Hi, Hilary here. Regular readers of this blog will have noticed how quiet it's been lately; that's because I've been in the UK for a month with my daughter visiting family, and Bruce has been flat out looking after the farm (and himself) in our absence. Of course, our flights generate many tonnes of greenhouse gases, and have to be offset somehow, but that’s a difficult topic that I’ll tackle in a future post. One thing I really noticed on this trip was food. Organic and fair-traded foods are much more widely available there, and people seem more concerned about where their food comes from. In one supermarket near my parents' home in northeast London, I could buy a packet of spinach from a named farmer in East Anglia (the nearest agricultural area), and there was an apologetic notice explaining that the broccoli was from the USA because the UK crop was under water. But perhaps things are changing in Australia too. Last Friday’s Bush Telegraph included a segment on a couple in Black Mountain who eat guinea pig as an alternative to chicken, and another about Age journalist Richard Cornish, who spent a month as a ‘locavore’ — eating only food produced within 160 km of his home. I was quite taken by the guinea pig idea, they breed rapidly, are easy to kill and skin, cook within minutes and apparently taste delicious. Sadly, my suggestion to Bruce that we turn part of the shed into a guinea pig farm was met with strong resistance. He kept guinea pigs as a child and is not prepared to eat them (I kept them too, but that wouldn’t stop me, I must be harder hearted than Bruce).
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