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The Food Farm

An extract from Grow: Wāhine Finding Connection Through Food, spotlighting one remarkable woman.

Words and photography Sophie Merkens

A heart-to-heart with the incredible Angela Cli ord.

Angela Cli ord is a co-owner of The Food Farm, a permaculture hub that runs educational workshops. With Angela’s family and the help of volunteers, The Food Farm grows more than 60 varieties of organic fruit and vegetables. They have bees, cows, sheep, pigs (including Pjörk and the hefty Jimi Hamdrix), ducks, and hens. They also forage, collect, hunt, dive, and fish for wild kai. As if raising her children and co-running The Food Farm didn’t keep her busy enough, Angela is the chief executive of Eat New Zealand – a national food collective dedicated to connecting people to the land through food.

Angela and I sat down to talk on her patio under the grapevines, where she kept an eye on the roaring fire in the pizza oven. In the kitchen, her three teenagers measured and kneaded pizza dough for our dinner. We spent the evening gathered around the 12-foot-long table, which was laden with local foods: homemade halloumi; wild fennel dukkah; dried wild plums; pizzas with local goat’s cheese, rosemary and foraged porcini mushrooms; and plenty of local wine. The night blurred and became a joyous celebration of friends new and old, of good food and of sharing.

Did you grow up surrounded by food producers?

Angela: Definitely. I grew up in the city with really strong connections to the country where my extended family were. Food and food growing was how we organised ourselves as a family. That sense of manaakitanga or hospitality – including raising the mana of others, around and across tables – was pretty instrumental in the way that I was brought up. Everybody was made to feel welcome, and the tables were always large. There’s no point in having small tables, because it just limits the number of people you can have around them.

Do you have an early food memory?

Angela: Collecting wild foods with my Aunt Beep. Also, a big vegetable garden, lots of fruit trees, spending a lot of time in the country, mustering and being around all of that. Everybody around me seemed to be good cooks who were connected to food. That was the way I grew up.

Louise, my late aunt, was a huge foodie influence. I had grown up with quite traditional New Zealand cuisine, which was really fresh and connected food, but very influenced by the English. Whereas Aunt Louise drew influence from all over the world; she had a passion for travel, so she put ingredients and flavours in front of me that I’d never seen before as a young girl. She was such a flavour junkie. Her food expanded my horizons.

What have been some standout challenges or big learnings on your own food journey?

Angela: That perhaps everybody doesn’t think like I do. For example, yesterday I picked this rockmelon. It’s such a small thing. On the face of it, it’s not worth much money at all. But, to me, it’s so extraordinary – the flavour and the texture and the smell – that it’s priceless. I know its story. I raised the seed, I looked after the plant, I worked out when it was ready to harvest, I shared it with my family, I watched their faces as they ate it. I think that is an experience you can’t put a price on. You think that surely everyone’s like that. So one of the challenges has been trying to understand that not everyone approaches food the same way we do.

You’re extremely busy with The Food Farm, Eat New Zealand, and other time-intensive projects, as well as family life. How do you find energy and balance in your work?

Angela: I don’t measure the time that it takes to do. It’s a way of life. It’s how we’ve raised our children. It’s a way of being, not

a job. The great thing about a seasonal life is that it is incredibly purposeful and connected.

There’s an enormous amount of mindfulness in being connected to natural places. I think as a species, that’s probably what we were meant to do. And the further we get away from that, the unhappier we are. When you live seasonally, your life has a natural rhythm that makes sense and makes you feel good.

I guess Eat New Zealand is an extrapolation of that idea, which is to connect people to our land through our food. That reconnection is really important for us as a country. As a family, we are a team. Our children being part of this farm is a really big part of what we do. I don’t see boundaries often. Whenever I’m talking about The Food Farm, I take Eat New Zealand with me. And when I’m in the Eat New Zealand space, I bring my understanding around food with me. I think it’s really hard to speak about food without having your hands in the dirt or in the ocean, to really understand what’s involved. It’s important to understand how much it takes, the heartache and triumph, so it’s important to advocate for the connection, for the beginning and the end to be better connected. So advocating for the farmers and the fishers to be connected to the eaters is really important, as the more that gets in the middle of it, the more complicated it gets.

The Food Farm started as a tree in a paddock and has now flourished into what it is today. You describe it as your tūrangawaewae, your place to stand and to belong. What e ect has growing your own food had on your mindset?

Angela: Part of the philosophy by which we live is permaculture. It’s a design system that acknowledges that everything is interrelated. It is a form of systems thinking that draws heavily on Indigenous thinking and ancient wisdom that came before it.

Training for a long time in this sort of form of systems helps me see the interconnectedness between everything.

I think that’s played a huge role in my life. In anything that I’ve done, I’ve tended to see things in constellations, rather than straight lines. What it shows is that everything is interconnected. Permaculture can be applied to design a piece of land, but you can also design communities, or think of communities in a designed way and how everything is interrelated. I have spent a long time seeing communities, whether it’s my local community or the national community, as a constellation. I also believe there is a connection between the food we eat and our mental health. Globalism and capitalism are just driven to e iciencies and monocultures. It’s the economic system in which we find ourselves. We have one foot in an old economic system and one foot in a new territory. There’s a cool word that I love – liminality. It speaks to a place in-between. So this is who we were, this is Covid, and this is where we are not yet, and in the middle is liminality. Right now, we are so in the guts of liminality that it’s really di icult to see the way forward. It creates massive challenges

and epic opportunities – right now, anything is possible. A year ago, the status quo was the most likely outcome, whereas that’s not the case anymore.

What change needs to happen to have a local-focused food economy?

Angela: We use a term – ‘lots of little’. It’s about relocalisation. We’ve centralised our food system, and this makes it less resilient. I think that what we have to do is pull it back to our communities, because we’re facing some pretty unprecedented challenges as a species on this planet.

Here on The Food Farm we’ve worked out that nature creates naturally biodiverse systems. When you’ve got a lot of biodiversity, some stu fails, but other stu succeeds. So then if you extrapolate that to our community or society, we should have a lot of little, a lot of di erent stu going on. That theory moves from farm scale to community scale, around creating lots of small food-producing food communities. Food-eating communities, urban communities, rural communities, peri-urban communities, lots and lots of little. So if bits are going to fail in the future, that is a back-up plan. It makes the most sense to put as many eggs in as many baskets as possible.

What is one action that a conscious consumer can take to begin a local food journey?

Angela: Grow some food. Or go out and find some wild food. Take the journey from seed to something on your plate. It’s really such a powerful, simple thing you can do.

So once you start growing a little bit of stu , suddenly you find yourself with a food farm and you’re not sure how that happened. It’s important to recognise that you don’t fail if you’re not eating only organic, locally grown food. It’s just a journey of finding what your capacity is.

Also, acknowledge that it’s not possible for everyone. Some people are working 50+ hours a week, earning minimum wage, so might not have the headspace or capacity to grow something.

I think that’s always really important to remember: it’s quite a privilege to be able to have space and time to grow food.

“…ere’s an enormous amount of mindfulness in being connected to natural places.”

Angela Cli ord

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2022-09-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

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