Taste: Peas and quiet

A CO-OPERATIVE project aims to have children clamouring for their vegies.

For Elaine Reeves. L-R Jody Clay Pantry Officer, Corey Barnes 20 of Gagebrook who volunteers, Gwen Harper Project Manager at The Pantry that forms part of Waterbridge Food Co-Op at Gagebrook Community Centre. Picture Nikki Davis-Jones

PICKING up a bag of frozen peas at the supermarket does not encourage strong family connections and social engagement - but helping people grow the peas does.

So says Gwen Harper, project manager at Waterbridge Food Co-op, a program with community gardening as a component.

Gwen says it is a program with two years’ funding and 10- year goals. The overarching aim of the Commonwealth Government and Primary Health Tasmania in funding Waterbridge (centred on Bridgewater) and seven other programs in the state, is to improve health and wellbeing by improving access to fresh food, education and training.

It is a project with so many tentacles, stakeholders, crossovers and schemes that it can be difficult to get one’s head around it, but Gwen seems a natural fit for such complexity.

Raised in Lindisfarne, she has worked in marketing and ecology on four continents before returning to Tasmania with her husband, Michael (an Australian she met in Belgium), to raise their children aged six and two.

One of her more recent jobs was at a community garden in Texas that welcomed 10,000 children a year, and alerted her to a ‘nature deficit” in children.

“Kids in Texas, when they saw a tomato or carrot that wasn’t ripe would ask, ‘Is this real?’” she says.

“We have lost that connection with the growing of food. People want to get their food back, they want to be able to trust their food, they want to support people who are growing their food, they want to have more connection to it.

“You should see a kid pull up a carrot - it’s a hidden surprise - their eyes boggle every time.”

Among the Waterbridge projects is a Chefs at Home class on home cooking. It has a production kitchen, Fast Foodies, where Chris Gimblett leads a team of volunteers who make preserves and cook meals that are frozen and sold at the Pantry, a shop staffed by volunteers three days a week at Gagebrook Community Centre, at Herdsmans Cove.

Such fare as a seafood curry ($4), fried rice ($3) and cherry pudding ($3), or pumpkin jam (in a blindfold test you would say it was plum) or tomato relish ($2), can be bought individually or are included in $10, $20 or $40 vegie boxes.

Fresh vegetables for sale come from wholesalers and from the community garden at Bridgewater or the two-month old garden at the centre, where garden volunteers can help themselves to the harvest and “learn heaps” by working alongside expert Jodie Tune.

One of the aims of the funding grant is to ensure there is collaboration between the many organisations that aim to help the same people.

Sixteen local government, food-rescue, employment, gardening, nutrition, health and welfare organisations are involved in the Waterbridge project.

The MONA 24 Carrot Garden scheme for schools is on the Waterbridge steering committee and provides it with Gardens in a Box, an apple crate, liner, soil and seedlings ready to be set up at home.

“Instead of fighting with parents to not eat vegetables, when kids have grown and picked them themselves they will fight to eat them,” Gwen says.

And soon the Pantry hopes to be online and to link another local community project, Top Gear.

Learner drivers will be enlisted to make deliveries.

Recipients of vegie boxes can expect to see much three-point- turning outside their houses as their vegetables are delivered.

Visit Pantry at 191 Lamprill Circle, Gagebrook, open Tuesdays noon to 2pm, Thursdays 1pm-4pm and Fridays 10am to 2pm. waterbridgefood.org

Happy birthday

I wonder if any readers now remember (when this column was called Checkout, a weekly shopping guide), a column when I visited Merediths Orchard at Margate, A One at Glenorchy and bakeries Krusty Korner and Little Swiss Bakery in Hobart. It was the first column I wrote and it was published 25 years ago last Saturday, on October 24, 1990.