Nadia Lim has launched a new cookbook - Nadia's Farm Kitchen. Photo / Holly Wallace
Celebrity chef Nadia Lim has revealed she experienced the “lowest point” of her life when life threw up a “perfect storm” of challenges.
The former MasterChef winner is touring New Zealand to promote her 13th cookbook, Nadia’s Farm Kitchen, which was released earlier this month.
She admits the past few years have been tough going, with personal and professional challenges proving “very humbling” and making her “realise I wasn’t as tough as I’d believed”.
In a candid interview with Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night, Lim said the troubles started after she fractured a vertebra while skiing on Coronet Peak in 2023.
“My youngest [Arlo] was only about 5 or 6-months-old. At the time I was still breastfeeding him, and obviously he was very dependent on me,” she said.
“It was very, very tricky because I couldn’t get up to get him, so I really had to rely on anyone and everyone who came by and popped into the house to help me.
“The neighbours were incredible – they all came around and helped to get him for me and cooked meals and all sorts.”
Lim told Real Life that by March last year, her tank had simply run dry.
The pressures of running her Otago farm, keeping her marriage and family together, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance culminated in “probably my lowest point I’ve ever reached in my life”.
“Everyone’s got to go through that at some stage, and it just happened to be the perfect storm. Having kids does take a big toll on your reserves.
“I was probably quite depleted and never had much of a chance to catch up,” she went on.
“And then when it rains, it pours. I had three kids, including a newborn who was still feeding; we were right in the thick of introducing new things on the farm, trying out new processes and systems and types of farming, and taking on quite big risks in that area; and I had my own work going on and my own pressures.”
Added to that was a rough patch in her marriage to husband Carlos Bagrie, her My Food Bag co-founder and partner of more than two decades.
“What probably naturally happens in a lot of relationships is, when you’ve been together for that long, you start taking each other for granted.
“After 19 years of being together, I think we both agree that we were taking each other for granted,” Lim told Cowan.
“Luckily we realised and really worked hard to become self-aware of it, and then to take some action to not take each other for granted.
“And we’re lucky – we made it through a very rough, tough patch, but came out the other end much stronger than what we were before.”
Lim has always taken pride in her mental toughness – “I’ve always kind of believed resilience was my middle name” – which was noted by Masterchef judge and fellow celebrity cook Josh Emmett when she won the competition in 2011.
“He said, ‘You’re really soft on the outside, but inside you’re as tough as iron, I’ve never seen anything so tough.’ I’ve always kind of believed that I was really, really tough.
But, she says, “everyone’s got to be humbled at some stage in their life”.
“When I found myself on the kitchen floor crying and telling myself I couldn’t do it, couldn’t face everything, it was very humbling to realise that I wasn’t as tough as what I’d believed for the last 38, 39 years.
“It’s a great lesson to learn: no one’s invincible.”
Lim says she started to build back her mental fitness while Bagrie was away on an international farming scholarship for several months, and she was at home looking after the farm and the three children.
The first step was to recognise that “I’d been a bit of a martyr”.
“I always kind of thought, ‘I can never rest, I’ve got to keep going, I’ve got to keep going, I’ve got to keep going’. But that was a bit silly, really; everyone deserves a break,” she told Real Life.
A big part of that mindset is inherited from her father, she now realises.
Lim’s father grew up in Malaysia in abject poverty, and as a result wouldn’t let any of his children leave a scrap of food on their plates because it would remind him of what his mother went through during the rice famine in China.
“He tells us stories of having to share one can of beans between 10 of them,” Lim said.
“He was a very hard worker and did really well at school, and that was how he got out of poverty. He managed to get a scholarship to come to New Zealand and study engineering.
“But to make that happen, he had to work so hard; he was working several jobs while at university to get through.
“So that work ethic has always been drilled into me from a very young age, same as my brother and sister, and I think there was this belief that you have to earn your rest; that you need to work and work and keep going to prove that you deserve a rest.
“It’s not a great thing to believe in.”
What Lim’s learnt, she says, is that “for me to do my best work and to be the best friend and mother and wife and daughter and sister, I do need to have rest for myself – and I shouldn’t feel like that’s selfish”.
“It sounds silly and obvious, but sometimes, when it’s been so ingrained from your childhood, it’s hard to unpick.”
With Bagrie on his farming scholarship, he and Lim also had space to reset and work on their marriage in a different way.
“Because he was away mainly in Brazil, I think it’s like an eight-hour difference, so there was never a very good time to call … we actually had to take to writing to each other.
“I feel like that was one of the keys to saving us. Written communication is really handy, because you can have time to think about what you’re saying [and] you’re not reacting in the heat of the moment. If we had talked on the phone, we probably would have exploded at each other.
“So it was a much better form of communication for us to get everything out there. It really worked and I’m very proud of us both because we worked through stuff and we’ve come out the other side even stronger than we were before.”
Lim’s new cookbook Nadia’s Farm Kitchen was released on October 3.
Her book tour started on Saturday in Wellington and will continue over the next few weeks, finishing in Cromwell on November 6.
