Where the oysters grow
On the Bay of Plenty oyster farm that’s now entirely Māori owned, the end of fruit stickers and a dubious iced coffee flavour.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter produced in partnership with Boring Oat Milk. Written by me, Charlotte Muru-Lanning. It’s lovely to have you here!
Just east of Whakatāne lies what is probably one of the country’s lesser-known harbours: Ōhiwa. Traditional names for the harbour, Te kite kai a Tairongo and Te umu tao noa a Tairongo, reflect the abundance of food within its shallow, warm waters. Though depletion of stocks, environmental degradation and hundreds of years of government legislation have created barriers, the harbour has long been a vital source of kai for local hapū and iwi.
On the harbour’s shore is Ōhiwa Oyster Farm, a Pacific oyster farm and takeaway shop that’s been there for 55 years. Last week Wini Geddes (Ngāti Awa, Ngaitai ki Tōrere) and her whānau took over – and she believes it makes the business the only entirely Māori-owned oyster farm in Aotearoa. I spoke to Geddes about her connections to tio (oysters) from Ōhiwa, their role in upskilling rangatahi and how the purchase is an effort to reclaim the past for the future.
CML: How did this come about?
WG: My husband’s and my day job is to train, qualify and employ rangatahi to work on their own whenua. This is mainly in the primary industries, forestry and farming, but also includes seafood. I had five aquaculture cadetships from Māori trade training and couldn't really place them anywhere because all the farms were filled up. A while back the broker rang me to see if we were interested in the farm. I initially asked them to take it back to iwi but he said they weren’t interested. So we've been negotiating for this, and working out ways to acquire it for the last 10 months with the help of [lender] Orange Network. It just made sense. If I can't place any of these aquaculture cadets, let's buy our own farm and put them in there. And it finally came to fruition when we took over last week.
When you buy an oyster farm, what are you buying?
We have four acres and potential to grow. You're buying the business itself, access to domestic and export markets, the licence to operate and grow oysters for sale. Not many oyster farms have a retail outlet like this, with an oyster and takeaway shop. It's got great fish and chips, the best batter you can get and it's just carrying a lot of goodwill from the time it's been here. It's iconic.
What is your relationship to Ōhiwa oysters?
I grew up around Te Teko, which is quite local to Ōhiwa – it's probably about a 45-minute drive between. Every year we used to come down here in the summer, for about a couple of months, tent up with my huge whānau and just gather kai from Ōhiwa harbour to take back for the winter. It all stopped when the seafood stocks were depleted by commercial fishing licences and then when the Quota Management System came in and we were banned from gathering certain kai. And then as a family, we all grew up and went away.
Do you know of any other Māori-owned oyster farms?
Not 100% Maori owned. There might be some partnerships and government-funded ones. As far as I know, this is the only 100% owned.
Do you see this as a kind of reclamation?
Absolutely. It's encouraging whānau to dream too. I went to a training hui last week, and everyone knew that I own this oyster farm. A few came up to me and said, “Whaea, we've got an oyster farm out here, and we want it back, we want it for our people and our rangatahi to also learn.” If I can do it, we can all do it.
This particular farm has been open since 1968. Do you know much about its history?
Since we've purchased it we’ve heard snippets from people. But going further back we've got a lot of Māori history around here – Tauwhare Pā is just above here and down the road is where Te Kooti settled in Wainui. So we've got lots of significant historical sites.
How do you actually harvest the oysters?
It’s kind of like going out to pick grapes on a vine but you just walk out with your waders on with a wheelbarrow to the racks where the oysters grow. We've got some barges that you can stack trays on or put yourself on to get a ride out if the tide hasn't completely gone out. Then they come into our little oyster-processing plants on site here and they get washed and shucked and graded and sold or stored. We don't get a chance to really store them because they just get sold.
What’s the best way to eat oysters?
Just raw with lemon juice.
So you’ve been in charge for just over a week – has anything changed immediately?
