I live very close by to some of the most spectacular coastline in Australia. This is a picture of one such beautiful swimming beach only a very short distance from our home.
This is also a great beach for fishing, we have caught some lovely big Australian Salmon here on numerous occasions.
The area where I live also has many oyster and mussel farmers. There are many oyster leases in the surrounding lakes and when you are out in the boat you can often see the bream enjoying a good feed!
One particular day, my mother and I were also lucky enough to get a big feed of fresh mussels. It had been a really windy night and one of the mussel leases had broken off shore. They grow the mussels about 100 metres out in the water on big nets and ropes. When the mussel lease broke, all the mussels washed up on the beach in the morning. We weren’t the only ones down there, some people were filling up their eskys as the whole beach was littered with beautiful, big, glossy black mussels. When they fall to the sand and are rolling around under the water, they ingest a lot of sand, thus making them useless for the commercial trade. So the locals score big time!
This was our haul! We made a delicious dish of chili mussels. Sort of like a Spanish tomato and saffron dish. It was very yummy…but if truth be told, it was a little gritty….!
There is a lot of stuff packaged into just one little seed. There is a ton of genetic material and there is also the potential to feed a whole family. Just one little bean seed can produce a beautiful plant with a bountiful crop of food. Giving people the knowledge and skills to grow their own food, is giving them empowerment and food security. Food security is a basic human right.
