Eating Democracy: The True Cost of The Food We Eat

We are peering into shopping bags, leaning on the kitchen bench, chopping herbs for dinner, and talking about household budgets to explore the challenges, opportunities, and costs of our food system! 

This book tells the story of eaters doing things differently, navigating their paths to grow, provision and cook in ways that are fair to soil, water, plants, animals, and people. These eaters are helping to build a new food system based on culture, community, and personal, public, and ecosystem health without blowing the household or the planetary budget.

The ripple effect of capitalist, industrial food production on the way we source and consume food is demonstrated by the rise of supermarkets, which in the past 50 years have captured the eating system as the main source of food for most Australians. In Australia, Coles and Woolworths are the two major players that control 66 per cent of the retail grocery market. Woolworths is the clear favourite, where 48 per cent of Australians primarily shop for their groceries, followed by Coles (39 per cent), Aldi (ten per cent), IGA (two per cent) and Other (two per cent).

On average, Australians spend $185 per week and over half of us shop weekly for food and groceries. 40 per cent cite the rising cost of grocery bills as a key stressor in our daily lives, particularly for Millennials. So, we have a general idea about where Australians are sourcing their food, but how do we feel about our food choices and more broadly, our connection to the food system?

When we talk about the true cost(s) of eating, it can be difficult to identify and quantify the costs that industrial food systems externalise to the environment, animals, workers, and the public’s health and well being. When food is turned into commodities in long supply chains, it is rendered less nutritious, ecologically sound or socially just, and local control of food and agriculture systems is diminished. The Covid-19 pandemic laid bare how unreliable long supply chains are. This book posits that if there was full transparency across the food system, it would not look as it does today.

Eating Democracy shows what it costs to enjoy safe, nutritious, culturally appropriate, affordable, ecologically sound, and socially just food. We’ve brought together diverse eaters from a range of locations, socio-economic backgrounds, and food journeys to tell their stories – where and how they source their food, how they cook their food, who they eat it with, and what it costs them.

To paraphrase a famous philosopher, those who control the means of production control the world. For too long that control has been in the hands of corporate, industrial food and agriculture systems serving the interests and maintaining the wealth of distant shareholders at the expense of the planet and its inhabitants. But things are changing, and more and more people are empowered to act - by growing, bartering, and sharing their food, and by connecting to local farmers in autonomous food systems, to the benefit of families, local communities, farmers, animals, and ecosystems everywhere.

Your support of Eating Democracy is two-fold. Your contribution will help to publish this important book to share the stories of our eaters, which we hope will inspire more people to think about new ways and means of growing and sourcing food, and offer insights into what the opportunities and challenges are in eating democratically for those already questioning our current food system or wanting to know more about alternatives to the industrial food system. It will also support the food sovereignty movement and the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance as we work toward a future in which everyone has access to nutritious and culturally-appropriate food grown and distributed in ethical and ecological ways, and enact your right to democratically determine your own food and agriculture systems.

This is your chance to play an active role in the food sovereignty movement. 

About the Eaters

This book is the product of collaboration and the commitment of eaters from around Australia with a foreword written by Alexx Stuart (Low Tox Life).

The eaters in this book are as diverse as the food they source. Some are city dwellers, others remote, some on low incomes, single or with large families to feed. Some are students, others work in hospitality or the arts, are academics or have professional careers. Some are couples with more choice, higher incomes, or living in areas with more options. They have different skills, abilities and choices when it comes to food. However, the eaters in this book share a common theme of helping to transform the food system as individuals determined to make a change. No matter their location, family situation, education or income, these eaters care about the food they consume - from where and whom they source it, and how it is grown, prepared and eaten. 

