Tag: gluten-free

Maize and the quest for gluten-free food

maize-gluten-free
Photo of maize mill courtesy Corson Grains.

As you’d know, we have been in the Tasmanian wilderness. Here’s something I prepared earlier (and posted on Thursday night!).

I’d no sooner starting thinking ‘Where do gluten-free products come from?’ when I found the answer right under my nose, a kilometre from home. The Warwick Mill, which incidentally has been trading for almost 150 years, processes maize into maize flour and other products which manufacturers use to meet market demand for gluten free breakfast cereals, breads, snack foods and brewed products.

In case you did not know, the FOMM team largely depends on a gluten free diet for various health reasons (not coeliac disease). We are always encouraged when finding palatable new products that have joined the GF club. I cite as examples GF beer and that staple spread of Australian pantries – Vegemite.

The Warwick Mill was once owned by the Toowoomba-based Defiance Group. The mill was bought in 2003 by New Zealand family company Corson, which also has mills at Gisborne and Tuakau in the north island.

The Warwick-based company, Corson Grains Defiance Maize Products, processes on average 35,000 tonnes of maize a year. The cobs are bought direct from Southern Downs growers and stored in silos for six to eight weeks to dry before milling begins.

The maize kernels are milled into two different types of ‘grits’ from which the mill produces six products including flakes (for cornflakes), maize flour, semolina and super fine polenta flour.

In January, Corson bought the Freedom Foods gritting mill at Darlington Point in south-west New South Wales.

Warwick-based Corson Grains General Manager Australia Shawn Fletcher said the Darlington Point mill would allow the company to expand into different products such as rice, sorghum, buckwheat and quinoa flours.

“This is something a number of our business customers have been asking for,” he said. “We see it as a real opportunity for growth and to get some geographic spread along the eastern coast.”

In 2018, the company started a major on-site storage project, adding six new 1800-tonne silos, manufactured in Allora. This took the storage capacity of the mill from 3000 tonnes to 13,800 tonnes.

If you are one of the estimated 260,000 people in Australia who have coeliac disease or the estimated 1.8 to 3 million who are gluten-sensitive, this is a story you need to read. It’s not that many decades ago when people with coeliac disease or gluten sensitivity had the devil’s job finding food that didn’t have gluten in it.

Now there are many companies manufacturing GF cereals, bread, pasta, biscuits and snack food. They are all supplied with the raw materials from mills like the Warwick operation, which employs 26 people.

We have noticed since we first started taking a caravan around rural Australia, how small towns have recognised the importance of catering for people who are shopping for GF products. On our most recent trip, I found a loaf of GF bread in the freezer of a grocery store in a small New South Wales town.

People who have coeliac disease become unwell after eating foods containing gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Over time, the immune reaction to eating gluten creates inflammation that damages the lining of the small intestine. Medical complications can follow, including malabsorption (prevents some nutrients being absorbed by the body). Many people have no symptoms but the classic one is diarrhoea. Other symptoms include bloating, wind, fatigue, low blood count (anaemia) and osteoporosis. Healthline says the mainstay of treatment is a strict gluten-free diet that can help manage symptoms and promote intestinal healing.

A few of our family members in Canada are afflicted with this auto-immune disease. Cousin Glen put up with a mixed bag of symptoms before a naturopath suggested in the mid-1980s he was gluten-intolerant.

“Back then the condition was totally off the radar of conventional medicine. I have never been diagnosed as coeliac and march under the banner of the gluten intolerant.”

Glen’s brother was formally diagnosed with coeliac disease, as was a young relative of She Who Is Also Gluten Sensitive. All agree it was good to identify the cause and the cure (a gluten-free diet). Cousin Glen said the improvement in his overall health once off gluten was     “immediate”.

Having said that, it is important to have some tests and get a GP or nutritionist to verify whether you have coeliac disease or are gluten-sensitive. There’s a difference.

Officially it is known as non-coeliac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), a condition which belongs in a cluster of food allergies including lactose intolerance. The numbers of people who are choosing to go GF has risen steadily over the past five to 10 years – in Australia it is estimated to be between 7% and 12% of the population.

