Harvesting Community
Within this HARVEST series, #EatNZKaitaki Gabby Arnott explores her experience of moving to a new city and how through the process of harvesting food, she's harvested community!
When considering the significance of food within society, it can be beautiful to picture a solar system. Food is the sun central to the constellations (communities) of our society. It is a common ground, a conversation, and a celebration of the breathtaking biology that the planet fosters.
The year of 2023 saw a move for myself and my partner from the beautiful deep south (Waihōpai/Ōtepoti) to Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Left behind was my sense of community and familiarity; our new backdrop of the Mākara hills created a strange feeling of isolation within the windy city of Aotearoa.
It should have been intuitive that my sense of community would be harvested around kai. Our flat had connected over shared values surrounding soil sovereignty and organics, and a quick tour of the backyard showed hinting tomatoes, curly kale, an outburst of courgettes, sleepy cabbages, wilding beans, and yellow- and pink-stemmed silverbeet in out flatmate’s organic garden.
In our second week here, we headed to the Newtown Apartments where a Sunday Kai Sessions series was beginning under the guidance of Seeds to Feeds (@seedstofeeds), Kai Cycle (@kaicycle), and The Sustainability Trust (@thesustaintrust). We shared knowledge and stories, concerns and worries about the future of food within Aotearoa, all within a familiar and safe context - the context of kai. Our community began to grow. The basil leaves on our front doorstep nurtured throughout these workshops illustrates those new connections within our constellation.
The third week found Wonky Box (@wonkybox) in our home, overflowing with basil and rejected capsicums, cherry tomatoes, carrots, rock melon, courgettes and more! The true harvest tries to embrace leaf to root; we ventured into pesto and pastas, roast cherry tomatoes on homemade bruschetta, all nourishing to both puku and planet.
A fourth week flying by, my partner and I were seated in the warm and generous company of Everybody Eats (@everybodyeats) in the heart of the city. Conversations were had to our left and to our right - a laugh, a smile, a hardship from the day, alongside appreciative sighs following three outstandingly scrumptious meals. Like Wonky Box, Everybody Eats had harvested commercially unloved kai, and turned it into an evening of nourishing community, harvesting community, and creating a space to slow down, whether for three meals or the entirety of the evening.
I feel as a student we sometimes get lost in the food system’s webs. Where do we invest our student loan funds? Who can we support? How do we access nourishing kai with the cost of supermarket veggies rising and no māra kai or community garden nearby? How can we remove the disconnect that students have with the whakapapa of their food, and continue to support them in accessing this knowledge? If these notions become accessible, we can harvest generations of good-quality, nourishing kai systems within Aotearoa. How can this become the student mainstream?
Let’s harvest each star within our communities to make our constellations shine; I am so grateful to have been so generously welcomed to others’ tables. Within communities, we strive, and with good food, we flourish.
If you can, check out local Facebook pages for community garden gatherings and recurring crop swaps; head to local farmers’ markets and support where you can. Intergenerational connection is the most beautiful connection of all!
Words & photo by Gabby Arnott @earthy.gabs