“I SEE THE FUTURE BEING ABOUT MORE LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS”

Nadia Lim is a well-known cookbook author and food personality. She studied nutrition and dietetics before becoming season two winner of MasterChef New Zealand.

She then went on to co-found My Food Bag in 2013, and now lives on a farm near Arrowtown where she is on a mission to show how farming ethically can be profitable.

The fact New Zealand has to compete for our food on an international market is obviously a factor in why food is so expensive in New Zealand.

We also have a duopoly supermarket system, and then there’s the high costs of production, and these both a ect prices. ut shipping, transportation, and labour costs are huge – that’s probably the biggest killer.

So we’re actually quite vulnerable in some ways, in terms of supply, but also costs.

And it’s probably going to get more interesting with what’s happening around the world with Covid-19, and also the events in Ukraine, and how shipping and freight costs have risen dramatically. That’s all going to have a big impact on the cost of food as well.

On top of that, currently there’s no enabling of an alternative to a global food market system as a way to feed New Zealanders.

I see the future being more local food systems outside the global market to help New Zealand build greater food resilience, support our local farmers and economy, and reduce all these external global factors. Of course, a degree of export and import is always going to be needed.

ut to me, it always starts with your home ground and protecting and looking a er your own people, and making sure that you’ve got a good solid stable system there to begin with.

Also, it just makes sense. Why ship grain and food from the other side of the world when we grow perfectly good stu here, and we could be supporting our local farmers and economy?

If we worked on that more, I see multiple bene ts, because we won’t have to rely on external global factors such as importing from overseas suppliers.

There would be fewer logistics – food and produce will only go, for example, from Canterbury to as far as Northland. So even your carbon footprint is reduced.

Our farm just outside of Arrowtown in the Wakatipu basin is an example of that, where about 95% of our customers are within that area. We’ve gone as far as Christchurch. That’s who we keep to. We don’t export, or ship up to Auckland.

So food systems like that are becoming more and more relevant as time goes on, because of these events that we’re seeing lately.

It would be great if every Kiwi had access to learning the skills to grow their own food. Knowing how to feed yourself is probably one of the most important life skills anyone can have. It should be mandatory in all schools.

I see immense value from being able to do that, not just to be able to feed yourselves, but also the mental health bene ts of getting outside, having a connection to nature.

It is true in some cases that having a vegetable garden can be expensive – if you have to go and buy all your compost, soil, and seedlings.

ut you can actually save money if you know how to do it, but it will take quite a few seasons of experimentation and learning to get to the point where you know how to grow, what things to grow, and how to grow it e ciently and at a low cost.

ut if you can get to the point where you can easily make your own compost, and grow everything from seed, it is economically viable.