From a consumer's POV the whole shopping thing is a complete bummer.

We fork out $20 for a pizza but apparently we're being ripped off if we pay 50c/dollar more per kilo for fruit & veg.

I just want to buy fresh fruit and vegies, fresh milk, ripened cheese, full-fat yoghurt, well-made bread and good eggs.

I don't want calcium-fortified “dairy”; I don't want OJ with "Vitamin C" or D or A or bloody H. I want yoghurt with full milk, not skim plus cream and sugar (you read the labels). My two year old is not on a low-fat diet so why the hell does it take so long to find yoghurt that is yoghurt? So far I have found TWO brands and about 40,000 brands that are "low-fat" "97% fat-free"; "lite"; "light" "original(!!)" This is choice apparently.

I don't want to buy perfectly round red apples (it's still impossible to believe that they are "phasing out" Red Delicious), I don't want green tomatoes picked too early; or frozen oranges shipped around the world for days and days at subsidised prices. I can live without African potatoes.

I don't want tinned tomatoes like I bought last week only to find the tomatoes also had tomato paste (10%), gums and maize thickener inside. Why anything other than water and salt? Maybe because the can has such a long journey round the world or the ingredients were aged or of such low quality that they need a bit of oomph on their travels? Or is it cheap padding of ingredients? Is it so hard to make good food?

Anyway, its a bummer, I can't grow vegies to perfection and I don’t want to keep reading every bloody item to make sure it a) hasn't been taken apart and put back together again or b) hasn't been frozen, flown around and flung half-ripened and flavourless at people. For god’s sake I’m not even a vegetarian so why is this all so difficult?

Edina in Ab Fab said it all when she said "I don't want choice, I just want better things"

Absolutely Fab post Ro.

I deliberately purchase local, in season produce for the simple reason it is more nutritious and tasty - especially if organic. If we have to put in place protections to keep our produce fresh and local - then so be it.

I too am tired of reading labels - don't have a weight problem - prefer real yoghurt, real milk and real cheese. Where I can, I buy from the local organic shop - believe me if you try organically grown asparagus you'll never go back to the supermarket version.

There is the real possibility of promoting local, safe produce, to make a profit from it and to avoid following the mass production nutrition depleted food like that produced in the USA and elsewhere.

Why are sales of multi-vitamins so high? Because we are not getting the nutrition we need from over processed, over-transported food.

Protect our fresh food industries both for our health and dare I say our economy.

Where did Greg Barns get these figures from? “Where it takes 450 Tasmanian farms to produce 80,000 tonnes of potatoes, 13 New Zealand farms can produce the same amount”

Assuming Greg is right. he is advocating a huge number of farmers must leave their land in Tasmania so the remainder can compete. But unlike Greg who met people in the Premier’s offices way back I actually met more than a few of these folk and their forbears out in their paddocks.

I offered the Senator for “poor” farmers some advice recently on my private thoughts that lots of big tractors were part of the problem based on my experience watching daily operations in those rich soils. But I can also say labeling in globalization of alternative sources is a big problem. Only the big international brands know how to rip off us consumers at the supermarkets too.

As consumers we leave the door wide open to this abuse. Generally, from my work with processors our local quality control has led the world but who knows what we get with the same major brands as importers? With JASANZ we can expect product from New Zealand to be interchangeable with our own in regards to quality.

However I doubt NZ farmers can do anything for much less than our best efforts in the long run. Both countries overheads should be much the same. Land and labor costs, like fuel must be roughly equal when all are considered on a level playing field. My best example for comparison is all the varieties of cheese available from this part of the world. If I am wrong darned kiwis would out number the devils in our big cities ten to one.

This raises another issue, how dependent on the bush are our city folk? Who in this forum can actually grow or make anything? Sustainability anywhere is really about how we actually relate to the land, tractors or no tractors.