Taking it slow at Stanley

Six courses, over four hours, with a showery autumn afternoon blowing outside.

We’re at Stanley on a lazy Sunday afternoon celebrating the season’s produce.

We were fortunate enough to have our pork on the menu at The Old Cable Station’s autumn ‘producer’s lunch’ – a slow food event that happens quarterly.

Charlotte Brown and Michael Whatley prepared a feast for almost 50 people, and this was the menu:

- Slow-roasted capsicum with ricotta cheese and vine ripened tomatoes
- Spicy Sassafras parsnip soup
- Mutton bird and duck terrine with a pepperberry and tomato marmalade
- Free-range egg fettuccine pasta ‘al funghi’
- Twice cooked crispy skinned Wessex Saddleback pork belly on parmesan risotto with chilli jam (that was us!)
- ‘Mile high’ apple pie with double cream
- And wines from Tamar vineyard Native Point.

You can already see it was about slow food…even the capsicum was slow-roasted and our pork was twice-cooked!

The slow food movement is all about food that is good, clean and fair. It’s about getting people to care about what they eat and where it comes from, and to realise that their food choices do affect other people and the environment.

Slow Food Australia has more than 40 branches, and across the world there are 100,000 members in 132 countries. At the moment they’re campaigning for cheese to be legally made from raw milk, and against urban sprawl on productive farmland.

We think our pigs fit the slow food philosophy pretty well. They’re slow growers to start with – they take almost double the time of an intensively raised pig!

But we also think we’re doing the right thing by them ethically. They can root around in the dirt, get in a mud bath, play with their piggy friends, and they’ve got sea and mountain views from their paddocks.

The slow food movement is also about preserving biodiversity, and thus our food supply. The varieties of fruit, vegetables and meat we eat have been boiled down to the ones that look good, travel well, and can sit in a supermarket cool store for months. Unfortunately taste wasn’t on the checklist during the reduction.

And it’s also about valuing the food we have, and the people who produce it. A farmer needs to be fairly rewarded for what he grows. If he’s not, animal welfare and the environment will be compromised as he tries to produce more to pay the bills.

We had a lovely lunch at Stanley, meeting people who truly value what they eat and who want to know the story behind it.

(Thank you to Kevin O'Daly for the photos ... scrumptious.)