Book Review: Kai and Culture – Food Stories from Aotearoa, edited by Emma Johnson

Available in selected bookshops nationwide.

We need to come back to eating what’s available and sustainable. We need to remind people where food comes from. …Respect is what we need more of – for each other, our land and our food.
Fleur Sullivan – p. 32-33

This is a thought-provoking book exploring New Zealanders’ connections with kai. It encourages reflection on the social, cultural, historical, ethical and environmental issues linked with the food we grow, import, export, and eat.

The introduction explains that Kai and Culture covers ‘a range of ideas, projects and stories through essays, profiles and recipes’. The narratives incorporate multicultural perspectives, including reference to the mahinga kai central to Ngai Tahu identity that focuses on how and where traditional food and other natural resources are gathered. There’s also a profile of the Māori-owned Yellow Brick Road sustainable seafood company whose business is based on kaitiakitanga principles (of guardianship, protection and preservation) that focus on preserving New Zealand’s seafood resources. This ‘involves responsibility, respect, a deep connection to place and knowledge of provenance’ – such as knowing who caught the fish, when and how.

There’s discussion, too, of the positive impact that immigrants have had on the food grown, purchased and eaten in New Zealand homes and restaurants. Historically this includes the new varieties of vegetables established by Chinese market gardeners, and the parmesan cheese and olive oil introduced by Italian immigrants. As we are a multi-cultural nation, there continues to be many influences on what we grow and eat. For example, the book tells of a restaurant that honours and celebrates Pasifika food, and describes the innovative Middle Eastern meals prepared by refugees who cook for the non-profit social enterprise Pomegranate Kitchen.

Kai and Culture challenges our thinking about our interactions with food, including not only what we prepare and consume but what we waste, and why. Most of us know that seasonal variations influence the quality and availability of fresh produce – but do we consider where out-of-season produce has come from and how it was handled along the way? We learn about the skills and resources required to plant and nurture a self-sufficient fruit and vegetable garden, and whether or not this is a realistic goal for the average New Zealander. Kai and Culture also outlines alternative ways of gathering food, such as foraging – for wild parsley and other herbs, fungi or edible seaweed, for example – as a complement to fishing and hunting.

The book raises the issue of whether consumers have a right to know which country the food they are buying came from. (It’s a yes from me: I’m irritated by the fine print on many packaged foods declaring that the product was ‘packed in New Zealand from local and imported ingredients’, with no further information provided.)

Contributors include chefs, architects, writers, film-makers, academics, producers and restaurant-owners. Most sections are well-written (with references included if you’d like to learn more), although some of the longer sections would have benefited from tighter editing. There’s a fine balance between describing a business model or venture objectively and sounding like an advertisement or product endorsement. I would like to have heard more of the voices of individual contributors, instead there’s a certain sameness to the writing style across many sections.

Photos accompany most stories. The strangest depicts four adults bobbing in a spa pool full of heated milk. (You’ll have to read the book to find out why.)

There’s an unconventional mix of both narrow and wide margins throughout the book and a somewhat pedestrian two- and three-column layout and font. I found the typographic ornaments (swirly icons and the like) accompanying the heading of each section a distraction. Few seem to have any relation to the section content.

The 30 recipes at the end of Kai and Culture were provided by contributors to the book and most have links to particular sections. I wonder whether the recipes might have been more appropriately placed together with the associated story. This would mean, for example, that the simple pasta with tinned tomatoes recipe might have sat alongside Rebekah Graham’s essay about families that struggle to afford nutritious food, which she argues is a human right.

Some recipes include foraged ingredients, such as beach spinach. At the other end of the scale several recipes involve expensive or unusual ingredients and complicated methods. I’m keen to prepare the Ika Mata recipe for marinated raw fish, one of the more straightforward recipes, based on techniques and ingredients shared by people from the Cook Islands.

I can imagine Kai and Culture being used by secondary school teachers as part of a food and nutrition module, or as assigned reading for a tertiary education course that focuses on food production and consumption. It could also appeal to people interested in challenging and changing how they source, grow and/or use particular foods, and consumers wanting to make more informed and responsible purchasing decisions at supermarkets and even restaurants.

The topics and issues discussed in Kai and Culture have given me a greater appreciation of the efforts made by New Zealand growers, farmers and other food producers and of the challenges they face in providing us with healthy and sustainable food.

Reviewed by Anne Kerslake Hendricks

Kai and Culture: Food stories from Aotearoa
Edited by Emma Johnson
Published by Freerange Press
ISBN 9780473412241

Shifting Points of View: Race and Extremism, with Reni Eddo-Lodge, John Safran

Things are not as simple as they first seem. When you think of racism, chances are you conjure images of skinheads, not institutions at the heart of our society. When you think of the head of an extreme-right movement in Australia, you probably don’t think of someone whose parents are Italian and Aboriginal, and whose wife is Vietnamese. Two sessions at WORD Christchurch and Christchurch Arts Festival’s Shifting Points of View series, Why I am no Longer Talking to White People About Race and Depends what you mean by Extremist, explored some of the complex currents expressing themselves through racism and in extremist movements in Australia.

