Wandering in the Ausfood wilderness

I've now spent nearly eight weeks reading labels and putting together the foundation of my Ausfood cupboard.

While on the one hand I am greatly encouraged about the availability and labelling of some Australian food products I am now becoming aware of certain confusing aspects of food labelling that needs to be approached with some caution.

A particular item, let’s say for the argument, might be tomato paste or might be canola oil, will have the same brand name but will be labelled product of Australia on one size container and labelled as an imported product in another. Or it might be a combination of imported and local products. This makes life difficult and means that every time you buy this item you need to read the label if you want to be sure you are buying Australian.

What really irks me is tomato paste; I have found that multiples of two or four packs may have no identifying country of origin at all. Multiple packs of tomato paste require a great deal of application when reading the labels, even for some-one dedicated to the cause!!. I fail to understand all the discrepancies but I am sure the food manufacture has a perfectly good reason for stuffing around with the labelling process regarding country of origin.

There – I've got all that off my chest. Now I can move on to another grouch because Grouchland is where I am headed today.

At this stage I am becoming more aware of the number of ingredients that might be found in something as simple as flour, especially when you move away from plain flour. These are usually additives which keep the flour fresh and easy to use, no sifting and in the case of SR flour the raising agents are numbers. As for buying plain flour and adding the raising agents yourself – forget it – I am yet to find on any supermarket shelves any raising agents manufactured in Australia. Only bi-carb soda is a product of Australia; cream of tartar and baking soda come from some other place.

Meat is labelled in the duopoly supermarkets because it is packaged but even this rule of thumb cannot be applied to all other supermarkets where labelling is haphazard and in the case of the butchers shop with meat cut and displayed in cases no mention is made of country of origin at all.

Any questions about this bring the curt response of all our meat is Australian. I am mystified why supermarkets seem to have one labelling system for meat but this doesn't seem to apply to your standard butcher shop. Huh?

As I could go on at length on this topic I will close off by putting fruit and veggie vendors under the label magnifying glass. Once again the duopoly labels their products but not all the other supermarkets follow this practice. The more consumer oriented green grocers will identify their products but the only products easily identified in the smaller shops will be the packaged products.

Country of origin product labelling? What a confusing tangle for the ordinary shopper.