Our intense gratitude and thanks go to the following contributors and comrades in the fight for a healthy and fair food system: 

Caley Callope - First Peoples' Food Sovereignty

Caley is a Badjala, Anguthimire woman with ties to Bindal and Wakka Wakka Country. She was raised on Yuggera people's Country. Food has always played a significant role in her life, whether it was due to a lack of food or limited access during the first 12 years of her life, juxtaposed to a surplus of food and food waste when she attended boarding school. Her parent’s wit and ability to produce and prepare delicious meals used recipes passed down through the generations by their old people.

 Caley now works at Black Duck Foods, a social enterprise that wants to influence the direction of Australian agriculture towards a more sustainable future, an inclusive future for Aboriginal communities.

Through the lens of who she is, and the opportunities she has received, Caley completed her honours thesis in anthropology examining Aboriginal food sovereignty and the relational dimensions of health and wellbeing. She is committed to looking at ways that food creates opportunities; to reclaim and heal fragmented ecosystems of care: for food, Country and people. 

Ruth Gaha-Morris - Food is a Significant Other

Ruth, 45, lives with her partner, teenage/adult child, dog, and cats in Bungendore in regional NSW, where she works for Southern Harvest Association (SHA), a not-for-profit organisation at the forefront of increasing the profile and availability of local food and fibre products, through farmer-consumer networking activities such as markets, aggregated produce boxes, tours, workshops, festivals and community long lunches. Ruth also has her own business focused on catering and value-adding locally grown, found and foraged foods.

Ruth has been a farmer and a Registered Nurse, and seen first-hand the results of poor nutrition on health and welfare outcomes, across many social contexts. She grows her own food, forages, preserves and is heavily involved in food system work. She also has her own catering business, along with teaching cooking and preserving.

Sharolyn Newington - Food, Finance and Family

Sharolyn and her husband Joshua live in Meanjin, Brisbane in the inner city suburb of Grange. The couple have four children: Iggy (ten), Junia (eight), Athanasius (five) and Ira (two) along with five pet chickens and a resident Willy Wagtail who has recently taken to going inside. 

Joshua currently works two different jobs while Sharolyn stays home with the children (and does a lot of volunteer work), so they are dependent on fluctuating Centrelink payments to meet their monthly bills, including paying the rent and putting food on the table. 

Sharolyn has always been creative about accessing food, with early origins in dumpster diving, although today that is harder to access. With such a busy family and church life, there is limited time even for home vegetable production, so Sharolyn chooses to purchase from as close to home as she can, including direct from farms with a group of like-minded others, and the Community Food Centre now that the Food Co-op she has been sourcing from for the past nine years has shut its doors.

Hannah Kothe - Living in a Food Desert

Hannah is in her mid 30’s, having grown up in suburban Sydney. She now lives with her partner and a young family in the food desert that is Mparntwe, Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory. Her upbringing was not one of being surrounded by delicious, culturally diverse foods. Still, with the influence of cooking programs, her partner Ahmed, years of travel and experiencing different cultures, she has grown a passion for putting together healthy and delicious meals from the most locally available and seasonal produce possible.

The recent impacts of Covid-19 and food shortages had a massive effect on food availability in Alice Springs. Natural disasters cut transport lines and supermarket shelves lay bare. This brought to light for Hannah how fragile our food system is. Imagine walking into one of the major supermarkets and not finding any fresh produce, not for just one day, but for weeks at a time.

Jessie Power - Health and Addiction

Jessie, 30, lives with her parents Tom and Donna and their cheeky cat Harry in the Redlands, a small coastal city on Quandamooka Country, just outside of Brisbane. She quit her full-time job in Sydney during the pandemic, which is where she made the decision to move back to Queensland, and in with her folks. 

Jessie has just completed her Master of Environment, where her final dissertation explored how policy can support an agroecological approach to climate change adaptation in Australian agriculture. Jessie also joined AFSA as General Coordinator in March 2022 to help grow the food sovereignty movement under the guidance of the National Committee. 

Her ancestry is Irish and English, and after Jessie's family moved to Australia in 2005 from south-east London, she can recall being inspired by the diversity of fresh produce grown in the subtropics as well as culinary influences from Asia. Her story speaks to the complex relationship between food, body image and Big Alcohol as she recovers from addiction through food sovereignty. 

