New Zealand cook Sophie Gray is learning to 'focus on one day at a time' and to let the tears flow after a year in which her infant grandchild and father both died.
New Zealand cook Sophie Gray is learning to “focus on one day at a time” and to let the tears flow after a horror year in which her infant grandchild and father both died.
The food writer and cookbook author is best known for teaching families how to cook well on a budget as Destitute Gourmet, and also runs the Good Works Trust, a food bank on Auckland’s North Shore.
While she’s used to helping ease the pressure on families in hardship, Gray unexpectedly found herself facing difficulties of her own this year. Her father, John, died in August, just six months after the death of her 6-week-old grandson William, who was born with a rare, and ultimately fatal, genetic disorder.
In an interview with Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night, Gray said she’s pleased to be seeing the back of 2025.
“It’s enough some days just to be ‘up and not crying’ and get through that day – that has very much been our mantra over the last six months.
“For people who lose a grandchild, you grieve twice because you are seeing your own child go through the most unimaginable pain, and you can do nothing to make that any less. And then you are also grieving the loss of your grandchild.
“So it’s a double whammy, and I had not really been aware of that. For the first while, my grief was all for my daughter and her partner and the agony that they were in. And then you have this other wave yourself, of the empty arms and the hopes and the dreams, all of those things.”
Gray told Real Life the grief continues to hit her in “unexpected waves” and at inopportune times – like in between cooking workshops during a visit to Melbourne earlier in the year.
But she sees huge value in letting the tears fall whenever they need to.
“I had a break between events [in Melbourne] and was having a browse around Target. I found myself in the baby section and I just burst into tears. It was very out of the blue,” Gray told Cowan.
“My mother died when I was quite young, so I was in my very early twenties, and I learned then to cry all the tears, to not actually try and hold them in or stop them from coming.
“I’m very aware that when you are crying, people will often try and comfort you because your tears make them uncomfortable. So now, when somebody else wells up, I don’t go over and hug them, because I’m not trying to stop their tears falling. I would rather stand there and weep with them.
“I’ve got a friend who lost her husband … she and I have sat over morning coffee together and both had tears rolling down our cheeks as we chatted. And then 10 minutes later, we can be laughing and eating a piece of cake and neither of us needs to stop the tears from flowing.
“I think there’s a real freedom, a liberation in that … cry [your tears] in the shower, cry them in the car, cry them wherever you have to. But don’t try and stop them, because they will take you by surprise.”
Gray has been no stranger to heartache over recent years, having lost her roles as food director for Bauer Media Group and as editor of Food Magazine during the pandemic. She was one of 270 Bauer staff to be made redundant in a seven-minute Zoom call early in 2020.
Gray told Real Life this was a “very uncertain time” – and remains so – but is ultimately what led to her becoming the operations manager for the largest food security hub on the North Shore, the Good Works Trust.
“I took over at the end of 2020, and at that time New Zealand was Covid-free and it was a little food bank. I was asked to fill in for somebody; it was a 10-hour-a-week thing, and I had nothing else going on so I said, ‘yep, I’ll do that’.”
At the end of her six-week stint, she spoke to the Good Works Trust board and told them it was impossible to make a meal out of the food that they were providing to people in need.
So they gave her a new brief: to find out what the need was on the North Shore and what the trust should be doing to meet it.
“So now we have 60 volunteers working across eight volunteer programmes; we run an independent social supermarket; we supply school lunches across nine North Shore schools that don’t get any government lunch provision; and we’re the biggest crisis and emergency provider for the Shore.
“We are trying to build a food-secure North Shore where there’s nobody who can’t afford to access food through one way or another.”
The trust has Christian roots, having been born from the convergence of the Devonport Network Trust and Shore Vineyard Church, before becoming a separate entity embodying the same values.
For Gray, a Christian herself, the trust’s mahi (work) aligns with her values of the faith with its working gloves on.
“We have a real precedent from scripture,” she told Cowan. “Jesus said, ‘I was hungry. You gave me something to eat.’ He didn’t argue about whose job it was to feed you or whether or not somebody’s drop-kick parents should be the ones feeding their children.
“It’s like, okay, you’re hungry, let’s get you something to eat. That, for me, has become the thing that helps me make the really hard decisions at the end of the day.”
Despite life being a little harder than usual in recent years, Gray says she’s feeling optimistic about the next decade.
“I’m really, really looking forward to it,” she told Real Life.
“I’m looking forward to grandchildren. I’m enjoying adult children, but I’m also enjoying the opportunity to pursue interests and hobbies and pursuits of my own.”