Money and the putting of it where one's mouth is

Hello lovers of meat, animals, and the interweb.

Just a quick one from me today to alert you to this story .

The lady who started Kathmandu is offering rewards to industry insiders to dob in cruel farming practices in the world of pigs and chickens. I love the concept but I'm not that confident about its success. Would you really be working in a farm with cruel practices if you didn't condone them, or were at least indifferent? I mean, I work for the state government and I sure don't condone everything they do but the animal cruelty stuff seems to me to be a lot closer to home, you'd have to be watching some not nice stuff going on. But I ramble. It's an interesting idea and I can't wait to see if anyone puts their hand up for the cash.

Side note, who knew this woman donates EVERYTHING she earns from one of her businesses to charity? Seriously, way to go lady. I feel like buying some camping gear just to support her. But not actually go camping, ew.

Random bonus, my friend watched one of his chickens laying her egg the other day and the verdict is that it's a little bit gross.

Know Your Product: Vue de Monde

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. This update is so long overdue it’s not funny (what length of time would make it funny?). Fortunately the food involved is so magnificent the taste has lingered in my mouth these past few weeks.

I must confess to a few wee struggles on my self-imposed ‘free-range or nada’ rule but so far my will power is winning out over my need for bacon NOW, before I have time to head to the supermarket for some free-range goodness, NOW. The biggest transgression was deliberate and calculated; it was done in a spirit of research and not indulgence. No really, I don’t even LIKE this food very much. I will get to what it is soon, bear with me. I’ve mentioned before that I’m also hoping to cook more and healthier but I might not have mentioned that I also want to broaden my palate and try new things. I’m trying to say a lot more yes, though mushrooms are still getting a resounding NO. One of the points that struck me in Eating Animals was that we as a society eat a very, very, very small percentage of the amount of edible produce on the planet; I eat even less of that edible produce because, well, I’m a spoiled brat. So that brings us to saying yes, when for the purposes of this blog I would normally say no.

Okay, tangent over. I want to talk about fancy restaurants (I also want to own fancy restaurants, live in fancy restaurants, eat in fancy restaurants and only have friends who own, live in, and eat in fancy restaurants but that’s another story). My hunch was that with the bigger price tag you get the right to know what is going on your plate. The high-end establishments are generally more able to buy free-range and local. With the Masterchef phenomena I also think clientele are more interested in this kind of thing. I had a few visits to one of Melbourne’s well established Café Vue planned (disclaimer, one of my bestest pals works at Café Vue but that doesn’t make me more likely to be nice to them, I promise) and so they seemed like a good place to start asking questions. The staff have always been very keen to answer questions when I’ve been to the Café so I thought I would get the same response from the business as a whole. And I did, sort of…

Sent: Monday, 12 July 2010 9:53 AM
To: Vue de monde
Subject: Farmers and stockists

Hi,

I'm currently writing an article on restaurants in Melbourne that serve locally and ethically farmed meat - and I'm also a huge fan of your restaurants - and I'm hoping you can answer a few quick questions.

Firstly, do the Vue restaurants have a policy on this? If so, what is
it?

Do you source your meat directly from farmers? If not, how?

Where do you source your chicken, pork, lamb and duck from?

Any information you can provide on this would be hugely appreciated.

Regards,
Kim





To Kim.Armstrong
13/07/10 10:44 AM

Subject RE: Farmers and stockists


Dear Kim,

Thank you for your email and interest in Vue de monde.

I will look in to this for you, may I ask if and where the article will
be published?

Thank you,

XXXXXXX

XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
Executive Assistant
Vue de monde
Normanby Chambers
430 Little Collins Street
Melbourne VIC 3000

Okay, so far so good. I told her it was for a humble blog but that we’d see where it went. Next email was this:

To Kim.Armstrong
13/07/10 05:51 PM
SubjectRE: Farmers and stockists


Dear Kim,

Thanks for your email. We source our meat and poultry from Vic's Meats.


Kind regards,

XXXXXXX

XXXXXXX XXXXXXX
Executive Assistant
Vue de monde
Normanby Chambers
430 Little Collins Street
Melbourne VIC 3000

Well colour me disappointed. From this one might conclude that Vue de Monde and its various babies don’t have a policy on where the meat is from and how it is treated. Nor, I might assume, are they particularly inclined to talk about. Intrepid eater and blogger that I am, I soldiered on (I might add at this juncture that I had TWO events at various Vue eateries that week and I really wanted to be able to enjoy them). While awaiting next contact from Vue de Monde I did a little research into Vic’s Meats. They’re an on-seller butcher that source from a lot of different farmers, if you do a little googling it seems they stock a pretty broad range of meat that includes a lot of free-range products. They also sell your stock standard meats. So it didn’t help me much.

