Stuff Digital Edition

Why stories about communities’ food insecurity Start in the family

Isa Pearl Ritchie New Zealand writer with a PhD in social science.

For me, kai (food) has always been connected to empowerment or disempowerment. I was born into the 1980s, the first child of a solo mother. At the time, the welfare-state established post-Depression was quickly being dismantled under a virulent strain of the neoliberal project.

My mother cried into the phone to the social welfare department when they cut her Domestic Purposes Benefit by $50 without warning. That was our food money. As her income grew, so did our family, until there were six children. We were never wealthy, but we didn’t starve. I often didn’t have school shoes or new clothes, but we were a lot better off than some of the kids at Te Ara Rima School, a decile 1 kura kaupapa (total immersion Ma¯ ori school).

Here, my step-sister Piata and I were among the lucky ones who usually had lunch to bring to school, even if it was occasionally stolen by other kids. I have warm memories of the term when the father of some school pupils was employed to come in and cook hot meals for the kids: pale green leek and potato soup, mince and gravy on mashed potatoes. He had cooked in the army, and there were extra plates, even for the kids who could not afford the $5 a week.

Growing up, we did not have a vegetable garden. I was raised on processed bread and margarine; skim milk and meat that came in polystyrene packets; canned tomatoes and uniform vegetables that I often refused to eat. Food came from the supermarket. Once a fortnight when Mum got paid, all the kids would push the trolley around the Pak ’n Save supermarket asking for treats. By the end of the fortnight there wasn’t much left, especially for that most precarious meal: school lunches, so easily ruined by stray odours or liquids, vulnerable as it sits for hours in a plastic box, in a school bag, in a cloak bay, going stale.

As the oldest children in an evergrowing family, Piata and I were taught to take on domestic responsibilities. We were expected to make our own lunches from the time we first started school. Tired in the morning, I often did not get organised in time and spent many days feeling hungry.

Later, at the middle-class school I attended, I learned that if I pretended to have ordered my lunch from school, the teachers would feel sorry for me and eventually microwave a pie for me from the staff-room freezer.

I learned to bake and cook dinner for the family at around the age of eight. Mum always had a baby, and I remember going into her room, where she lay with a newborn and asking instructions for cooking, which usually started with ‘‘First, chop an onion…’’

In my early 20s, as a fairly young mother with a sociology degree and strong critical analysis, food took on a different kind of significance in my life.

Concerned about the industrial food system and potentially harmful additives, I sought more control over my baby’s food. I felt I had to claw some power back from corporations. I was seeking more connection to food and health. I wanted to focus on micro-level solutions to the concerns that were now prominent in my consciousness.

These concerns became the focus of my Masters research, where I explored nourishing food movements. My doctoral research followed on from this interest in food, health and wellbeing.

It was sparked from excitement about the proliferation of food democratisation initiatives and prospects of greater food freedom I was becoming aware of.

I came to this research with a deep commitment to social justice, and a deep

concern for human impacts on the ecosystems of this planet. My focus on food has been influenced by experiences of food insecurity in my childhood; observations of abject poverty in my immediate surrounds; by ongoing negotiations in my life around food as healthy, ethical and affordable; by an acute awareness of the ruthless social and environmental exploitation involved in the corporate food industry; by a deliberately cultivated attitude of optimism; and by a strong compulsion to search for and promote more sustainable models of food production.

There is a sense of urgency building among the voices of scientists, activists, citizens and social researchers; awareness that we are heading towards multi-faceted crises that could ultimately mean the demise of our species; crises comprising global warming, social exploitation, increasing socioeconomic disparities, environmental destruction, the peak of our energy capacity within our current global system dependent on fossil fuels, the peak of an economic system, dependent on exponential growth, and the devastation of the planet’s ecosystems, upon which our species depends.

In the face of these multiple intersecting stories of exploitation, humanity needs now more than ever to develop coherent counternarratives – stories of solutions. We need to tell genuine stories that inspire hope, that resonate with people, and that connect people and inspire compassion and empathy, because this seems to be the most obvious way to counter alienation, depression, and exploitation. I intend to tell, re-tell, and explore some such stories, through the narratives of research participants in the community of

Whaingaroa and wider New Zealand.

Extracted from Food,

Focus

en-nz

2021-09-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-19T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282063395102799

Stuff Limited