A Reimagined Food Culture for Aotearoa

A Reimagined Food Culture for Aotearoa.

Can we reimagine a food culture for Aotearoa? One that moves us from a colonised ‘paddock in the ocean’, delivering ingredients to the ‘Motherland’ to a re-indigenised?narrative that better connects us to our land and ocean and our unique place in the world?

From 1915 the British Government purchased NZ’s entire output of frozen meat to help ensure a regular flow of food to the British public and troops in France & Belgium. As the war progressed this bulk purchase agreement was extended to cover most of our other primary products. We were a colony from which resources were to be sent back to the ‘motherland’. This resource, of course, included men to fight in the war; “New Zealand offers her best” taking on even more meaning.

By the Second World War this arrangement was ensconced, although by this time the sales were organised through the individual producer boards.

I believe these two world wars set in stone Aotearoa’s export culture and siloed sector responses along with it.

My ancestors were among those responsible for this. Sir George Clifford established The Canterbury Frozen Meat & Dairy Produce Export Company and my great, great grandfather on my mother’s side was Sir Joseph Ward, Prime Minister of New Zealand just three years before that first poster was printed. His early career was centred in Bluff establishing the NZ Shipping Company and a statue of him remains there to this day.

Sir Joseph Ward, 17th Prime Minister of New Zealand

Despite the kaupapa of my ancestors, I have a different perspective and want to challenge that paradigm. Are we grown up enough to cut the ties that bind our ingredient-driven food story and move into an age of self-determination?

If we are ready to make a determined push towards a different food culture we have precedent. New Nordic Cuisine was created through collective and collaborative work from chefs, industry, science and government. A 2013 paper entitled?“From Label to Practice: The Process of Creating New Nordic Cuisine” outlines exactly how it was achieved;

“Fast-paced diffusion was possible because New Nordic Cuisine was conceived as an identity movement, triggered by active involvement of entrepreneurial leaders from the culinary profession, high-profile political supporters, legitimating scientists, disseminating media, and interpreting audiences.”

It was an orchestrated, beautifully choreographed dance that took the group of Scandinavian countries from ‘zero to hero’ on the world’s food scene. Although, as one of the most famous son’s Rene Redzepi stated, “It’s not a cuisine, it’s a region”.

Is a food culture necessary to be considered a ‘food nation’? It seems we think it is.

In Beef + Lamb’s 2019 report ‘Shaping the Future of NZ’s Red Meat Sector’, they state;

“there is a need to deliberately and strategically articulate and then export a culture and story around food that’s uniquely New Zealand’s”

and

“there is a need to further develop and differentiate “Brand NZ” in the face of rising competition. Our food is valuable because it reflects our unique culture and point of view”

But what is our ‘unique culture’? It seems we’ve been trading off things that aren’t actually unique to us, including our beautiful landscapes such as our fiords?

Fiordland in Norway

Our sense of adventure and daring?

Kayaking in Alaska

Our grass-fed meat and milk?

USA grass-fed cow

or even NZ based brands such as Zespri?

Zespri orchard in China

Unlike the suggestions from New Nordic Cuisine, we don’t have ‘an “empty” label, without a previous meaning in food’.

This is an example of our unique food culture;

These are Pōha, kelp bags made to store Tītī or Muttonbirds. There has to be clean, cold water to find kelp of the right quality, the Totara bark covering them is harvested from remnant stands and the knots on the weaving indicate the number of birds in each vessel. Nowhere else in the world do these exist.

We have Hua Parakore , the only indigenous verification system in the world.

Or Hiakai, a restaurant in Wellington where our native ingredients are turned into world-class dishes by chef Monique Fiso. There is simply nowhere else in the world you could have this experience.

In 2019 Eat New Zealand won the Auckland Airport Tourism Investment fund and established Feast Matariki , Aotearoa’s only national food celebration. Our vision is to unite our food stories and emerge and uplift what makes us truly unique. We hope it will become a time of year we celebrate by gathering around tables, inviting visitors and friends from around the world to join us.

It’s important to us that we hold the space to allow our original and indigenous stories to take centre stage and that we work hard not to appropriate ingredients, techniques and stories, but rather work in partnership.

It’s not just the rest of the world that needs to see us as a ‘food nation’. Feeding ourselves our own, good food is a priority and one that has risen exponentially in our consciousness over the last year.

As this recent Radio New Zealand report shows we export much of our food.

And as Elaine Rush , Emeritus Professor at AUT points out the food we import with the money we earn has less nutritional value;

“High-nutrient foods were exported for income. Meanwhile, a large proportion of imports, which are a cost to New Zealand, included discretionary and nutrient-poor foods. Sugar and wheat were imported in the largest quantities – for both, the equivalent of 300g per person every day for a year.

“This disconnect has long-term implications for nutrition-related non-communicable diseases, healthcare and productivity”.

There is a rapidly building grassroots movement that counters this trend around the country. It recognizes the importance of food security, food resilience and food sovereignty or self-determination. The disparate movement seeks circular food systems and equity for all food citizens. It looks like a renaissance of interest in hunting and fishing (mahinga kai), and Māra Kai (food gardens). It’s the ‘Longwood Loop’ in Southland, Community Unity in Lower Hutt, Off the Grid Festival in Aotea, Koha Kai in Invercargill, Kai Rotorua, Papatoetoe Food Hub or the Canterbury Food Resilience Network, just to name a few examples. Eat New Zealand has supported this with #GrowFoodCommunities messaging & campaigns.

