WE are told by shops that the consumer drives the market and that the limited choices are because we the consumer are happy with that. We want fruit that are all the same size with no blemishes. What about good to taste? What about good to cook? There are almost no fruit that are grown these days that are just good to cook. Take the beautiful Comice pear which is said to be one of the most delicious eating pears in the world but because it is a large pear, it does not fit well on the manicured display shelves in the shops. There are orchardists down south who grow these pears but they cannot get them to market and so these pears either just rot or are given away. Before they are totally lost, why do we not ask the independent supermarkets to put these on their shelves so our food choices are increased and the farmer who produces this fruit is not forced to uproot his trees.
Slow Food’s Ark of Taste is one of the tools that can be used by us to identify and highlight fruit and food that is threatened with loss, the other criteria are, it must have quality of taste, linked to the memory of a group and linked environmentally, economically and historically to an area. In Australia, so far there are four Ark of Taste foods, the Queensland bunya nut, the Tasmanian leatherwood honey, the Kangaroo Island ligurian bee honey and the Victorian goldfields bull-boar sausage.