Bimbo poster

I bloody love this poster, used at Bimbo Deluxe for their special needs pizza:

Sewing and reaping

Mr Fothergills - an Australian seed retailer - has an 'ad' in this month's Gardening Australia magazine. I put ad in inverted commas as it's quite clearly designed to look like an article, with no branding on the page but plenty of text.

The text focuses on two things: that Australians, on average, don't eat enough vegetables; and that part of the reason for that is their high cost. The ad claims '5 daily serves of vegetables for a family of four can average well over $1,000 a year'. The alternative, of course, is to grow one's own, and to that end the ad contains a table listing half a dozen of Mr Fotherfill's seeds, their estimated yield and the cost per kilo of yield, versus the average supermarket price of the same product.

I'm a strong believer in urban sustainability, growing your own, locavorism etc. But I'm surprised to see a company that ostensibly shares the same values presenting such a biased version of cost. First of all, I don't think $1,000 a year, for four people, is too much to pay for vegetables. Secondly, why do vegetables have to be 'cheap'? I think this is a great misnomer of our time, the cost of fresh produce. People are rejoicing that bananas are back down to $2 a kilo. Remember when they were more than $15? It was terrible!

Well, it was frustrating that a couple of bananas cost several dollars, but a cyclone had wiped out an enormous portion of supply. Lower supply + same demand = high prices. It's really simple market economics. And, frankly, I think $2 a kilo is an absurdly low price for a weighty product that doesn't grow within a thousand or more kilometres of Melbourne.

As Alla Wolf-Tasker - chef extraordinaire at the Lake House - says, 'There is no such thing as cheap food'.

A part of the marketing strategy for many supermarkets is advertising products that cost less than they did a year ago. I've always found that a bit strange, and the message I get from it is that we can't take their word on what a product 'costs'. Fresh produce should not sit at a fixed price. We should not expect to always be able to get apples for $6 a kilo or tomatoes for $4. We recognise that with the products that are still acknowledged as seasonal - mangoes, grapes, berries etc. But it goes for all of them.

Mr Fothergills does have a point though. Even though they ignore the cost of potting mix, plant food etc in their pricing of produce grown from their seed, at least a vegetable grown in your backyard demonstrates a truism more certain than market economics - you get out what you put in.

Vitamin WTF

VitaminWater are going all out with a new set of billboards advertising VitaminWaterZero, an improvement on VitaminWater10 because it's low calorie. That's a relief, cos all those calories in water have been bothering me...

Let's wind back a step here. They are advertising low-calorie water. Water. The stuff that comes out of the tap, made up of hydrogen and oxygen, rather than a bunch of carbohydrates that want to make friends with your hips.

I've been pretty flabbergasted over the last few years as these super-waters started, ahem, flooding the market. Bottled water is bad enough, with each 600ml bottle requiring about twice that much water to manufacture and distribute. Even advertisers tip their cap to the industry that has made so much money out of the ultimate free commodity.

But any product, no matter how successful, needs innovation to keep up the buying trend, so the gurus at Coca-Cola (Glaceau, who puts out VitaminWater, is a subsidiary of the soft drink giant) put their heads down and came up with stuff to put in the water to make it better for us. Advertising for VitaminWater is admirable - it's Gen Y styley with plenty of social media presence, and products spruiked to help in situations from hangovers ('get perky when you're feeling murky') to workouts ('more muscles than Brussels'). There's even VitaminWater 'uncapped' which sets out, armed with 600ml bottles of pick-me-up, to uncover the latest in music, sports and fashion.

The original VitaminWater10 range, with products names such as Focus, Revive and Spark, is pitched as a 'nutrient enhanced water beverage'. The liquid of life is improved with an alphabet of vitamins and flavours described as both fruit and 'other natural'.

They push the healthy line pretty hard: in the products area of the VitaminWater site, the interactive feature allows users to 'rollover to view nutrition info', which merely enlarges the front label of the bottle - already clearly visible - to zoom on the list of vitamins and additives such as taurine and chromium. It's a simple nutrition panel - it must be good for you!