A Massey University Study is investigating local food networks, and their findings show that small-scale producers are crucial for building a resilient and thriving local economy.

In Palmerston North there is the Manawatu Food Action Network who share their vision as “We will receive our food in ways that enhance ecosystem function and the environment, while also supporting human health and well-being”.

Throughout the country there are powerful signals of changes in priorities and it’s no wonder.

Our food system does not deliver us positive environmental, social, cultural or health outcomes.

We waste one third of the food we produce . 20% of us experience food poverty and close to 80% of us reduce the quality of the food we buy to be able to afford other living costs. This is not surprising when 70% of household wealth is held by just 20% of households.

Close to 40% of adults in Aotearoa are obese and in economically deprived areas that almost doubles. Children in those areas are three times more likely to be obese. Māori & Pacific Island food-related disease rates are staggering.

We are losing 192 million tonnes of soil a year, over 80% of land vertebrates are classified as threatened and just 40% of our freshwater lakes and rivers are swimmable.

We have lost our way.

Eat New Zealand made a call for a National Food Strategy last year, a roadmap to help us to a better place. Aotearoa Circle heeded the call, and supported by KPMG have bought a leadership group together to develop a people-powered values based framework. It’s very early days and the framework calls for widespread input from everyone, but the starting point is grounded in Te Ao Māori and is called ‘Mana Kai’.

This framework acknowledges the special role food plays in creating mana for all those who are connected to the catching & producing and/or eating of it. It’s a reminder that we’re intrinsically connected to our environment and are just one species within it. It speaks of abundance as a lens through which to see food, as a way of acknowledging that there should be enough for us all. Importantly, it doesn’t just take a Māori word but is connected to practice and a way of seeing our world.

For the first time it brings together all aspects of our food system; from production to health, processing to communities and those who celebrate our food.

It will only come to life though when everyone has a chance to breathe their aspirations into it. What comes next has to be bottom-up as well as top-down.

There is a legitimate and growing call for technology and innovation to help us solve some of our food system issues, but it’s important to remember that a change in priorities is also a form of innovation.

How do we grow and make food in a way that better supports our environment and us as people, communities and cultures within it. How do we prioritise access to our own good food for our own people?

This question gave birth to the Eat New Zealand movement when chef Giulio Sturla couldn’t access fish from the wharf next to his restaurant in 2015 and the same problem exists today. We have very few fishers left who can deliver back to their own communities.

Priyanka, Eat New Zealand Kaitaki.

This is Priyanka. She is one of our Kaitaki; a cohort of next generation food story-tellers. Our Eat New Zealand Kaitaki are farmers & fishers, writers & artists, dieticians, chefs and iwi leaders from across the country and with diverse cultural and social backgrounds. Priyanka created this piece of art, a crayfish, and posted it with this caption; ‘Bring Back My Cray Cray”. She says “The kōura or crayfish is a creature who has scavenged in our waters for over 80 million years. Today almost all of New Zealand’s catch is exported. I understand economies must be fed, but in my four years here, I’ve only eaten this magnificent creature twice, both times fed by a generous fishing friend. Kōura is so hard to come by. Even if I did find it, I’d have to pay over $70 for even the smallest one. Why can we not eat our own crayfish?”

How can we change the story we’ve found ourselves in? How can we feed a food culture that serves us in the many ways we need it to; with healthy kai and a sense of unique identity.

And we don’t have a single identity, we are a combination of many things, but we’re not nearly as different as we are the same.

May delivers the perfect example of this. It’s bird season. Both wild duck & tītī. And two predominantly different cultures are united by the quest to get into wild places and harvest a feed of birds.

Nate Smith, Tītī harvester

Next generation duck shooter (Shepherdess Magazine)

?Our unique identity can be drawn from our environment in other ways as well.

This is my husband Nick. He’s a viticulturist who runs the Greystone Wine business here in North Canterbury In this photo he’s tipping Pinot Noir grapes into a fermenter in the vineyard where they’ll ferment beside the vines, rather than in the winery. It will be a unique strain of yeasts that predominate this ferment, drawn from the earth and vines of just THIS piece of terroir or turangawaewae.

The wines made in this way are completely different to wines from the same grapes fermented in the winery. Greystone was recently acknowledged as the first modern winery in the world to do this. Again this is innovation as practice, not new technology.

This wine is the essence of this place, unable to be replicated anywhere else in the world, what else do we ferment that could draw on these unique sets of yeasts and bacteria. What if we overlaid this with our people and their cultural stories including regional variations?

What is the value of supporting, encouraging and developing our food stories here at home as a way of differentiating ourselves in an increasingly homogenised world. Surely ensuring our own people are fed their own food should be a priority? ‘Eat Your Pepeha’, so to speak. Surely this makes claims such as ‘Made With Care’ more legitimate? Don’t our trading partners want to see healthy, well-fed New Zealanders to reinforce our claims of being a food nation?

There is a genuine opportunity for all New Zealand food producers to collaborate and contribute to our food story, as well as just extracting from it. We can find a unique, inclusive voice that delivers health and happiness to us all.

So what would my ancestors think of our kaupapa? They were men of their time. Ultimately they were colonists and not good treaty partners. I like to believe they loved NZ though and sought independence and uniqueness in their own way. I think they’d be shocked that over one hundred years later we still have the same mindset and approach to our food production. Despite times changing so significantly that we still have the same story about ourselves as an exporter of ingredients.

It’s time to let go of this version of ourselves. It’s time to embrace what comes next. It has to be something that truly reflects who we are, whatever our different backgrounds. THIS has to be a place to Eat New Zealand.