WHEN you grow some of the best cauliflowers in the land, they can end up anywhere in the world.
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Just ask Gormans Hill market gardener Michael Cook and his wife Stephanie.
When P&O Cruises’ superliner Pacific Jewel sailed from Sydney recently, the pallets of fresh food on board contained boxes of Bathurst-grown cauliflowers.
Once Mr Cook sells his crop at the Sydney Markets to wholesalers, he doesn’t always know where it will end up.
By coincidence, Michael and Stephanie last year treated themselves to a well-earned end-of-growing-season break – a Melbourne Cup cruise on, as chance would have it, the Pacific Jewel.
“For all we know, we could have been eating our own cauliflowers on the cruise,” Mr Cook said.
P&O Cruises – which has a three-ship fleet, which will rise to five as of November next year – buys nearly 100 per cent of its food and beverages from Australian suppliers.
“The quality that we seek when it comes to fresh food to serve our passengers is very high indeed, so Michael Cook’s cauliflowers would have lived up to a very high standard,” P&O Cruises spokesman David Jones said.
And the quantities of fresh food purchased by the cruise line are huge.
In a typical year, P&O Cruises’ shopping list includes 3.3 million eggs, 465,000 kilograms of beef, 589,000kg of poultry, 217,500kg of pork and 148,000kg of bacon.