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Articles

I researched Australia's food system from 2011 for a number of years, and shared what I learned on my blog. The blog is long gone, but I saved the most popular posts below. Enjoy!

Produce

Sommerlad chicken: an extraordinary chook
1 February 2015

Chicken, once a rare treat, is now our most popular meat. It’s convenient and cheap, deemed the ‘healthier’ meat, mildly flavoured so appealing to kids. Available year round so we eat without thought, much less ceremony.

Whereas I’ve been anticipating this chook. For. A. Year.


Strength in diversity
Published in Wellbeing magazine, February 2015

Did you know that in the same time that breadth of brands on our supermarket shelves has exploded, the number of widely grown and sold seeds and animal breeds has shrunk? As has the number of farms and food suppliers and processors and retailers. It's a huge issue, but you can help change it.


Why buy farmhouse, organic and unhomogenised milk?
8 February 2015

When Coles reduced the price of home brand milk to $1 per litre, I knew it’d impact the entire milk supply chain. Spurred on, I searched for milk where farmers could attain a fair price. I discovered farmhouse brands. And rediscovered milk.


The end of Sommerlads' Poultry. And a new beginning.
27 December 2017
As begets tradition, Kathryn Sommerlad emailed on Christmas Eve, four years to the day she first wrote to introduce her family business, Sommerlads’ Poultry, to me. The purpose of this email, sadly, was to shed details about the closure of the business.

But let's start at the beginning.

Supermarkets

How the Australian supermarket duopoly has decreased the resilience of Australia's food supply and the implications for health
2 December 2014

This is the final essay to complete my Masters of Public Health. If you don’t want to read 2,000 words, here’s two. Shop local. Public health, please consider research in supermarket marketing and buyer behaviour. Because they are. More.


Stop sleepwalk shopping down supermarket aisles
12 July 2015
People are motivated by many factors when shopping for food; there are the sensory aspects, cost and accessibility, health, cultural influences, social and psychological factors, to name but a few. More.