Back in 2004 Hazel Hill Farm in Western Australia, the first to bring the truffle spores to the Australian mainland, yielded 4kg of Perigord truffles. In 2005 it was 26kg and 2006 about 100kg. The 2007 harvest didn’t live up to some of the hype. Nevertheless the WA farm is producing enough truffles and has trained enough dogs to offer truffle hunting tours from $55 a person, reports the Kirkfood blog. Advanced booking is recommended and “with some luck and persistence, you can experience the exhilaration of finding the gourmet French black truffle and smelling its pungent and unique perfume fresh out of the ground”.

And on metal in microwaves:

“Despite general warnings against using metal, metal containers and aluminum foil aren’t dangerous. They reflect microwaves away from foods and so slow their heating. That’s sometimes useful for preventing the edges of foods, like fish fillets or asparagus tips, from overcooking. Just don’t put foil or bowls too close to each other or to the oven walls, since that can cause sparking.”

Today The ACCC Inquiry into food prices began and all submissions can be found on its site here.
The Victorian Farmers Federation’s submission is revealing:

“These increases in food prices, sometimes referred to as ‘ag-flation’, are going to change the world as we know it. Over the last 12 months, vegetable prices have risen 21.5%, cheese by 8.5%, bread 7.9% and milk prices up 5%.
Growers have informed the VFF that there is a mark up of around 120 per cent on farmgate prices for vegetables; while lettuces fetch between $1.00 and $1.20 at the farmgate, they were retailing at $2.78 in supermarkets this week; parsnips attract $50 per 10 kg box at the farmgate, but retail at $9.99 per kg which equates to $100 per 10 kg box, or a 100 per cent mark up.
Growers are price takers and not price setters. Transparency, competition and fairness through the supply chain must be addressed, in order to ensure that the farm sector, as price takers, does not incur the major impacts of any price reductions at the retail end of the chain.
The price of bread has risen up to 70 cents a loaf in the past twelve months. However, only 14 per cent of this is accountable to higher grain costs. The remaining 86 per cent is the costs of marketers, flour millers, bakers and transporters.
Calculations on additional returns to wheat growers from these price rises only amount to around 10 per cent of the 70 cent rise per loaf, much of which have been reduced through increased farm input costs such as fertiliser, fuel and herbicide. Clearly the drought is not to blame for the price rises.
According to the ABS, the retail price of milk rose over the period December 2006 to December 2007, while the price of beef and lamb remained unchanged. However, the ABARE measure of farm gate prices from July 2006 to July 2007 recorded no change for milk and a 10 per cent and 11 per cent reduction in the price of beef and lamb respectively.”

The food crisis is a global one, a global food catastrophe some say that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen.

“The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club’s 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto recently, according to the Financial Post:

“It’s not a matter of if, but when,” he warned investors. “It’s going to hit this year hard.
“The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it’s getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we’ve got to expand food output dramatically,” he said.

Now Crikey! reports on major banks about to take a $1 billion hit from flaky pub lending. That’s in the same week that The Independent in London reported on the Laurel Pub Company, the one behind the Slug and Lettuce and other well known brands went into administration. That’s a chain of 388 pubs on the brink all affected by the UK’s smoking ban. As the Independent says:

“According to the British Beer and Pubs Association, the smoking ban in England and Wales combined with the credit crunch and a decline in drinking are responsible for closing pubs at their fastest rate in history – 27 a week.
The Massive Pub Company, which owned the Tup chain of pubs in London and the Sports Café chain, have both been placed in administration, while Regents Inns, owner of the Walkabout chain, has been forced into the sale of 94 bars.
In the past two months, Marstons, Greene King, Fuller, Smith and Turner and Wetherspoons have all announced their profits have been hit by the ban on smoking in public.”

I’ve noticed more than a few well known and loved local institutions feeling a bit more than empty at peak times. Crikey! says that National Leisure and Gaming Ltd and Hedley Leisure and Gaming Property Fund are wobbly thanks to smoking bans, increased food and staff costs, high interest rates and a falling numbers of pokies:

“The crazy days of greedy publicans living high on the hog and borrowing to the hilt to enjoy their exotic lifestyles are well and truly over.”

Like the absurdly expensive balsamic vinegars of years past, the plainest of kitchen staples has been elevated to a luxury good. At Williams-Sonoma’s Web site, customers can now spend up to $28 on a 3.5-ounce jar of salt.

“And not just those of the cooks. Since the mid-’90s, Japanese knives have become de rigueur in professional kitchens of all stripes — edging out, so to speak, German and French blades. As top chefs like Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter and Jean-Georges Vongerichten discovered Japanese knives, home cooks began to follow, and in the last five years sales have exploded. Even the enterprising Rachael Ray now hawks an “East/West” blade based on Japanese design.

“They’re perfectly engineered,” said legendary four-star chef David Bouley. As he pulled out blade after Japanese blade — he owns 50 — he explained that these knives cut through the cells of ingredients so cleanly and precisely that food oxidizes more slowly, and tastes better as a result.”

And there’s more”

“Japanese carbon steel derives from techniques originally developed to produce steel for samurai swords. Its exceptional hardness lets you hone an incredibly sharp edge on the blade.

Shape is also critical. Japanese knives come in two broad styles: Western and traditional. Western looks like the double-edged knives we know. A gyutou is what we’d call a classic chef’s knife — this is the one American chefs typically buy. Traditional Japanese kitchen knives, on the other hand, come in three main shapes: yanagi, usuba and deba. The yanagi, which looks like a long willow leaf, is for slicing raw fish. The usuba has a wide rectangular blade for cutting vegetables. The deba is a heavy blade like a thick chef’s knife, for portioning fish and chicken.”

One of the founders of Malagasy, a company from the north of England making chocolate in Madagasca, tells how it was established to help with poverty on the island. Like The Grenada Chocolate Company, the idea is to make chocolate locally rather than export a cheap commodity. It’s known as Equitrade.

Writing on The Guardian’s Word of Mouth Neil Kelsall says:

“…we wanted to make it all in the country of origin – in our case, in Madagascar, with the Malagasy people. Yes, the whole process – farming, fermentation, drying, roasting, winnowing, grinding, mixing, refining, conching, tempering, moulding, packaging, and transportation.

This is what is termed as “added value”. Compared to exporting farmed cash crops (in this case cocoa) it’s worth many times more for Madagascar. Why do we do it? Because we want to help the people trade their way out of poverty rather than accept charity. If they acquire the skills and equipment they can make quality products that we want to buy whilst satisfying the stakeholders.”

I’ve often wondered if the same could be done for coffee but am told it needs to be roasted locally. Why then is so much coffee imported to Australia from Italy?