Simon Wever - The Permaculture Approach

Simon is a 41-year-old North Queenslander with a deep-rooted passion for food sovereignty. Growing up amidst the lush landscapes of a mango, avocado, and banana farm on the Atherton Tablelands, Simon's early exposure to the world of primary production played a significant role in shaping his perspective on food and eating. It instilled in him a profound appreciation for sustainable agriculture and the importance of local, community-based food systems.

Simon entered the property market in 2010 and relished the opportunity to start growing his own food on a 680 square metre suburban block. It quickly became apparent that the quality of homegrown produce far exceeds that of supermarket-bought produce and cemented the proverbial “If you want something done right, do it yourself”.  Over the next 10 years that small block of land started producing a decent quantity of food featuring 13 tropical fruit trees and backyard chickens.

With time, Simon and his partner, Cassy, felt they had outgrown their suburban block having far greater ambitions of food production. In 2020 they embarked on an inspiring journey. They made the life-changing decision to purchase a sprawling 20-acre property just south of Townsville, signalling their commitment to self-sufficiency and a more sustainable way of life. Driven by a desire to reconnect with nature and promote food sovereignty, Simon eagerly embraced the challenges and rewards of transforming their property into a thriving haven of organic farming and permaculture practices. They are now just over two years into this mammoth undertaking but already bringing in a tidy quantity of fresh food on a regular basis.

Olive Awaritefe - The Meaning of Food

Olive, 25, lives in a share-house on Dharug/ Gundungurra land, in Hazelbrook in the Blue Mountains of NSW. She lives with her friend Gabby, Gabby’s partner James, and their doggo, Pawpaw. They frequently cook together and share food. She was drawn to this place 6 years ago, when her heart just wanted to be surrounded by mountains, fresh air, waterfalls and a solid community.

Olive’s ancestry is African, and she feels most at home with this cuisine, having been influenced by her Grandmother early on to have a taste for spicy food.

Social food enterprises are a passion of Olive’s, having helped found ‘Farm it Forward’ a social enterprise scheme that started at the time of fire and flood. Farm It Forward is a ‘not-for-profit urban farming social enterprise model connecting landowners and local young people who are passionate about growing food. The project fosters youth and community mental health, develops skills, training and job opportunities, while tackling social isolation and increasing community wellbeing.’

As passionate as she is about her own food culture, Olive would love to see a revival of First Peoples’ Foods, driven and owned by First Peoples’ as a celebration of culture and return to Country.

Lucy Ridge - Cooperative Eating

Lucy is a 29-year-old woman who was born, raised, and still lives on Ngunnawal and Ngambri County in Canberra. She rents with a housemate in a ground floor apartment in the inner north of the city, in an area known as the 'lentil belt'.

Lucy trained as a chef, beginning her apprenticeship when she was still at school. After working for over ten years in the hospitality industry she began to search for greater meaning in the food system and began a series of self-directed internships working with women around Australia in all areas of growing and making food. During this time Lucy also transitioned from her kitchen work to a career in food writing telling stories about the people behind the menu. 

In addition, Lucy also works with a not-for-profit organisation that connects small-scale farmers with eaters. Lucy is also a member and volunteer at the Canberra Food Co-op: Australia’s oldest food cooperative.

Olivia Feng - Stretching the Budget Further

Olivia lives in a share-house in Gimuy Country, in the Queensland regional coastal city of Cairns. As a current student of nursing, she has a limited budget but makes the most of foraging and small-scale growing to supplement her weekly food purchases, and she certainly knows how to stretch her food dollars further. 

With a Chinese Vietnamese background, Olivia finds the climate perfectly suited to her choices of Asian cuisine. She is curious about food, what grows where, how it is grown, and what goes into nutritious dishes, and her food sourcing is based on relationships, learning and love. One day she plans to start her own food commune feeding herself and maybe another family or two.