‘Whiteness is a powerful ideology, which you can you see more clearly when it hasn’t been working for you.’ Reni Eddo-Lodge, at just 28 years of age, presented her fresh articulations of racism and white privilege in conversation with playwright Victor Rodgers, when they discussed her book Why I Am No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

The book stemmed from a blog post she had written ‘out of fatigue’ from her experiences in leftists and activist circles, where she was labelled as divisive for questioning the groups’ discomfort with addressing racism. Finding it very difficult to have conversations with people who were unwilling to acknowledge that racism still existed, and that it benefited them, she wrote a book to have the conversation in her own terms.

While the extremist edge to racism is highly visible, other parts of the dominant white ideology – ‘a political project of hundreds of years’ – have less of a profile. We don’t talk about it nearly as much; we are less critical of it. Reni is an astute diagnostician: structural racism is supported by bastions of silencing, wilful oversights and the fact that conversations about race have been led by those who haven’t been affected by it (at least not in a negative way). Reni underlined that it is critical to talk about how racism manifests and how it is justified, because otherwise we fall into complacency. She explained to Rodger that she wanted to include context, history and how race shapes power in her book to respond to this.

Applying her journalistic skills, Reni showed how racial biases are embedded into society’s structures to the benefit of white people. She used data from government resources, which clearly evidenced that black students were much less likely to get into the top schools and more likely to be marked lower at school (these same students received higher grades when marked by independent moderators who did not know them). People with Afro-Caribbean or Asian names were much less likely to be called in for an interview even if their CV showed the same the qualifications and experience.

In a great example of silencing, she talked about omitting parts of history – how UK school students were taught about US civil rights, but nothing about British civil rights or the slave trade. And an example of who was leading the discussions: the Brixton Riots were generally understood to involve two equally weighted sides, but there was ‘no understanding of the daily slights that led to this, why one community felt over policed’. The Metropolitan Police, after an inquiry into the handling of a 19-year-old case where an 18-year-old black teenager was killed, recently found that the police force displayed institutional racism, through their practices of unthinking marginalisation and stereotypes.

The way we talk about race in wider culture has been led by white racial identity. The white ideology is held up as ‘objective’. Reni spoke of writers to illustrate her point. ‘White people don’t have to think about representing other white people’, whereas a black writer, for example, is seen as speaking on behalf of the half of the community. This, Reni points out, is a silly generalisation, an assumption that black culture is something ‘homogenous, as if we went away to some black persons’ conference and decided these were the talking points’. She refuses the label of ‘a representative’, not only because she has no constituency, but also because ‘it strips away individuality’.

The goal is a meritocracy, but for white people to talk about it now (a particularly favoured trope of conservative politicians), is to assume that it exists. Comments such as ‘You don’t work hard enough’ are wilful misunderstandings because it is not a level playing field. Words such as diversity can be troublesome, because the validity of the word depends so much on who’s setting the agenda: ‘I am often on the menu but never at the table’.

It will be an incremental, long slog on the path to change, she warns, but we need to be vigilant and critical of racism, or else we will continue to unwittingly reproduce it.

Australian satirist John Safran with Te Radar
Sunday 10 September, 1pm

The complexities, layers and sub-groups in extremist movements in Australia were up for discussion on Sunday, as Te Radar spoke to satirist John Safran about his book Depends What You Mean by Extremist.

It all began at a far-right protest that Safran turned up at in Melbourne. Expecting skinheads, he was surprised to find the protest to be quite a multicultural example of ‘anti-multicultural protest’. John spotted a Sri Lankan evangelical priest up on a ute with a white nationalist, addressing the crowds. These strange bed-fellows were ‘providing each other moral cover’ in their shared anti-Islam sentiment: one could claim his evangelical messages were not so ‘out there’ as they were being received at this rally; the other could claim he wasn’t racist. These complexities and ironies instantly piqued John’s creative instinct.

Photo by Donna Robertson, Chch City Libraries

He started an investigation into the world of extremists and fringe elements in Australia: the far right, ISIS supporters and the hard left. He started writing about them in the eighteen months pre-Trump and pre-Brexit, and he found that over the course of that time ‘the world started to meet up with fringe groups’.

He had entered a complex world, which he compared to gum stuck in the carpet, gathering fluff, hair and dust – impossible to pick apart. There were many layers to the extremist groups and a bizarre, incongruous mix of messages and agendas to suit purposes. The far right appropriated feminist arguments to promote their anti-Islam agenda; the hard-left leveraged anti-bullying of Muslim messages to bring traction to their own agenda, which was ‘to pull the rug out from society’. There was the Muslim fundamentalist who was also a Monty Python and MAD fan. And then there was an unsettling movement of ideas. Claims from the far-right that atheism was the true Islamophobia eventually turned up and were repeated in leftist circles.