The US National Library of Medicine refers to a survey that showed the market for gluten-free products grew at an annual rate of 28% between 2004 and 2011. Today it is a market worth more than $6 billion in the US alone.

Some of the GF retail drive has come from celebrities and athletes recommending it for weight loss and improved performance.

The proliferation of ‘free from’ products has created a marketing push, with many supermarkets devoting entire aisles to products, be they GF, dairy free or foods that avoid serious allergens like nuts and egg.

Although I’m not a drinker, I was in a bottle shop one time with SWIAGS when I spotted a six-pack of GF beer. As is often case with GF products, it was more expensive than standard beer. But SWIAGS (sometimes known as Ed), said it was quite palatable.

According to VinePair.com (which maintains a list of GF beer brands) gluten-reduced beers are brewed just like regular beer, with malted barley, wheat, rye. The beer is then exposed to an enzyme during primary fermentation, a filtration agent that has little if any effect on beer’s flavour. Or the beer can be made directly from gluten-free cereals.

It’s easy (if you do not suffer from food allergies), to be flippant about so-called lifestyle diets. In Richard Osman’s amusing Thursday Murder Club, he invents a vegan café in a up-scale retirement village called, Anything with a Pulse. Then there was Tom Waits telling David Letterman he’d passed a street protest on the way into the studio. “What was it about?” Letterman asked. “Free the glutens,” said Tom.

Multinational food producer Unilever estimates that 12% of Australians avoid wheat/gluten while 10% of New Zealanders are gluten intolerant.

The latest research on NCGS suggests that a test could soon be developed. Research from Columbia University has found people with gluten sensitivity produce high levels of antibodies to gluten, different from those measured to diagnose coeliac/celiac disease. Although they have symptoms, those with gluten sensitivity do not have the blood markers or intestinal damage of coeliac disease. The antibodies could be used in the future to help doctors more easily detect who has gluten sensitivity.

While that’s happening, I guess people will try the hit and miss system of eliminating certain foods from their diet and then introducing new ones. It’s great to see food retailers responding to this growing ‘trend’ with a line of ‘free from” foods (not just GF-free but lactose free, including ice cream and milk). It can be a bit of over-kill, though, when the label ‘gluten free’ is attached to such products as plain potato chips. Marketers are always looking for a trend to latch on to. (Let’s hope our ‘marketer in chief’ doesn’t find a winning one prior to the next election. Ed.)

Next Week: Confessions of a TreeHugger

 

 

Not keen on quinoa

(Ord River irrigation scheme photo by Laurel Wilson)

I have a couple of issues with the alternative health world’s high-protein saviour, quinoa (pronounced keen-wah). There was the time we were travelling around Australia and got invited to lunch by vegan friends.

Some 12 hours later came a coincidental 24-hour bug, where I woke at 2am immediately looking for a bucket; the kind of ‘lurgy’ you pick up from feral roadside dunnies. So yes, the taste, smell and texture of quinoa still causes an initial revulsion, much like when you’ve been spreading horse poo around the fruit trees and no matter how many times you wash your hands, you can still smell it.

Don’t get me wrong, I can eat quinoa – it goes well in salads, as it tends to fall to the bottom so you can leave the little seeds if you can’t scoop them up with a fork. Quinoa is a high-protein pseudo-grain popular with people who suffer from coeliac disease or those diagnosed as gluten intolerant (two different ailments would you believe?) Quinoa, which used to be exclusively grown in the Peruvian Andes, is now being grown, experimentally or not, in at least 10 different countries, including Australia.

Quinoa is variously described as fluffy, creamy and slightly crunchy, a substitute for rice and other cereals. A grain-like crop with edible seeds, it belongs to the spinach and beetroot family.

All kinds of people eat quinoa (and other grain substitutes like amaranth), including vegetarians, vegans, those who have issues with gluten and of course ladies who lunch and want to be with the in-crowd.

Here lies the second issue with quinoa – its consumption by people who don’t have a genuine health reason for eating it. Popularity in the west has led to a quadrupling of price, making it scarce and expensive for the Peruvians and Bolivians who have grown up using it as a staple.

Quinoa has caught the attention of commodity brokers, as per a report produced in 2015 by NAB’s agri-business economist Phin Ziebell highlighting it as an ‘emerging commodity’.

