Shopping at a big name supermarket returns just 16 cents to the local community, says Eat Local Ballarat author Alex Bayley.
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The new blog, which launches on Wednesday, focuses on sourcing local food and the ethical and economic issues that come with thinking seriously about where your food come from.
“There’s a huge gap for this kind of thing in Ballarat,” says Ms Bayley.
“There are lots of organisations that are doing their little thing, but there’s no one site that’s telling the whole story.”
Ms Bayley said she originally considered writing a small pamphlet about where to find local food supplies, but soon realised the issue was bigger than a slip of paper.
“I realised this last Christmas. I have this tradition where I do an enormous shop before Christmas so I don’t have to go when it’s crowded, and I buy all my sugar and vinegar for the preserving I do over summer, and I caught a taxi home.
“The driver said he hated having to shop at the big supermarkets, and he wanted to shop more locally – but he didn’t know how. And that’s where it started.”
Ms Bayley has been eating locally for over a decade – although she says when she started, there were a few stumbling blocks.
“I would go to the deli at the supermarket and ask the kid behind the counter ‘which farm is your ham from?’, and of course they would look at me dumbfounded.”
In order to enable people to shop locally, Eat Local Ballarat will carry a ready guide to those hidden shops in the city that may not have a presence like the supermarkets.
“When I tell people ‘Did you know that the Ballarat Homebrew Shop sells the most amazing bread flour that’s grown locally?’, they’ll say ‘I had no idea it was there,’ or ‘I knew it was there but had no idea they sold bread flour.’ It’s the most fantastic stoneground flour from Camperdown.”
According to her own research conducted on ABS data, if people in Ballarat chose to shop at local stores and small supermarkets, it would bring around $70 million more per year to Ballarat.
“It’s quite simple maths, and it would have a huge effect on the local economy, rather than benefiting the shareholders of Coles and Woolworths, who take 84c in the dollar,” Ms Bayley said on Monday.
Eat Local Ballarat can be found at www.eatlocalballarat.com from June 1.