The extreme ideologies held by these groups were bleeding into public discourse and being repackaged into the mainstream, under waving Ausssie flags and calls for the right to freedom of speech: ‘Aren’t you sick of political correctness?’ These groups have successfully paved the way for what John calls Pauline Hanson’s second coming. He had the chance to talk her a few weeks ago, and the conversation aptly illustrated the absurdity of these strange times in which we find ourselves. You couldn’t write it.

John questioned her about being aligned with Asian groups against Islam, in what was a complete about face. When she denied this (in spite of extensive television coverage of her anti-Asian immigration views), Safran asked her how the public could be sure she wouldn’t do another turn around. She replied ‘You will never see me in a burka’. A promise, Safran drily noted, one would have thought would have been easy to keep.

Attended and Reviewed on behalf of Booksellers NZ by Emma Johnson

Why I am no longer talking to white people about race
by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Published by Bloomsbury
ISBN 9781408870556

Depends what you mean by extremist
by John Safran
Published by Hamish Hamilton Ltd
ISBN 9781926428772

 

 

 

Book Review: Don’t Dream It’s Over: Reimagining Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand

Available now in bookshops nationwide.

The title for this collaborative book of essays and insights, borrowed from the Crowded House song, “Don’t Dream it’s Over”, is apposite and timely. From the song there is the line “…they come to build a wall between us…”. If we took that literally with regard to journalism, applied to the commercial model for media, it seems that the quality product will soon be found behind a paywall; and the mass media will not provide anything in the way of investigative reporting in the future. The contributors to this book  make it abundantly clear that long-form print journalism is on the wane, and, in any case, the whole future of the print media itself is in doubt.

A lot has already been written about this demise, however, and though covered here the real insights are into the specific role of New Zealand journalism. We like to think of Crowded House as a New Zealand institution, but do we similarly think of any of the local media with this level of esteem? Other than the regard shown for public broadcasting on radio, in the form of RNZ, one’s reaction to the essays in general is to ask what is worth saving in the commercial media? And does it actually matter? Those of us who do listen to RNZ for much of the morning and early evening are still well informed, by and large, and can then pick and choose what to read or view from the commercial outlets. But even then, RNZ can be challenged for its content, as some of the contributors do, on the basis of a deficit in their indigenous and Pacific stories.

Industry insiders, such as Brent Edwards, do concede that there has been a loss of trust between the audience and the media, and he is particularly critical of political coverage. RNZ is actually the only media outlet that covers the proceedings of Parliament, while all the rest of the Press Gallery simply focus on the game of politics without any substance of policymaking. I suggest that the so-called ‘political editors’ don’t actually report anything, but simply provide an insider commentary. Morgan Godfery provides a brilliant chapter ‘Against political commentary’, where he wrestles with his own involvement as a commentator, and trappings of the elite company he has kept. He refers to the idea of ‘savvy commentary’, and the narrow demographic background of commentators creating a hermetically sealed world. He refers to the odd premise that this perpetuates: “a belief that political progress comes from pragmatic insiders who know how to manoeuvre within the system…” With his critique in mind, we should also note how partisan most of the broadcasters have become, even though the media insiders refer to certain examples to counter this.

The book’s editors point to the release of Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics as a catalyst for the collection, and contributors refer to the innovative use of the Panama Papers as a counter-example, whereby the government was held to account. Hager has his own chapter in the book, and the Panama Papers are mentioned a number of times, including in Peter Griffin’s essay on New Zealand’s fledgling data journalism ‘scene’. Griffin’s title is ‘Needles in the haystack’, but it might as well have been ‘Missing the wood for the trees’. This is because none of the contributors note that without the release of the Panama Papers as an international story, and with the New Zealand stories actually coming out of the Australian Financial Review, we would never have known that there was a tax haven operating in New Zealand. The local media seem to think that they are responsible for exposing this, and creating policy change, though nothing has actually happened yet to close the tax haven down. In fact, certain business reporters were aware of the trust law and the related industry, that is the basis for the tax haven. These are the same couple of reporters that noted that John Key’s agenda for an ‘international financial hub’ came to grief a few years ago. There is no mention at all of business reporting in this book, and its role in providing expert analysis of economic issues, even when it is still ideologically aligned to the right.

But, overall, the Freerange Press has done a great job with this book, and every chapter is worthwhile. Peter Arnett provides a foreword, and reflects on his being a foreign correspondent in Vietnam, something of a high point for the international press. There is also a chapter on the views of some journalism students, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they almost all want to work for major international broadcasters, other than the one who is happy to find a job at RNZ. The book has some very good design features, and some impressive motifs for each chapter heading, and the ‘tags’ at the end of the book. The ‘tags’ appear in place of a conventional index, which may, however, have been of some use given the length of the text. There is even a chapter that discusses the role of design in the digital age, which adds another dimension.

Reviewed by Simon Boyce

Don’t Dream It’s Over: Reimagining Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand
edited by Emma Johnson, Giovanni Tiso, Sarah Illingworth and Barnaby Bennett
Published by Freerange Press
ISBN 9780473364946