Ashley Darby - The Social Impact of Food 

Ashley, 31, lives in a family-owned property on Yuin Country in Durras, New South Wales. She lives in a cabin with her cat Hugo, just next door to her family who share their Fijian-Indian culture and love of food through preparing, cooking and eating meals together.

As a way of connecting with her Fijian-Indian heritage, Ashley and her family hand-make and sell samosas at their local markets from time to time. 

Ashley and her community were rocked by the 2019-20 bushfires, as the food supply chain was completely cut off during the disaster. She is now working as a Youth Development Officer, passionate about community-led social transformation. During the pandemic, Ashley started a hobby garden and is keen to learn ways to be more self-sufficient when it comes to growing her own food. 

Vicki Swinbank - Food in the City

In 2021, Vicki achieved a longstanding ambition to have a book on the feminist politics of food published. This work was a culmination of a life-long interest in not only food issues and a love of cooking but decades of involvement in feminist politics. 

Vicki’s early childhood awakened her senses to good food, and growing up in what was then a rural area close to Melbourne in the 1950s and 60s gave her an awareness of where much of her food came from. Living in the UK and Europe in the 70s and 80s exposed Vicki to the vibrant feminist movement of that time as well as to a range of different food cultures. Through her wide reading and research on food issues, she is acutely aware that even in a wealthy democratic society such as Australia, access to nutritious and adequate food is not a given and needs to be prioritised as a right, not a privilege.

We need you!

Through the work of these passionate eaters we've created a book that will appeal to other eaters, that's everyone, right?!, looking for inspiration and a community of like-minded others, just as it will appeal to mindful eaters everywhere who want to know just what the true cost of eating really is and their role in voting for fair food with their dollars every day. 

But in order to do these stories justice, we need your help.

REWARDS - Mementoes, books, support for food sovereignty and tickets to the launch!

While the main reward offered is a copy of the book itself, we will be holding a book launch event with Costa Georgiadis on Saturday 14 October 2023 at Sustainable Agriculture Eurobodalla (SAGE) on Brinja-Yuin Country, Moruya on the South Coast of NSW. It will be a celebratory event with a great lineup of stories from the eaters featured in the book, and of course, bountiful food and drink produced in ethical and ecologically sound ways! 

The Eating Democracy book launch is being held on the eve of AFSA's annual Food Sovereignty Convergence, which is a fantastic opportunity for farmers, eaters and allies to join together to work through priorities and actions that will help transform our food system for years to come. 

The launch event will start with a tour of the SAGE Gardens, followed by wood fired pizza prepared with ethically sourced ingredients and topped with fresh local and seasonal produce. This will be coupled with locally produced beverages. While the feast is being prepared and shared we'll be joined by Costa Georgiadis as host to hear one on one from some of our passionate eaters. All proceeds from Eating Democracy will go to AFSA to continue fighting for food sovereignty for all!

Our goal is to produce a book as cost-effectively and ecologically-sound as possible. The following is a breakdown of costs: 

• Printing (Finsbury Green): $12,500
• Contributors: $8,000
• Illustration:  $1,500
• Design & Editorial:  $3,000
• Project Manager:  $5,000
• Total:  $30,000
  
  

Finsbury Green are committed to a low carbon footprint and use only certified recycled paper stock.

Books will be posted to supporters through Australia Post or alternatively be available for collection at the Eating Democracy launch event and subsequent book events around the country. 

The Project Manager funding will not only keep the Eating Democracy project moving forward but also contribute to the ongoing work of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) to support the growing movement of small-scale agroecological farmers in Australia and globally, as will any funds raised in excess of our target. 

When the campaign ends, the book will sell for $35. 

Subsequent proceeds from the book will go to AFSA to continue our work towards a future where everyone has the right to culturally appropriate, nutritious and delicious foods grown and distributed in ethical and ecologically-sound ways and to advocate for everyone’s right to determine their own food and agriculture systems.