So where, in amongst the -ins, -ines and -iums are the -oses? Where does sugar come into this? It seems pretty extraordinary that enough sweetener had been added all along to make it worth their while to bring out a whole new range that in effect spruiks the unhealthiness of the original product.

And it shits me that the conglomerates have carte blanche to take over the 'healthy' soapbox with 'enhanced water' (come on, it's a ridiculous phrase) when in fact that enhancement is in no small part sugar, the ingredient against which genuine health experts are fighting an uphill battle.

Hotbeautyhealth.com can't get enough of it. 'No more worries about high calories in our favorite beverages because Glaceau has come to the rescue creating Vitamin Water 10!' They spruik its benefits of only 10 calories per serving (although there are 2.5 servings in a standard bottle) and mentions three times how tasty it is, and as many times how 'natural' it is. 'Sounds unreal!'

My oath it does.

Fructose free III - at what cost?

I give great credit to Sacs in Westgarth. Formerly the wonderfully named Silly Yaks, this cafe and foodstore serves a full range of food suitable not only for a coeliac diet, but also for those avoiding fructose.

A range of breads, pasta and ready meals are available from the freezer, and the cafe offers pies, pizzas and sweets, all marked out as FF or GF. They even offer tarts with forbidden fructose-laden fruits, wherein the fruit has been cooked with dextrose, which binds with the fructose to carry it across the stomach wall, hence avoiding the deleterious effects of fructose malabsorption.

But...and this is a big but...their takeaway products are horrendously expensive. I ducked in this morning to look for some gluten-free breadrolls (pack of 4) so I could partake of burgers at home, as well as pastry to wrap around the mince we bought in readiness for sausage rolls. What would you expect to pay for two such pantry staples?

$30.

That's what the guy at the counter asked for. $10 for the rolls, $20 for the pastry. Most of their products aren't marked with a price, perhaps to avoid screams of the nature I swallowed as I calmly handed over enough food to feed myself for a week, in return for two pantry items. As I left the store, I imagined other uses for that $30. I could:

• See two films at Nova as a RRR subscriber, and get a choc top
• Buy one and half six packs of beer
• Buy two bottles of very reasonable wine, or three bottles of Gran Sasso from that place on Lygon St
• Travel to Yea and back, and back again, on the bus
• When Tiger's in a good mood, fly to Tasmania
  
• Buy three pairs of shoes from Green Collective
• Revamp my summer wardrobe at Savers
• Revamp my entire wardrobe at Salvos
• Pick up a desk and drawers at Don Boscos
• Eat at Don Dons five times
• Get two courses and a glass of wine at innumerable Melbourne restaurants

Instead, for that money, I have two meal components, not even two complete meals.

Now, grumbling aside (and I confess that as I left the shop I was pretty grumpy), let's consider what this actually means. The food we stock our pantries with, despite protests to the contrary, is, in the main part, quite cheap. A large proportion of the population can't satisfactorily process a lot of wheat, yet white flour is a staple of our diet. It's cheap and easy to grow, harvest and mill, and it has just the right amount of stickiness - or gluten - that we've come to expect in everything from bread to muffins to pastry. And, thanks to monoculture farming, it keeps the costs of those types of products low.

So it's pretty scary when you step outside the protected world of mainstream groceries. Firstly, to discover how many alternatives there are - rice, tapioca, soy, barley, oat, buckwheat and maize flour to name some - and what the cost of production and distribution is when you don't have the back-up of a large corporation.

You can't just replace wheat flour one for one with another choice - to get a reasonable consistency you need a mix, so there is more involved in product development. And, not everyone likes it, so the market is smaller. However, not everyone likes stomach cramps and headaches after a sandwich either, so people like me who are trying to lessen health problems are faced with elevated costs for alternative items, in part because mainstream costs are kept so low.

Think about bananas. When they're $17 a kilo people get angry. But that's what they cost when supply is low. When they're $4 a kilo, noone's thinking about the fact that they're still travelling thousands of kilometres to fill the market in cooler climates. The cost of food isn't a static one, yet supermarkets push prices down on lead items as if they can control the weather. If stores stocked a range of bread products, the white flour options might cost a little more, but the alternatives would almost certainly cost a lot less.

