Green grocery in a box

In recent years I have been fortunate enough to get home before the peakiness of peak hour arrives on our Melbourne roads. I do get the tail end of the school run that meld into the tradesman's beer o'clock but it is generally a smooth run home.

Most nights I am home to answer the door to the many spuikers and energy company people who want me to defect in one way or another. My usual response is to use my still-at-work Partner in Crime (PIC) as a foil. If the person at the door wants to sign me up to the great deals at Company A, I say something similar to 'Oh my PIC works for Company A and we get unbelievable discounts already'. PIC is amazing, working for telephone companies, all the major utility companies and probably the odd bank.

Sometimes I do get reasonable offers such as signing up for home delivery of The Age and recently, I signed up to a group called Aussie Farmers Direct. Aussie Farmers Direct source fresh food from Australian producers and growers and deliver to your door once a week. As well as various fruit and vegetable packs, they also have milk, eggs, coffee, bread, butter and cheeses.

The very nice guy at the door, an Englishman on a working holiday helped convince me that I should buy Australian grown produce. It made sense at the time and still does but I must have been swept up a little by the prospect of getting fruit and vegetable delivered because the fact remains, we are very lucky in Australia. We can source Australian grown fruit and vegetables all year round and though I have tried the idea of being a locavore, I false start when it comes to the colder months without tomatoes, cucumbers and just about every summer vegetable you can think of. The prospect of a winter dining on such greenery as broccoli (even though I do love it), silverbeet and peas may take a bit more planning on my part. But then again Spring is now here and I can think about it next year.

As I scanned the price list I did notice that most things were quite reasonably priced so I bought a Couples Pack of Fruit and Vegetable which contained 8 regular items such as potatoes, carrots, apples as well as 4-6 seasonal items such as mandarins, strawberries and avocado. The fruit and vegetable pack was $25 which is about the amount I spend at the green grocer each week. I also bought some butter, a dozen free range eggs and some OJ. I signed up and sent the friendly Englishman into the night.

When the items arrived in a nice cardboard box, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality. The only minor criticism was the size of the two bananas. They were tiny things but everything else looked and tasted as I expected. A sidebar now: 'looked and tasted as I expected' means that they were blemish free, glossy and clean. A shame that I neglect to tell myself that pesticides and various intensive agricultural practices brought such beauty to my table but that is another issue.

Anyway, the other day I decided to do a price comparison between Aussie Farmers Direct, Safeway and the local green grocer. The results were surprising with costs coming in at $25, $24.25 and $24.26 respectively. I expected Safeway with its buying power would come out much cheaper. I thought the green grocer being a small business would be considerably more expensive though I guess behind the facade of a charming green grocer may hide a fruit and vegetable mogul with shops all over the place. I would say the main difference is the distribution of my $25 (or so) at each of these places given their respective overheads (or lack of) and differing company structures.



A few notes:

Some of the calculations are based on per kilogram prices whereas I received some of my items pre-packaged, such as the mushrooms and spinach. Given the choice, I rarely purchase pre-packaged due to the expense and extra packaging.

As much as possible I chose the same sized fruit and vegetable in my comparisons. The green grocer for example sell two lots of Sundowner apples at different prices based on the size of the fruit.

I am not a fruit and vegetable price watcher and do not know whether there are peaks and falls in prices throughout the week but I recorded my prices on a Thursday and as good experiments go, I should probably take a few price readings over the next few weeks. I guess my intention is not to prove anything 'earth shattering' as to be hailed on those tv shows that like to believe such things are.

I am not sure whether I would like to receive a 2kg bag of potatoes each week as well as a 500g bag of carrots as we don't like root vegetables that much.

Also note that this entry is not a covert rant about the evils of any of the companies, it is just a price comparison that I wanted to perform as a point of interest. I do not work for nor am I associated with any of the companies, except as a customer.

For now, I will continue ordering my green groceries in a box as I like the philosophy behind Aussie Farmers Direct and also the surprise of what I'll receive on my doorstep and planning various meals around each week's produce. Also, for some reason, I am not a very big fan of fruit so getting various fruits may help me to eat a lot more than I do.