Sent: Wednesday, 14 July 2010 8:23 AM
To: Vue de monde
Subject: RE: Farmers and stockists


Hi XXXXXX,

Thanks for the reply.

Do you have a policy about ethically produced or locally produced meat?

Regards,
Kim

Firm, wasn’t I? At this point my Café Vue contact might have stepped in and done a little prompting and reassured everyone in the office that I am not in fact a crazy person, or at least only harmlessly crazy. That shouldn’t have had to happen but there is no denying the response was an improvement. A few days later:

Hi Kim,

I'm sorry this has taken so long to get back to you, I just had to check the information I was giving you was correct.

We strive to use the best quality meat and poultry available, free range if possible. And currently all our meat and poultry is free range.

All the best for your blog and good luck with the ethical adventure!

XXX

XXXXXX XXXXXXX
Executive Assistant
Vue de monde
Normanby Chambers
430 Little Collins Street
Melbourne VIC 3000

So it ain’t all bad, but it ain’t all good. I got to enjoy my duck, and my pork jowl (I know, right?) and my beef bourguignon etc. They were all spectacular and (totally unbiased) the service at both Café Vue in the city and Café Vue at Heide Gallery was great. I can’t deny though that it would have been so much better if the restaurant was a bit keener to engage with me on this. The price tag gives me the right to ask what I’m eating, I stand by that and intend to continue being annoying (it’s growing on me).

So what nasty thing did I eat? Well, foie gras. I had never really eaten foie gras and I decided not to knock it til I tried it. And it was okay, rich and meaty but not so good that avoiding it will keep me up at night. The ethical price tag is way too high. But kudos to this mob and I might see if there is somewhere I can sample their goodies.

A joint post on our visit to a farm up in Healesville with fun photos coming soon.

Smoochies,
Kim

Cups and Cakes: Sugardough

A few Saturdays ago, my wife Lily and I headed down to Sugardough on Lygon St in East Brunswick.

When we first moved into Brunswick about a year and a half ago we dropped in one morning and had breakfast there, and hadn’t gone back until the aforementioned jaunt. We must have been in a bad mood, because for some reason we came away unhappy. I now know that it had to have been us, because the place is quite incredible.

Sugardough is a patisserie, bakery and café. It’s pretty much always busy on the weekend (and reasonably busy on weekdays), so you might want to head down early if you want the good stuff. As it’s a bakery, items can sell out quickly as they’re all baked in house daily. I went down this past Saturday at 9:30 am to snafu some Custard and Sultana, and Chocolate Brioches for our friends, and some items were already starting to sell out.

So now for the reason you’re all here, the ethical facts:

Sugardough uses the cleverly named free-range Green Eggs in all breakfast items, cakes and breads. You can eat any one of the wonderful cakes, pies, pastries etc without worrying about the fact you might be eating cage eggs, as opposed to some cafes where only the fresh cooked eggs are definitely free range. They also sell the eggs they use at the front of the store, as well as some specialty honeys (and I may have seen jams, I’m not sure).

Additionally, all bacon and ham is provided by Western Plains Pork. As I mentioned in my Coles sow-stall post, Western Plains provides ham and bacon to KR Castlemaine for their free-range products. This is one of the few instances I have found of a café using both ethical eggs and ham (another notable exception is the recently opened Pope Joan, where the waitress assured me their bacon was “like, massively free range”), and it’s great to see consistency like this. It means the business is actually serious about free range, ethical farming, and is not just pandering to hippies like Kim and I to win our egg purchase on a Saturday brunch.

While the source of the eggs is proudly announced around the store (the aforementioned Greens Eggs), the bacon didn’t receive the same fan-fare. The brand of ham/pork was listed, which meant I could give it a google search and find out more. I suppose it could be a good thing, showing that they’re willing to source their meat ethically without blowing their own trumpet, but why not celebrate it?

In any case, it made me very happy to know I could eat the wonderfully light and tasty, but very filling, breakfast pie without guilt. The pictures probably don’t do it, or the Red Velvet cake that Lily had (literally covered in icing from every given angle), justice.

The cakes, too, are magnificent and tasty. And as you can see, everything is very fairly priced:

Breakfast pie (see ingredients in photo above): $8.90

Red velvet cake: Approx $5

Salad: $5

Soy Flat White: $3.50 (X 2)

Tea: $3

Total: Approx $28.90

That’s a very cheap breakfast and way more than we’d generally have eaten. Lily took a lot of her cake slice home uneaten, and snaffled it a few days later. We could have probably eaten for under $20 had we not been starving on the day.

The service was great, the waitress who helped us was very happy to let us take photos after checking with her manager. We had a great conversation about the blog, and they seemed very supportive of the concept.

Well, if it can help direct people to wonderful cafes (/bakeries/patisseries) like Sugardough, then I think this blog will serve its purpose! It’s great that such good food is also ethically good, and is so affordable. It puts a lie to the idea that you have to spend big to eat ethical.

