Tannic Teeth

I was in the city the other day and saw colourful hand prints on the wall in Forrest Chase.

These were hand prints of supporters. Supporters against the abhorrent industry of human sex trafficking.

Of all the maligned things humans inflect upon each other, child/young person sex trafficking is the most diabolically horrific. Here are a few facts taken from The Body Shop’s site.

• Human trafficking is the third largest growing criminal industry in the world.
• 1.8 million children are exploited in the global commercial sex trade but this estimate is thought to be higher due to the underground nature of the crime.
• Sexual exploitation is the most common purpose for human trafficking.
• Once the children are successfully captured, they are abused, beaten or raped into submission so they can be sold repeatedly.
• They are psychologically and physically damaged but are too frightened or ashamed to ask for help.
• If they try to escape their lives or the lives of their families are threatened. If they do manage to escape the authorities don’t always provide immediate protection.

To show your support against atrociousness inflected upon the world’s innocent, click on the above link to The Body Shop.

So I was supposed to have a get-away down South.

1 week of floundering around wineries of Margaret River, tasting wines and seasonal produce.

But Mr Murphy’s Law was rightfully instructing. We got sick.

3 days savagely bed ridden with a bout of gastro-intestinal dysfunction. Hoary! for Gastrolyte or I’d probably be dead.

Consolation prize: you get to discover the eateries 15 min drive from your hotel. Meal-up was one of those places.

It’s a kinda shop, open kitchen, tapas, light eatery thingy that is approachable at random hours of the day. Well random for the dysfunctional intestines we seemed to be suffering from.

The ‘take’ is: fresh, organic, wholesome and holistic. You will eat off biodegradable plates with biodegradable cutlery. The food is mindfully crafted by Chef Adam Lane. Nicolette helps with front of house with her gorgeous demeanour and stunning heterochromatic eyes (different eye colour). Husband and wife team helped by Lisa Tayolr. The food is nothing short of amazing. End of story.

Warming food. Warming philosophy. Love it. It helped healed my wretched belly

Meal-up

Shop 3

Bay View Centro

Dunsborough

P 9755 34 11

www.mealup.com.au

…and nobody gets hurt.

For this is my manta in the morning.

Okay. I may have a slight caffeine addiction, but I like the feeling caffeine gives to my brain – that tingly masseuse reinvigorating my neural pathways. And it tastes freaking good too, that is, if you have the right beans.

If you are a coffee buff in Perth then you would know 5 Senses. If you don’t know the brand, then I urge you to try them.

Essentially it started out as a PNG coffee grown by a small village in Papua New Guinea called Simbu. The local government funded a project to assist in sustainability and diversification. The coffee is grown on mixed use land so the growers are not reliant on coffee as an income per se.

This has three fold advantage:

• the environment is not cleared for a monoculture – thus biodiversity remains.
• the growers are not subject to punitive prices offered by multinational coffee houses – locking them into a cycle of poverty.
• because the land is mixed use, the growers can give the coffee bushes more attention to pest and disease management whilst still growing other crops for their own subsistence.

I won’t explore the flavour and aroma characteristics of this coffee because I don’t understand enough about coffee to do so.

All I know is, it’s very palatable for the tongue and the conscience.

As much as there is a massive power imbalance in the world, it is the tropical zones that are bolstering the round the clock function of the developed world. Our much beloved drug, caffeine, diligently serves society as an alertness crutch from students on late night literary rampages to pilots berthing a 370 ton highly explosive aluminum tube with wings. Without caffeine most of the developed world and fast ‘developing’ nations would swagger in pace. Caffeine the principle psychoactive compound in coffee (also guarana and tea), needless to say you are well acquainted with; is responsible for temporarily staving off drowsiness and increasing alertness.

Coffee the world’s beverage of choice for administering it, is almost exclusively grown in tropical and sub-tropical zones mostly in countries still developing. Coffee is second only to oil in the world’s most traded commodity, but most coffee growers receive about 1 cent per cup (when sold though multinational coffee brands). For a farm product that is very labour intensive to grow and harvest, coffee farmers are kept under poverty line by financially punitive conditions offered from their crop. Many less scrupulous multi-national companies pay in advance for growers’ crop, under the guise of what appears a modest sum. Growers are only to be trapped into a cycle debt year in year out, heaven forbid their crop doesn’t fail- such is the nature of agriculture.

Fair tradecoffee instigated by Oxfam serves to repay a ‘fair’ sum for coffee grown by producers. Hence when it came time for the annual Fair trade fortnight (and fair trade art exhibition) I was compelled to make make coffee cups bearing the 1 cent piece embedded in it, as a visual reminder to coffee drinkers just how much is handed back. Most of them sold, save 4, which still reside at the Oxfam shop on Hay St, Perth. They are on sale now and are half the price they were during the exhibition (half proceeds of the sale go to Fair Trade Collective), and the other half, covers the cost of production.