Learning in the māra
On appreciating vegetables and learning through doing.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s fortnightly food newsletter. I hope you’re hungry!
When you pull a carrot from the ground, there’s a certain sound it makes, a kind of “pop” as the tip detaches from the root cap. It’s something you can only know if you’ve harvested carrots yourself, something I did a few times in September while volunteering at Kelmarna Community Farm. Sometimes, a carrot wouldn’t pop, wouldn’t want to leave the earth at all and would snap in half, revealing the shock of orange at its centre and a whiff of the most potent carrot scent imaginable, sweet and grassy like spring itself.
After just a few days harvesting and washing carrots, I gained a new appreciation for the ones I was eating. I marvelled at their different shapes and sizes, at the differing sweetness between the inner core and outer cortex. Actually, since I started volunteering at Kelmarna, taking part in growing kai from seed to harvest, my appreciation for every vegetable I eat has deepened. Did you know it takes around four months to grow a full size cabbage? Just shy of half the time it takes to grow a baby. About the same length as the average gestation for a pig. A cabbage is a precious thing; every vegetable is a miracle.
Around the same time I was pulling carrots, research was published in the UK revealing that less than a third of primary school-age children were able to identify common vegetables. Naturally, I wondered how our tamariki here in Aotearoa might fare in such a study. While the presence and growth of school gardens, outdoor classrooms and food education programmes is heartening, enormous budget cuts to programmes like Ka Ora, Ka Ako could see the demise of many incredible initiatives designed by schools to serve the specific needs of their ākonga, like this sustainable, tuakana/teina model at Te Pā o Rākaihautū, or the low-waste scheme at Portland School where lunch is taking a central role in their current whole-school inquiry into where kai comes from.
Where does kai come from? Well, there’s the garden, the farm, the river, the sea; but it’s not so simple as that in an age of globalisation, imports and exports, kai grown in labs, kai that barely resembles kai at all. In the most recent episode of Home Education, we meet the Baker whānau who live and learn on their farm in Hiruhārama, Tairāwhiti. Watching this whānau work together in the māra, mustering horses, tamariki learning to arrange kūmara tubers in a barrel like “a school of fish,” I think about how it might feel to grow up knowing where the kai on your plate comes from, because you planted, grew and harvested it. I know this isn’t revolutionary stuff, but for a city kid whose kūmara has always come from the supermarket, it kind of is, especially with many studies showing that kids – and adults – who grow their own fruit and vegetables are more likely to eat them.
Early in the episode, Israel Baker explains how his kids began learning from home after a whale washed up on Tokomaru Bay and they pulled the kids out of school for a few weeks to learn the traditional Māori practices around whale flensing, harvesting taonga from the tohorā. When truancy officers came knocking, they decided to keep the kids at home, recognising the significance of what they could learn through hands-on experiences on the land and by the sea. While this kind of education might not be possible for every whānau, it does seem that there is something – many things – we can learn from the Bakers, perhaps about seeing the educational value inherent in tasks connected to sustaining life, in tamariki never becoming so alienated from Te Taiao in the first place that they do not know the sound a carrot makes when it is pulled from the earth.
Feeding our future
What will we be eating in 20 years’ time, and how will the way we eat change? The Aotearoa food community is finding innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the planet – and many of those solutions are being created right here in Canterbury. Join host Sophie Gilmour and guests Ross Milne (Leaft) and Angela Clifford (Eat NZ) for a lively discussion about science, sustainability, and the future of our food supply. RSVP to commercial@thespinoff.co.nz
Weekly bites
Of all the reasons to bake a cake – and there are so many – protest might be one of the best. This recent story from the New York Times traces the history of cakes-as-protest in the US into the present day, where baking as a way to protest or raise money for causes is alive and well with bakers such as Paola Velez and Natasha Pickowicz having raised millions of dollars for civil rights organisations and to support reproductive rights funds. While not limited to cakes, it did make me think of the Will You Free My Palestine? fundraiser organised by politically-engaged hospo businesses around Tāmaki earlier this year in conjunction with Tāmaki Loves Palestine, Palestinian Youth Aotearoa and Dayenu: New Zealand Jews against the Occupation. Would love to see more activist bake sales and dining opportunities – let us know if you’re aware of any coming up!
Far more fulsome read on a similar and extremely relevant topic, I cannot recommend this recent piece on Vittles enough (it is pay-walled, but Vittles is well worth a subscription if you enjoy excellent, thoughtful food writing!). Lola Olufemi writes incisively about the role of food in radical social movements and the kitchen as a site of political strategising. A quote: “the questions we ask ourselves when planning a meal… are the same questions political organisers ask themselves: What do we want? With whom? How long will it take us to prepare? How will we feel when we are finished?”
If you’re interested in discovering local food producers, I recommend flicking through the winners of the 2024 New Zealand Artisan Awards. This year’s top spot had gone to Wonderland Chocolate, a plant-based chocolate company based in Pōneke whose offerings include a vegan alternative to pineapple lumps, made with cashew milk chocolate. I was very happy to see Gian’s Sorbetes and Bear Gelato and in there (Bear also received an NZ Food Award for their Horchata flavour), and also interested that local oil presser The Good Oil receiving two gold awards for each of their extra-virgin oils – an excellent fresh and local alternative given the price of imported oils these days.
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Snack Review
Kinder Bueno Ice Cream in Cone 4 pack 248g for $12 at Woolworths (although on promotion for $9 at the time of writing)
Making an online grocery order from my sickbed, I came across a new product that was so exciting to me I gasped out loud. Kinder Bueno – my favourite chocolate bar – existed in ice cream form, and I could have a pack of four in my freezer within hours. When my order arrived, I went searching through the bags for my prize and let my partner deal with unloaded the groceries while I took my ice cream back to bed (don’t judge me, I’m ill).
It feels important to state here that I love a cone-based ice cream. A classic Vanilla Trumpet is a nostalgic fave of mine – I love the contrast of the crackling hard chocolate, the bite of the peanuts, the crunchy cone and soft sweet ice cream. And of course, the chocolate tip, so lovingly explored by Alex Casey in a memorable past issue of this very newsletter.
Reader, the Kinder Bueno Ice Cream is fine. It isn’t special or great, like the textural dream of a Trumpet, but it is a tasty, serviceable treat. I think the problem stems from the good folks at Bueno choosing to tone down the fundamental nature of the product they were trying to emulate here: a Bueno is a chocolate bar. The Bueno Ice Cream has very little chocolate involved, comprising of a smooth disc of hazelnut cream atop hazelnut-flavoured ice cream with a thin rod of that same hazelnut cream down the centre. Sure, there’s a fine coating of chocolate on the inside of the cone and some shards scattered on top, but flavour-wise they’re pretty inconsequential. Flavour-wise, it’s all a bit same-same, just hazelnut on hazelnut, until you reach the tip and the chocolate gets thick while the hazelnut cream continues down the centre… the tip is delicious, but by then there’s no ice cream left for the chocolate to contrast with. Hence, it’s simply fine. A 6.5/10 – won’t buy again, but happy to finish the box.