I'm still thinking of other options for that $30, and while the cost will make the sausage sandwich I've got planned for lunch a little tougher to swallow, I can take some comfort from contributing to the possiblity of alternatives one day actually breaking into the mainstream. And the lack of physical symptoms afterwards will feel pretty good too.

Where's your kitchen?

An intriguing part of the cafe boom around Brunswick is the forebearance of installing a kitchen. It's a pretty vital part of the food-service industry, but many venues go instead for a food-preparation area of grill and sink behind the counter, with as much bench space given to the coffee machine and its accessories.

The breadth of cafe options in the area owes thanks to that decision - it is, of course, about cutting start-up costs, making it possible to make rent and offer high-quality coffee with a small range of breakfasts and lunches, often under or around $10.

But, when the crowds arrive - as they inevitably do in Brunswick - the limitations of the set-up become more obvious, with 45-minute waits for breakfast orders, since only one or two items can be prepared at once.

It's a relief to visit somewhere like Mixed Business in Clifton Hill to see a cafe with closer to a 50-50 split between customer and kitchen space. A kitchen laden with colanders, steaming pots, aproned and hatted cooks is discreetly visible at the back of a single, large, light room. Filled with mish-mashed wooden furniture, it's an echoey space, but customers are given enough room that conversation is still an easy proposition.

Similarly, a recent lunch at Pope Joan was over refreshingly quickly, since their enormous food-prep area - with a separate room at the back and a finishing station at the front, often staffed by owner Matt Wilkinson - gives them capacity to cope with the endlessly eager crowd of customers.

Congrats to said Mr Wilkinson also, for recently being crowned Australia's best sandwich maker. I can attest that the ones on offer at Pope Joan are fantastic!

Cheap as chips

Down at Bridie O'Reillys, Friday nights are a bargain...for them. How does only getting a fifth of your meal sound? (Maybe one of the loads of 'give aways' is the chance to win the other 80%...)

Click on the pic to see in larger detail.

Hungry City - Carolyn Steel

I've rarely enjoyed the pleasure of a non-fiction book that brings together so many of my favourite themes for consideration.

I came across Carolyn Steel as the presenter of the keynote address for this year's State of Design festival. Steel is an architect by trade, but some years ago started researching how the design of our cities reflects, is influenced by and (especially in modern cities) ignores our relationship with food and its supply.

Steel is a rapid and enthusiastic speaker, unable to resist delving into tangents, then berating herself for not sticking to the vital facts in her allotted time. Despite both the restrictions and diversion, she did an impressive job of precising much of the book's 300 pages of content in an hour. Steel is clearly intimately engaged with her subject and it's a further credit to her that the book is so nuanced; she doesn't run away with passionate polemic, but her message is forceful regardless.

So what is that message? Hungry City argues that we cannot persist with building cities that ignore the realities of food supply. The 'sustainable city' is a common theme in today's media, whether in discussions about more bike paths, urban gardening or solar power rebates. Steel's argument, however, is more fundamental than that. It's not about improving what we have, it's about rethinking design and paying closer attention to the chains of power that control the supply of food around the world.

This is also about much more than food miles, which themselves aren't a new phenomenon. In Ancient Rome, the citizens dined on delicacies from as far away as Egypt and Spain. Steel traces the history of town- and city-building back to Sumerian times, when the first zoned habitable areas appeared out of a need to store and trade grain. (Ironically, it was our evolution to eat grass, rather than just meat, that was the first step in the journey that led to today's megalopises - we were no longer limited to town sizes that could be supported by the amount of livestock within walking distance.)

The story travels from Sumeria to Rome to post-industrialisation, to the development of the shopping mall in mid-20th-century America, the decline of independent stores in Britain and absurd zoning allowances for megamarkets, all the way through to a futuristic city of vertical factories. It's a lot to stomach, but in a fulfilling way.

'Small World' - Matt Beaumont

In 2000, Matt Beaumont published e, a novel written entirely in email exchanges between the employees of an ego-drenched London advertising agency. Its humour and observations would appeal to any fans of The Gruen Transfer. I've followed his work since that first novel had me chuckling and referencing for days.

