and there’s a whole other level of protection that needs to occur to keep produce free of the chemicals that have no natural place in, say, celery or a sirloin.
So it was worrying to hear of the concerns raised by Southampton farmers Jeff Pow and Michelle McManus over the spraying of pesticides across pine plantations adjacent to their property.
The spraying is being carried out by the Forest Products Commission who, let us be very clear here, certainly do not seem to have done anything wrong.
I dearly wish there was another way for the FPC to get rid of pests other than spraying Roundup all over the place, but they’re not breaking any laws.
But what happens if Pow and McManus – who must now undertake a costly chemical monitoring program – find traces of pesticide in the water on their property? Their fisheries could be worse than threatened, and other produce could be contaminated.
Then these 2015 Landcare award winners (for innovation and sustainable farm practices, for which they are also finalists this year) could conceivably lose the organic certification on which their business relies.
Nobody has done anything wrong, but someone might lose their business, and diners lose a source of good, pure food.
The case of Kojonup farmer Steve Marsh who lost organic certification of most of his farm after genetically modified canola from a neighbour’s property contaminated his crop is alarming. The Supreme Court ruled against Marsh, saying that his neighbour had not acted negligently and could not be held responsible simply for growing a genetically modified crop in the usual way.
Once again, Marsh’s neighbour did nothing wrong, nor did Marsh, but now one of them stands to lose his business and I have a hard time understanding why the onus should be on someone who wants to produce food as naturally as possible to defend themselves against contamination.
It should be the other way around.
– Jem Hedley