It’s well worth dropping in for breakfast or to grab some pastries, or bread, for a special event (or, maybe, just because you’re partial to pastries and are looking forward to stuffing your face). And it's all ethical!

P.S. If you want to have the best marshmallows ever made, grab some of their raspberry marshmallows. They're made with real raspberries (complete with raspberry seeds), and are wonderfully sweet and flavourful!

Some more brief animal killing news

Hi kids,

Another quick one from me just alerting you to this story about how we kill chickens in Australia.

And also this one about peeps who kill their own meat.

I'm really excited that more of these stories are popping up about the place. Having conversations about where our food comes from, how it's killed, and what taboos surround it is half the battle.

Lastly, a quick apology, I have a proper post about my foie gras and fancy restaurant adventures in the works but a bout of horrible illness put me behind the eight ball. This week I promise!

Love and smoochies to all,
Kimbo

Black Beauty Vs Daisy*

A quickie from me (mind out of the gutters thanks) about this story .

A Perth butcher has been given to sell horse meat in Australia - he has been exporting the meat for some time.

It might surprise people to learn that I have no problem with the eating of horse as long as it's ethically farmed and killed. In fact, I ate raw horse on my trip to Japan *awaits death threats*.

I want to chat about sentiment and our understanding of the intelligence and awareness down the track but it seems pretty hypocritical to me to be happy to eat a very smart and cute animal like the pig and then send death threats to the guy selling horse meat. If you don't want to eat it, hey that's cool, but death threats? Really?

I think our environment and economy can only benefit from examining some of these prejudices. Congrats to the WA Food and Agriculture Minister.

*That's a cow's name, pig's names are harder.

Coles to make purses from sow's ears: sow stall free from 2014

This is just a short post to commend Coles on their decision to phase out their sales of sow stall pork from 2014 onwards.

The fact that it's a set date in the future, with a timeline to allow industry to improve processes to shift to a more ethical solution should make the decision sustainable in the long term.

It will also give those industries that have not begun to make the shift already a much need kick in the butt. For the meantime, Coles does stock KR Castlemaine Free Range Ham in both its delis and sandwich meat fridge, which is provided by Western Plains Pork, which means it is much easier to get free range ham when your local deli is closed.

Oh yes, and the backlash from industry has already commenced.

I should note, this is definitely not a paid post and there's much more that supermarkets like Coles could do to encourage ethical meat consumption, but it's important to commend companies when they take big, important steps such as these in the right direction.

Know Your Product: Spotless Food Services

I often buy my lunch from the work “bistro” (I use the inverted comas there because it more closely resembles a cafeteria, but no one is apparently comfortable using that word anymore), so in aid of the blog, and my own decision making process, I decided to investigate what ingredients they’re using.

Since making the undertaking to eat more ethically, I’ve generally been sticking to their vegetarian selections, figuring it was a safe bet that any meat they are sourcing would not be free range. I couldn’t bet on the eggs, so I have also been avoiding these. As you can appreciate, in a commercial “filling foods = happy people” setting, this doesn’t leave much choice (ie. generally one meal a day, providing that meal doesn’t rely on eggs).

Like most people in Melbourne (perhaps Australia), my work’s catering is provided by Spotless, more specifically Alliance Catering, Spotless’ recently rebranded entry-level catering service (previously all their food services were simply referred to as Spotless).

Spotless’ three food service brands (Alliance, Epicure and Mustard Catering) provide catering services to schools, hospitals, aged care facilities, function and convention centres, prisons, airports and a variety of events. There is no doubt I’m forgetting some other facility or industry they cater for. Their own website states that their 14,000+ employees serve over 77 million customers every year, at 1,800 service facilities.

According to Spotless’ own “Quick Facts”, $2 Million per week is apparently budgeted to their 2,000+ chefs weekly for “fresh produce”. So, I’m figuring, some kind of free-range policy – eggs at least, given their comparable pricing to the cage alternative nowadays – would be in place. It’s more and more common for restaurants, cafes etc. to use free range eggs (at a minimum). That this is becoming the standard is a good thing, obviously.

It would be naïve to assume that Spotless (or Alliance, as their subsidiary), sources all of their produce ethically. As a large catering company, their objective is efficiency, consistency and maintaining low-costs, and the current cost of free-range pork products (for instance) is probably prohibitively expensive for these purposes. However, as above, the cost of free range eggs is not.

I jumped on Alliance’s website, hoping from some kind of clarity. Sadly, as you can see, it was not going to be that easy.