Aussie Farmers Direct
www.aussiefarmers.com.au

From Salerno to Melbourne

Orzo Pupo is made from barley. Caro is a similar product made from cereal and chicory. They are both marketed as caffeine substitutes. Neither of them taste like coffee though I guess that's not what the manufacturers are technically boasting. You would think that a hot beverage that allows you to add milk and sugar to it and is a caffeine substitute would have something going for it. In a blind taste test, I would say that Orzo Pupo tastes more like a ground up cardboard drink.

It would have remained the Cardboard drink if not for Italy. Italy saw my introduction to the barley drink which was bought by my traveling companion and kind of enjoyed by him in a town called Salerno, just south of Naples. Subsequently, Orzo Pupo will now always remind me of Italy, of pizza and pasta in their true forms, the various Empires in all their glory, fast driving in tiny cars and where I first experienced being charged for shopping bags and it was the norm to self pack your groceries.

These days I get my Italian fix at the various European food stores in Melbourne. The classic is Mediterranean Wholesalers which contains an aisle of pasta as well as an aisle of cakes and an aisle of alcohol. These places don't do things by halves. Olive oil can be purchased in a modest 500ml bottle to a whopping 20 litre tin (the latter being very attractive containers for growing vegetables and herbs). Orzo Pupo is sold there too and a few years ago and probably misty with nostalgia, a jar was purchased that took about a year to finish.

I recently came across another large food store called Basfoods Direct. Basfoods has been operating for more than 20 years as a supplier of mainly Middle Eastern and Turkish foods. I have known about it for a while but whenever I'd been nearby it had been closed. During those times I would gaze through the gates towards the store front lined with the mega tins of olive oil and wonder about Orzo Pupo and various other imports. Recently they 'moved' to an adjoining warehouse next door and opened a halal butcher shop called Melbourne Meat Company (how nobody else had previously snapped up that name is a wonder). Today I finally found myself inside the gates and inside their retail store.

The interior reflects a warehouse and its shelves and concrete floors are pristine. It smells like no other place, a strangely pleasant combination of spices and soap and is lit by subtle and sometimes dim artificial and natural lighting rather than the bleached qualities in regular supermarkets. There is cookware and utensils attractively displayed behind glass and lights and a great array of Basfoods packages nuts and spices, a whole aisle of them, plus more aisles devoted to pasta. Being a fan of anything dipped and preserved in oil, I lingered by the pickle and preserved goods aisle. I looked longingly at the 5 litre jar of assorted pickled vegetables, obviously targeting caterers or very large families but I opted for some olive and anchovy spread in a modest 100ml jar. In the hot drinks section, I searched for Orzo Pupo but was unsuccessful.

Jumping out at you as you scan the shelves are the occasional oddities. Edgell's Creamed Corn stands out as does Nutrigrain cereal and various cleaning products. I perused a series of Turkish cake mixes, Dr. Oetker brand which included a cheesecake mix. Further along was a kit that seemed to include a chocolate sponge cake for making a Tiramisu, fully imported. Along the bank of fridges were more bulk items of pasta and cheeses packaged in kilogram lots sitting next to big blocks of caterer's Western Star butter. I thought of my own refrigerator, already crammed full, and moved along.

As I slowly strolled towards the checkout counter with my few purchases, I saw a lady with 4 large bags of flour in her trolley and I wondered whether she was embarking on a bread making exercise in her outdoor oven or just a restaurant owner. Behind me a man held one of those large tins of olive oil. You never can tell.

From just popping in to have a look, I ended up with some freshly baked Turkish bread and my various preserved vegetables as well as some fettucine and a packet of wild rocket seeds. The cashier was giving each customer 3 packs of Dr. Oetker vanilla pudding whose expiration date was next month.

At home I examined the faraway addresses printed on my purchases, jogging my memories of Italy, but noting with a laugh that the pasta was made in the Melbourne suburb of Rosanna.

Basfoods Direct
419 Victoria St, Brunswick, 3056.

Mediterranean Wholesalers
482-492 Sydney Rd, Brunswick, 3056.