We started by asking why two good tomatoes, one grown in southern Italy and one grown here, are not the same thing to eat. Following that question honestly has kept widening it — into where a soil comes from, which varieties carry which flavour, how a crop is read from a distance, and how food gets grown and traded — and this is the record of following it.
We are researching and regenerating degraded soils to grow nutritious and delicious kitchen garden crops, tomatoes especially, so anyone can grow them at home. Doing that addresses access and knowledge at the same time.
The volcanic soils we are modelling were built over millennia. We are working out how they were built, and how to build a blend deliberately.
Australia's cropping soils were old before agriculture arrived here, and a century and a half of continuous cultivation has taken the organic carbon out of them.
The usual story — that exporting crops strips the nutrients out — is wrong where it matters most. Australian cropping applies more phosphorus than it removes. Synthetic fertiliser closes that loop.
What it does not close is carbon. More than half of stable soil carbon is the residue of microbial life, and a mineral input cannot feed that. Half the cycle is paid for and the other half is not.
So we work backwards from places where the soil is not in question. The volcanic soils of southern Italy are young, mineral and free-draining, and the evidence people accept for them has never been a lab report. It is what comes off them, and it is settled at the table. We are researching how those soils were built, and how to assemble something like them deliberately. We have not done it yet.
We have grown kitchen garden crops indoors, on our own blend, in a controlled environment. The work now is doing it at scale, and in the open.
The most direct answer to access is growing it yourself. Food that comes off a bed by the back door has no supply chain to fail, no distance to travel and no open question about what was put on it.
What makes that hard is not the growing. It is the starting. Most Australian households have a courtyard, a balcony or rented ground rather than a plot, so the growing happens in containers, where what you fill them with matters more than it does in open ground.
We are working on the material and the record together: a blend we can describe completely, and a plain account of how we grew with it.
The growers who kept these varieties and these methods are not being replaced. We write down what we do while we still have people to ask.
How to grow these crops well was never written down, because it did not need to be. It moved between people who saw each other's gardens: when to sow in a particular place, which plant to save seed from, what a good one looks like at the moment you have to decide.
In Australia most of it arrived with people. Italian, Greek, Lebanese and Vietnamese households brought varieties and practice with them and kept both running in suburban backyards for decades. It has only ever passed on in person, in a garden, and in most cases nobody has taken it on.
A variety can sit in a seed bank and still be lost, because no one remembers how it was grown. So we write down what we do, while there is still someone to ask.
Campania grows what it grows because two volcanoes have been resurfacing it for millennia. What that does to a tomato is a separate question, and a much harder one.