So, it was with some trepidation, and my middle-class eastern suburbs politeness gland working overdrive, that I drafted an e-mail to Alliance:

From: Wesley Mountain
Sent: Monday, 5 July 2010 11:18 AM
To: Alliance
Catering Info
Subject: Re: Free-range products

Hi,

I’m just writing to ask whether Alliance sources any of the animal products (eggs,
chicken meat, ham, pork etc.) used in catering from free-range farms?

I ask this as a consumer myself, but also because I am currently working on an
article investigating the use of free-range produce, particularly in cafes,
restaurants and bistros/cafeterias for an ethical eating blog.

I couldn’t find any details of the produce used on your website, so any help you
could provide would be really appreciated.

Thanks,

Wes Mountain

I received this response:

Sent: Friday, 9 July 2010 1:40 PM
To: Wesley Mountain
Subject: RE: Free-range products

Good afternoon in answer to your question yes we do currently use some products which are free-range whilst we don’t buy the products direct from the farm we use our suppliers to source the products.

Our menus change on regular basis so it is not easy to give you a list of products used.

As a company we are also looking at a number of initiatives lowering food miles by buying local products, incorporating free range and purchasing cage free eggs and using environmental packaging.

Alliance catering is part of the Spotless business so some projects take time to implement we also have issues with supply of the products.

Cindy (surname removed)
Brands & Standards Manager
Alliance Catering

My response was thus:


So, having received little clarity on the issue I decided to press further. I replied, with vigour. Okay, it was with a polite tone, and my stern “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” boots on.

From: Wesley Mountain
Sent: Friday, 9 July 2010 4:30 PM
To: Cindy
Subject: RE: Free-range products

Hi Cindy,

Thanks for your response.

I think it’s great that Alliance, as a company, is looking to reduce food miles and source more produce from local producers, particularly if there is an intention to ensure that that produce is ethically farmed. I understand that for such a large
company, a project like this will take some time, and an immense amount of planning.

Can I ask a few further questions, for clarification?

With regard to the intentions of your future initiatives, I am interested to know whether minimum targets for ethically farmed animal products will be set, or whether a more cost-based approach (ie. if it costs more than a
capped amount to purchase free-range eggs, this option will not be pursued) will
be the basis of decision making process. I understand that this may not be a
question you can answer at this moment, but as a consumer decisions like these
do affect the way I shop and eat, and any transparency you can offer on this
would be greatly appreciated.

In the short term, based on what I know of dealing with Spotless/Alliance in various places I’ve worked, events I’ve attended etc, it would seem that a lot of Alliance’s facilities are semi-autonomous, ie. the resident cook/chef would create the menu and then order produce in conjunction with the manager, presumably through a contracted preferred supplier.

In this instance, would you direct customers to ask staff at their work cafes, bistros, etc about whether their food contains free-range produce? Would staff be able to provide this information definitively, at present?

Thanks again for your previous response, and I
look forward to hearing from you.

Healthy
Regards,

Wes
Mountain

This response came much quicker.

From: Cindy
Sent: Friday, 9 July 2010 5:00 PM
To: Wesley Mountain
Subject: RE: Free-range products

Hi Wes,

In regards to the intentions of supply of the products it does come down to both cost and supply our procurement department are currently negotiating with a number of suppliers to see if we can get some better deals on price if we purchase as a whole for example cage free eggs whilst we understand it will inevitably cost us more we still hope to achieve this. So in answer to your question it may be a case that we use them in some contracts but not all.

We also have locked in prices with our contracts so this means we must wear the extra cost as a business, so yes price is an issue, we may however be able to negotiate a slight price increase with our customers given the fact we are giving a better product.

With the menus it is normally the higher end sites that have these products and are normally advertised on the menu.

Cindy
Brands & Standards Manager
Alliance Catering

My reaction was a little less puzzled this time, perhaps more defeated.

So… basically, while there’s a (very small) nod to ethical concerns
here, it’s not a considered policy. It’s not publicly stated, and thus not
transparent. There are no clear targets (at least stated), and the brand manager
is not really able to answer my questions fully.

But… we do have a real
answer here, in a way: No, Spotless does not have a policy with regards to free
range products, and there is no guarantee that what you’re eating is free range
in this kind of business, unless it’s clearly stated on the menu.

I will admit, it angers me that such a large company isn’t using their leverage to
support ethical produce, especially given the support of a large company could
reduce the cost of ethically farmed products for both the company and retail
consumers. But, it would probably be a significant cost for them in the short
term, and I understand that that may not seem worthwhile. They’re not paying
actuaries to work out these kinds of decisions, it’s simply about sourcing cheap
supply. But $2 Million nationwide is a lot of money to throw at a problem.

So… this is me now:


You win some, you lose some. You all have
the clarity you need to know that you can’t buy anything containing eggs, pork
or chicken from Spotless food services if you want to be sure it’s ethically
sourced.

Kim has been doing some interesting investigation herself into
high-end restaurants and their produce sources, but I’ll leave that to her.