There's a lot of work to be done. One of the biggest changes we've made is we've changed the trading name to Tio Ōhiwa. There’s a new logo which has a matau representing Māui fishing up the North Island. It's sitting in the oyster and the oyster is in the shape of the harbour. The racks that actually hold and grow the oysters in the farm are in disrepair. They have to be replaced and put back up again. Environmentally, it'll be really helpful for them because you got deteriorating timber out there which isn’t good. It will also increase the production of it all, which is only at 10% at the moment and that itself equates to a million oysters per year.
So it could produce up to 10 million oysters a year?
Yep, that's the potential.
What does taking this over mean for you?
It’s a bit of a retirement plan. Oysters grow, they don’t need any help to grow. You just need someone to harvest them and make them into something that they really are. There’s some succession planning, because I have my son Ngamotu who's moved back from Auckland and is now managing. He was a house dad while his wife, my daughter in law, is training to be a doctor. My two mokos come down on weekends. It's good to have them come back because then I can watch them grow as well. My son spent time with the previous owner to learn about the business, how to run an oyster farm, and how to look after them. We know how to eat them big time but to nurture them and get them going is a whole other thing.
What does this mean for your people?
Just from the karakia last week when we opened, I was only planning on a couple of kaumātua to come and karakia. But 20 came, and every marae or hapū was represented. There are 23 hapū in Ngāti Awa and the kōrero for them is finally back in Ngāti Awa hands. This is not just my oyster farm, this is for my hapū and for my iwi.
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Weekly bites
“New world plastic bag…[p]retty rare these days,” reads the description for a crumpled old supermarket bag currently for sale on Trade Me with a competitive $1 starting price. Remember plastic bags? Those omnipresent sacks we hauled back with our weekly shop then stuffed in drawers or even within each other like some kind of polyethylene matryoshka orb. Back when they were banned by the government in 2019, Act leader David Seymour, citing (“debunked”) US research, claimed the ban could be responsible for killing up to 20 New Zealanders. I even had some concerns – how would I manage the inconvenience of remembering reusable bags? Won’t the streets be filled with the grocery contents of split brown bags? Well, the sky hasn’t caved in and few of us would even think twice about our new reusable bag habits. Perhaps a testament to how adaptable humans can be. Anyway, now another set of plastics is set to be phased out: plastic fruit stickers, plastic straws (for most people), single-use plastic produce bags and single-use plastic cutlery and tableware. Shanti Mathias breaks down everything you need to know about the new plastic bans on The Spinoff.
Legislation tackling the lack of competition and the power imbalance in New Zealand’s grocery industry are a step closer to taking effect this week. The Grocery Industry Competition Bill, which had its third and final reading on Wednesday this week, seeks to improve competition and efficiency in the industry through a bunch of new measures like establishing a dedicated grocery commissioner to watch over the conduct of supermarkets and to encourage competition, make it easier for new retailers to enter the grocery market and to pass on the benefits of robust competition to shoppers. The bill was introduced last year under urgency in response to a market study report by the Commerce Commission that found the industry was dominated by an uncompetitive duopoly of Foodstuffs and Woolworths, which operate Pak’nSave, New World and Countdown stores, which meant consumers were getting an unfair deal at the checkout. So far, the bill has had wide party support in the House, except for Act, which has opposed the bill.
For a short, slightly nerdy read, I recommend this article (paywalled) on what “food noise” is, the science behind it and why it seems to be put on mute for people on drugs like Ozempic.
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The weekly snack
MSS Garlic Coffee drink, $3.90 from Jadan: It’s been a while since I’ve felt this much dread ahead of trying a snack, so take that as proof of the near-bottomless depths of taste that I’m willing to go for those of you who subscribe to this newsletter. I just hope your love language is specifically centred around someone who will drink a black garlic-infused iced coffee and tell you about it. The packaging? Absolutely charming (a garlic bulb-shaped bottle). The thought of the contents? Unsettling… even for the garlic-obsessed. But at the risk of sounding like I may have lost all sense of taste and reason, this was alarmingly tolerable. If we can ignore the elephant (garlic) in the room for a second, the coffee is more acrid than most of us would prefer, but it’s not entirely unpleasant. Now for the black garlic, which is certainly there, but not in a particularly explicit way. It even adds a slightly deeper, caramelised note to the whole situation. An unusual presence at the party, sure, but quiet enough that it’s kind of inconsequential that they even turned up. 6.5/10
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