Prices in Bolivia and Peru sat around 45 to 50 cents per kilogram through the 1990s but a surge in global consumption from 2008 onwards pushed the price as high as $US6.50/kg in 2015.

As is the way with commodities, there is a supply and demand cycle. By early 2015 the price had dropped to $3.40/kg.

Our local co-op sells organic white quinoa for $12.95 a kilo and the organic red version at $20.95 per kilo. That might seem like some kind of mark-up, but you have to factor in the cost of growing, harvesting, refining, storing and exporting, not to mention meeting the export market’s GF criteria.

Quinoa marketing and business consultancy Mercadero says falling prices are having an impact on the fledgling grower markets. At the beginning of 2015, wholesale prices above US$5,000 per US ton ($5.51/kg) were common. In the last quarter of 2015, import prices of organic white quinoa fell to about US$2,300 per US ton ($2.53/kg), while conventional quinoa was sold at US$2,000 per US ton ($2.20/kg) or less.

While this is bad news for new producers, Mercadero says consumers have not yet benefited much from the lower trade prices. “…when they trickle down, the superfood will become much more affordable, spurring further market growth.”

So are we growing it here?

Last year the EC imported 20,362 tons from Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, while European growers produced 7,000 tons, the majority grown in France. While the world in general relies heavily on the South American markets, quinoa is also being grown in the US and Canada.

Ziebell notes in his NAB commodities report that in Australia, planting has been concentrated in Western Australia and to a lesser extent Tasmania. In Western Australia, trials have centred on Narrogin in the central WA wheat belt and Kununurra in the Ord River irrigation area.  Now there’s a surprise; when we were travelling in the Ord River region in 2014 it seemed every second tree in the irrigation zone was sandalwood, grown for its use in the perfume and incense industries.

Ziebell says cultivation of quinoa is at a trial stage only in Australia. Problems include weed control, poor tolerance of water-logging, a highly variable yield and a lack of transport and marketing arrangements.

Quinoa is traditionally harvested by hand in South America, but the highly mechanised Australian model could cause problems in the future. Ziebell says the shared use of headers and silos used for wheat may cause cross-contamination and pose gluten free certification problems.

So why don’t we get a tax break?

She Who Eschews Gluten on Suspicion (more rational than that- Ed. aka SWEG)  has two cousins in Canada thus afflicted. One cousin was peeved to find he was not eligible for government subsidies because he discovered he was gluten intolerant by trial and error, while his brother was diagnosed and therefore eligible for government support.

It’s an expensive business, being unable to eat ‘normal’ food. A half decent loaf of gluten free bread can cost upwards of $7 or $8 and a packet of GF muesli can fetch up to $16.50 (which is why I make my own – Ed).

According to Coeliac UK, gluten free food has been available on prescription since the 1960s, although 30% of Clinical Commissioning Groups (who organise delivery of patient services in England) are now restricting or removing support for patients with coeliac disease, which is exacerbating health inequalities.

Patients receive generous tax rebates in countries including Canada, New Zealand and Ireland. In Italy, vouchers are available equivalent to 140 euros a month. In the US and elsewhere, patients must keep receipts and calculate the difference between the cost of gluten-free and the gluten-included equivalent. But at least they have a choice.

Coeliac Australia president Tom McLeod said there is no rebate for GF food for people with coeliac disease in Australia, although competition and a range of choices is helping to lower prices and make GF food more accessible.

“The only treatment for coeliac disease is a completely gluten free diet,” he told FOMM. “Coeliac Australia would welcome any move by the government to improve affordability of gluten free food for people with coeliac disease, or those medically requiring a gluten free diet.”

So forgive my earlier crack at people who adopt faddy diets. I do recognise that for some people, an appropriate diet can enhance their quality of life. Still, what’s with the six or seven varieties of salad greens at your typical supermarket? There was a time when you had (a) iceberg lettuce or (b) sorry, lettuce season’s finished. Now there’s a strange concept – eating fruit or vegetables in season as opposed to ‘fresh’ from the cold store.

Ah, the good old days, when you’d come home from school and get two thick slabs of white bread, slather them with lard and make a chip butty. Try and tell the young folk that today.