Where There's a Will continued the vein of comedy, but added a more bittersweet twist. It tells the story of Alvin, a perennial do-gooder, whose philanthropy is out of kilter with the cynicism and solipsism of those around him. It featured some wry and worthy observations, but the plot relied a little too heavily on coincidence and circumstance.

Enter Small World, wherein Beaumont combines key elements of both of those earlier novels, to varying effect. Clearly not one to be too limited by straight prose, but wanting something other than a modern 'epistolary' novel, Beaumont presents a story told from a dozen different perspectives. The first-person narrator switches within scenes, within pieces of dialogue, introduced simply by the character's name and a colon.

It's unbelievably off-putting at first, and my experience of this novel very nearly ended within twenty pages. We firstly meet a group of three married couples - tricky enough to remember who is friends with whom, who is married to whom, who fancies (or indeed stalks) whom. The perspectives then branch ever further: a policeman arrives at the house where the six are having a dinner party, and enters the first-person milieu. So does his girlfriend, who's the PA to one of the Original Six, a HR manager. So does the nanny of the HR manager, and the nurse she sees at the hospital when she takes her young charge for treatment. The nurse is the mother of the boyfriend of the shop assistant for another member of the Original Six (who is being stalked by the husband of the HR manager).

It's a complex latticework, and one that does stretch the boundaries of credulity a little bit. Some characters seem to be there just to add to the complexity - not all of them manage a distinctive voice, nor do all their stories contribute significantly to the overall plot momentum. The differences between each character voice are subtle for the most part, and that's one of the most curious elements of the novel. Normally books with multiple perspectives present each voice in large chunks, giving the reader time to get to know the character through their voice, mannerisms and reactions. With such rapid changes between perspective, there would be no narrative cohesion if Beaumont did that: the language remains much the same; at least it does between the white upper-class characters who make up the bulk of the cast. When it comes to Jenka, a Czech nanny, Beaumont is cruelly stereotypical and patronising, giving her broken, comedic English and furnishing her only with a desire to have her nose reshaped to look like Charlize Theron.

But what of the story? Just as this group of characters is implausibly connected (it would seem only ten or 15 people provide all the services and action in north London) their lives contain the melodrama of a daytime soap. Characters die, get attacked, have surgery, almost lose family members, end marriages, lose jobs and generally have a pretty shit time of it for much of the novel. For most, their saving grace is the power of the people around them to help, whether friends or strangers.

Beaumont weaves a tight web of interactivity, and with so many characters funnelling their experiences into the plot the reader is presented with several stereotypes - of mothers (or women desperate to be mothers) in particular. The connections between the characters do become ridiculous, especially with a long lost half-sister finding herself (unknowingly) on the same hospital ward as her sibling, although they live hundreds of kilometres apart. Perhaps, however, Beaumont was aiming for archetypes. With so many characters to empathise with, they need to be quickly sketched so we know who we're dealing with as the narrative perspective continually changes. (At times the perspective changes mid-dialogue just to give us a first-person reaction that could as easily have been described in the third-person.) The intended effect was perhaps to remind us of the propensity to find love and support in any of our relationships, and that anyone we meet could be connected to us in a way that means they deserve our respect and attention, rather than admonition and judgement.

Of course, attendant to that is the idea that people who do bad things could just as easily be closely connected to us. The 'bad guys' in Beaumont's novel are not fully redeemed, although they do reach a state of contrition.

In some ways, this novel can be compared to Christon Tsiolkas' The Slap (which has done very well in England), in that it details the machinations of a closely connected group of (mainly) young people, who are as connected to their urban environment as they are to each other. It does have some provocative themes. A character undergoing IVF is frank about the negative effect of the treatment on her emotions and the unfair impact this has on her husband. It has a character to match Harry, Tsiolkas' most hateful creation: Keith the policeman, an unsatisfiable arsehole of thwarted ambitions. Nannying and the respective responsibilities of paid help versus parents get a look-in as well.

The novel's ending is far brighter than much of the dark humour that has pervaded throughout, but given the licence taken with all these intersecting lives it's hardly surprising that things end up unrealistically cheesy as well. Beaumont manages to create enough intrigue for us to crave a conclusion, but I'm not convinced that this story and its message were strong enough on their own, separated from the conceit of multi-perspective narration.