In the hours between midnight and dawn

Some evenings I listen to the radio before dropping off to sleep. Sometimes it happens I doze off and hours later I am woken by the sound of the presenter’s voice going on about something. One night a week or so back, I heard the words: sheep, wheat, barley oats and dairy, in no particular order.

This was enough to stop me from reaching out and turning the radio off. I tuned in. I listened for a minute or two and then reached out for my trusty notebook and pen. The program was about Australian produced food and the program might well have been presented especially for me.

First up was an interview with a representative from the Rural Industries Research And Development Corporation. The talk then ranged over many topics, truffles and essential oils in Tasmania, bush tomatoes in Central Australia and broad scale farming. Tasmania grows saffron, wasabi and quinoa; all very well, but not items that you would find on the shelves in my pantry.

Here in Victoria we have the Meredith Dairy yogurt and Shaw’s buffalo mozzarella and yogurt. I have tried both the Meredith Dairy sheep yogurt and the Shaw’s buffalo yogurt and I like them both but I would say  Meredith wins in the taste stakes by a short half head.

Queensland produces a number of more exotic food items, such as dragon fruit with its bright red skin, white flesh and black seeds. Vanilla pods, tomato peppers (small, round, red peppers looking very much like a tomato) and finger limes also come from Queensland.

And coffee. In Queensland. This will definitely be investigated.

Every state grows olives and Australia produces good quality olive oil. The conversation, which is now talk-back, moves on to ramble around from eel farming, to native fish in water filled disused open cut mines and an old chap on King Island who talks about seaweed which was once used for gelatine. Beach cast kelp is still harvested and milled for export to Scotland, but not I suspect for food purposes.

A new crop of Australian food, the Kakadu plum, seems to be the food of the moment and is referred to as a super crop. An online search for the dictionary definition of super food informs me it is:

a nutrient-rich food considered to be especially beneficial for health and well-being.

When the talk wanders off to other places where people take the opportunity to promote their host farms and suggest olive growing is a tax dodge, I lose interest and I reach out and press the off button.

Ice-cream, you-scream, we-all-scream

Earlier this morning I was not quite screaming but very close to it. This screaming near-miss came about when I discovered I had been sold a ticket at Melbourne’s Southern Cross station for a bus service not operating in Rutherglen though the school holidays. As a result I was left to amuse myself for another day in lovely downtown Rutherglen. I threw myself on the kindness of strangers and spent most of the day in the cool of the library, only venturing out a couple of times into the blistering heat.

It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good somewhere. My extended stay allowed me to sample the pies for which this town is well-known, to drink some more of the best coffee in town and to carry out some serious taste and labelling research on Gundowring ice-cream.

Back at the tourist information centre in the afternoon I buy a small cardboard cup of the flavour of the day – Toasted Honey and Walnut ice-cream. I look at that wording and decide I would alter the words to read Toasted Walnut and Honey; maybe I’m being even more pedantic than usual today , as a spin–off from the bus debacle, but the idea of toasted honey seems rather odd. I toss around possibilities such as clever marketing, the actual process of toasting honey and walnuts, either separately or together, while I walk outside to sit at an outdoor table.

  Sitting at a table, under the shade of an enormous old peppercorn tree, I peel off the lid. This ice-cream is made in the Kiewa Valley in north-eastern Victoria, using a combination of farm fresh milk, cream, sucrose, walnuts, stringy bark honey, skim milk powder, wheat glucose, egg yolk, natural stabiliser 412, 415,410,407.

  All those numbers. What can they mean? They will be there for a very good reason, from the maker’s point of view, but are they (apart from the natural stabiliser 412) natural or chemical and where is their country of origin? There’s another item to add to the to-do list: investigate the numbers game, or maybe if a number appears on the ingredient part of the label simply place the product in the too-hard basket.




I’m not big fan of ice-cream at the best of times but I was keen to try this local product. I’ve tried it now and for me it lacks the wow factor. It is expensive, and while prospective buyers might be expected to place quality above price, for me in this case, the price is too high.