Sapeer Mayron reviews Pātaka Kai: Growing kai sovereignty by Jessica Hutchings and Jo Smith for Sunday Star-Times:
‘When Dr Jessica Hutchings begins to prepare a meal, she doesn’t head to the supermarket.
Instead, she’ll take a turn around her flourishing mara kai, her garden called Papawhakaritorito, kete on an arm, and gather the produce that’s ready to eat.
A favourite on her cooking rotation is inspired by her roots in India and Aotearoa: an ayurvedic kedgeree of rice and mung beans, topped with whichever vegetables are ripe out of the garden.
For Hutchings, growing her own food is about more than managing the rising cost of living: it’s about taking back control over where food comes from, how far it travels, what it contains and what has been used to grow it.
Hutchings (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Gujarati) and co-author Dr Jo Smith (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu) are behind a new book on exactly that.
Pātaka Kai: Growing Food Sovereignty, is a celebration of the growers and experts focused on changing the way we fill our pantries, starting on marae among small communities.
Today’s food systems are extractive and unsustainable, leaving our soil depleted and our population under-nourished, Hutchings says.
Ultraprocessed foods with no nutritional value, created and packaged abroad and shipped tens of thousands of kilometres to New Zealand covered in packaging that fills our landfills: these are the kinds of foods Hutchings and Smith want Aotearoa to turn away from, and instead grow nourishing, local produce to eat.
“It's time to break up with capitalist food systems and agricultural colonisation, and take responsibility for being sovereign around our food, our seeds, and our soils, and I really hope that the book encourages, inspires and motivates people to do so,” Hutchings says.
“There will always be detractors around this kaupapa and that's fine, but in Aotearoa small-scale food farming is leading the way – at a local level, it is starting to feed people.”
Her energy drops when asked to describe how it felt to eat processed food, before becoming a small-scale horticulturist.
“I felt hungry, because it's fast food and it doesn't provide energy over a long period of time.
“I felt bloated, I felt heavy, I felt disconnected, I felt busy.
“When you're eating packaged processed food, you are not taking that time to cook food and prepare it. Now, cooking meals is complete joy for us because it's the opportunity to connect with our food and it's the opportunity to slow down.”’
Read the rest of the review here.
