Prepare for the Garlic Invasion

Word reached me today from our island empire's southern frontier.  A ragged, disease riddled scarecrow, half starved and with eyes branded by unimaginable horrors thrust the missive into my hands before expiring at my feet.  Australia Post certainly goes the extra mile to deliver the mail.

Apparently all is not well in garlic town.  Those of you with a retentive memory and nothing better to do may recall that one of my colleagues whiles away her unproductive hours irritating cattle and helping her husband grow garlic.  So successful have they been in this endeavour that she now fulfils her work functions in a home office half full of garlic (the other half is full of dogs and her desk).  But as the odiferous bulbs climb to the roof comes word of a challenge to their garlic hegemony.

Apparently the geriatric population of Tasmania, not content with simply waiting for death like decent people, have committed their few remaining years to growing garlic.  Suddenly Tasmania is awash with garlic.  Farmers markets are waist deep in the stuff as various senile decrepits hawk their wares.  Prices are under pressure as the sheer volume of garlic threatens to overwhelm the purchasing capacity of the six or seven people in the state who actually want to buy it.

My colleague and her husband could be forgiven for giving the whole thing away and going into abalone farming in the bathtub but they are made of sterner stuff.  Garlic is what they have farmed and garlic is what they shall continue to farm whatever the price and the demand.  It is an attitude like that which has made Australia's agricultural community what it is today; largely owned by the Chinese.

Still they have some advantages over their elderly foes.  For starters they're not likely to drop dead of a heart attack while planting the odd garlic.  Secondly they cunningly arranged to grow their garlic out of season.  This means that they are (quite literally) reaping the benefits of having garlic on hand when none other is available.  As such they get the jump on their competitors (many of whom can no longer jump at all).  However this is not enough, drastic steps need to be taken and so they are investigating the possibility of selling their garlic in Sydney.

Selling garlic in Sydney has the advantage of opening up a large market that actually has some money.  All that needs to be done is persuade the inhabitants of Sydney that they desperately need Tasmanian garlic.  Fortunately Sydney is a sophisticated market.  This means that the people are stupidly gullible in complicated and unusual ways.  I made two suggestions to my colleague, firstly that they market their garlic as "organic" and secondly that they market it as "artisan".  The people in Sydney would buy dogshit if you claimed it was both organic and artisan.

Organic turns out to be a bit of a problem.  The stuff actually is organic (as is anything else with a hydrocarbon base) but getting it officially labelled as such requires the jumping through of a tedious number of hoops.  The single benefit of organic food is that it enables you to sell it at a higher price to people who think there is some other benefit to organic food.  Since, however, this is the benefit that appeals to them my colleague and her husband are currently jumping through those hoops.  The accreditation process should be finished only a few years after they've died.

Artisan is a much better prospect.  For the life of me I can't identify any definition of artisan that extends beyond "add 100% to the price".  If you physically touched your product at some point during its creation you can claim it as artisan and price it accordingly.  Keeping production low to create a false sense of exclusivity (its garlic for god's sake, it isn't like you've never seen it before) is actually easier if production is genuinely low because you can only grow garlic in the bits of land that the rogue cow hasn't trampled (see my previous blog entry on the difficulties of garlic farming in Tasmania).

So watch out for semi organic, artisanal garlic coming soon to an exclusive food store (or alternative market) near you.  A new food empire is slowly rising in Tasmania and will soon dominate the land or at least it will if they can ever chase the cow off the growing area.