The use-by-date debate
Banana walnut cake
Peter Bridges, co-owner of the Wholemeal Trading Co in the 70s and 80s, had a friend who would regularly make a banana cake, ice it, and then run a bath. She would then proceed to eat quite a lot of it in the bath.
No matter where you like to eat your banana cake, it has been and always will be the perfect way to use up over-ripe bananas. We make them often at our place as my daughter thinks that if a banana has the tiniest blemish or spot that it is rotten.
How on earth did we become so precious about food? We are told to stick rigidly to the use-before dates, which appear on everything we buy now. We often end up discarding perfectly good food just to be on the safe side, because we now trust a sticker more than our own judgement. All good news for the supermarket, as we then have to go and buy more. How did we survive in the olden days before use-by dates? We used our senses—taste, smell, sight and touch—to determine if something was “off”, and we managed to do this all on our own. Amazing, eh?
I must add that use-by dates DO have their place, especially on foods that have been vacuum packed to Houdini-resistant standards so there can be no way of knowing if a piece of chicken or fish smells fresh or not.
Recently we were fortunate enough to try a homemade unpasteurised cheese, courtesy of Poo and Wee Girl (two local four-footed girls), and this baby Brie certainly didn’t have a use-by date. It tasted pasture-sweet and the very image of the two said girls, in the home paddock grazing on lush spring grass, made the experience complete. Some experts say that you should wait until your cheese has reached its use-by date before you even try a bite. Some of us like our cheese smelling feral, as though it could take to the streets at any minute. Others prefer milder-tasting varieties. Hey, whatever suits. Use your senses to recognise when the cheese reaches its peak, and trust them.
The more we know about the food we buy (ie, grown down the road and around the corner by Farmer Brown, who tries to farm as naturally as possible), the better we can determine its freshness and what goodness it will still contain. We can also picture the farmer, the orchard or farm, and animals involved.
Does this matter? It helps us to feel a connection to what we are eating that anonymous could-have-come-from-anywhere-in-the-world food doesn’t provide. A Mr Palomar once said: “Behind every cheese there is a different pasture of a different green under a different sky.” By taking an interest in where yours comes from and from under which sky, you have the added benefit of a new awareness, and this makes the whole process of shopping, cooking and eating far more exciting.
We can’t picture where the bananas for this recipe came from, but maybe the eggs, honey, lemon juice and walnuts come from somewhere nearby. This cake is the one we made at the Wholemeal in the early days.
Banana Walnut Cake
1¾ cups of flour (I use half wholemeal and half white)
3 tablespoons of milk powder
1 tablespoon of baking powder
½ teaspoon of salt
1/3 cup of tasteless oil (grape seed or similar)
1 cup of mild honey
The juice squeezed from half a lemon
3 eggs
¼ cup raisins
½ cup of walnuts, roughly chopped
1½ cups of mashed banana (“rotten” of course)
Sift and combine the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. In a separate bowl mix the banana, oil, eggs, and lemon juice together until well blended,
Add the wet ingredients to the dry, and combine well before stirring in the raisins and walnuts.
Bake in a lined loaf tin at 180°C for 50 to 60 minutes. Ice when cold with your favourite lemon icing.
There is an old Yiddish saying: “The future is not a menu.” There is a lot in life we can’t determine, but some things we can, and I imagine that the future will feature yet more use-by dates, restrictions, hygiene controls and codes of compliance. I hope we can maintain the use of our own judgement and not be completely controlled by these.
Fiona Feasey
