SLOW Food Perth co-ordinated children’s food education and tasting activities – called ‘Food finders’ – at the 2010 Mundaring truffle festival in the Perth hills on Saturday 31 July and Sunday 1 August.
Kids discovered the history of the apple and tasted and identified different varieties, the story of wheat, ending in pasta-making, and became Spudhunters, digging up, identifying and replanting more than 600 potatoes.
Spudhunters was supported Gary Thomas, a Victorian Slow Food member and chef who devised the activity, Slow Food Melbourne convivium leader Alison Peake, Twigz kids’ gardening tool supplier Chris Hajos, and Western Potatoes’ Anne Kirou, Georgia Thomas and Rick Amos.
Slow Food Perth chose apples, wheat and spuds because they are common foods with 
uncommon histories. All are key Western Australian horticultural or agricultural food crops and the varieties grown today reflect significant changes in food diversity and availability.
A catalogue of fruit trees growing at the Royal Horticultural Society of Victoria’s Richmond experimental farm in 1863 – in what is now suburban Melbourne – listed more than 280 varieties of apple. These included adam’s permain, cornish gilliflower, duke of gloucester, kentish fillbasket, mank’s codlin, pomme grise, reinette jaune hative and sack-and-sugar, all absent from greengrocers and supermarkets almost a century and a half later. What we can buy today is limited to red delicious, fuji, granny smith, golden delicious, jonathan, pink lady, lady william and a handful of others, reflecting a huge gap in our food heritage.
The big ‘mother’ – actually both mother and father, a hermaphrodite – of all apples is thought to be Malus sieversii, native to northern Tibet, north-western China, southern Kazakhstan and north-eastern Kyrgyzstan. The former capital of Kazakhstan, in the northern lee of the Tien Shan mountains, is named Almaty, which translates as ‘grandfather of apples’.
Sieversii, which grows at between 1200 and 1300 metres and often is the dominant tree in endemic forest, is thought to have cross-pollinated with M. sylvestris – the European wild apple – to parent today’s common apple species, M. domestica, in eastern Turkey.
The United States’ Agricultural Research Service is continuing with studies which began in 2006 to collect and document genetic material from M. sieversii. The research has found that the species has an extraordinary disease resistance. Material from among the 949 apple tree accessions made in central Asia has been used to grow out 1600 M. sieversii trees at the US National Germplasm Repository in Geneva, near New York. Using genes from sieversii with modern apple varieties has displayed an ability to resist apple scab fungus and fire blight. From this work, researchers have also found an increased tolerance to growing apples at altitude and in dry and near-desert areas.
‘Food finders’ at Mundaring told the story of M. sieversii and its descendants, using modern winter-fruiting varieties including pink lady, red delicious, gala, sundowner and granny smith to encourage kids’ interest.
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