Store bought vegetables and fruits never quite match up to the taste of ones you have grown yourself writes Dave Mollard. Photo / Unsplash
Store bought vegetables and fruits never quite match up to the taste of ones you have grown yourself writes Dave Mollard. Photo / Unsplash
Opinion:
Empty supermarket shelves have been a regular feature of most of our visits for the last three years. First it was panic buying of toilet paper as the country went into a killer virus lockdown, then flour and milk powder for the same reason.
A global shipping crisis emergeddue to too many empty containers being in the wrong place at the wrong time and a ship running aground in the Suez Canal didn’t help. Then Putin invaded the literal breadbasket of the world and the supply of wheat out of Ukraine dried up. Floods in Pakistan, fires in Brazil, earthquakes in Türkiye and now a cyclone in Aotearoa’s fruit basket will continue to cause our shopping trips to be disappointing.
This is the new normal and we need to adapt right now to ensure food security for our whānau.
I remember learning about “Just in time” supply chain logistics in Econ101 at university in the 90s. Out with the large storage facilities and in with a sleek efficient and fast supply chain that meant we did not need to store a year’s worth of photocopy paper in every office in our motu. In the same cultural wave that brought us Rogernomics, the Discman and privatised railways we also lost some of the old wisdom.
My mum stopped preserving peaches from Hawke’s Bay in summer because you could always buy a can from the supermarket for less than a dollar, even in the darkest days of winter. We stopped using homemade tomato sauce on our chips, because store bought was cheaper and less messy and we stopped growing our own cabbages because we were all working too many hours to tend the garden.
Unfortunately, the “just in time” model does not allow for a crisis, and the multiple disasters we have had has broken it.
The last three years has taught us that we are self-appointed slaves to a supermarket duopoly that tells us what we will eat and how much it will cost.
It’s time we threw off these shackles and developed our own food sovereignty by going “back to the future”. Let’s be rebels by growing our own kai again, by building our own greenhouses and sharing our abundance and by preserving in-season produce so we don’t rely on supermarkets.
This summer I vowed not to buy any capsicums because I was going to grow my own. Of course with every gardening plan, we need to prepare for failure and I must admit the wet summer has meant I have snuck a few bright red bell peppers into my supermarket trolley. However, the ones I grew myself had so much more flavour and so much more crunch than the store-bought ones. Moving forward, the lettuce I just planted is enough to cover our dinner plates for autumn.
We actually need system change so we can store more food locally. Not just changing legislation, but changing the way we invest our most precious personal resource, our time.
Dave Mollard is a Palmerston North community worker and social commentator.
