Conservation Comment: Positive relationship with food

Plants that Airini Beautrais has "shopped" from her garden.

OPINION

When looking at ways we can be more sustainable and environmentally conscious in our everyday lives, dietary changes are a frequent suggestion. However, food is a very personal and fraught subject.

While a plant-based diet is generally touted as the most Earth-friendly option, opinions differ as to optimum human nutrition. We are exposed to a lot of advertising and influence around food, and it can be difficult to disentangle facts from fads and feelings.

One feeling I have is that it’s important to have a positive relationship with food, especially in a culture where eating disorders are an ever-present issue affecting people of all ages and genders. I have come across a lot of rhetoric around the class-based nature of gardening and foraging. I don’t subscribe to the idea that eating fresh plants is an exclusively bougie activity.

While tenancy rules and housing insecurity can make it hard for people to establish a garden, there are lots of ways to grow and/or harvest food that circumvent the dictates of a landlord.

As a renter on a low income in Wellington in the 2000s, I grew veges and herbs in a cardboard suitcase filled with potting mix. UCOL lecturers Phil Thomsen and Gina Gigou have recently run workshops teaching people how to grow plants in small containers such as tins and DIY planters.

Community gardening is another option that has an ongoing presence in Whanganui. A further option is learning about wild plants that can be harvested and eaten.

My small section is full of wild plants because I don’t have a lawn, and my gardening ambitions exceed the time I have available to keep everything neat. I am a former plant puritan, but I have moved on from exclusive devotion to natives and non-invasive edibles.

I have always eaten weeds — my culinary mantra as a student was “I can always find a salad” — but recently I have been learning more about edible wild plants. Palmerston North writer and forager Helen Lehndorf has a method she calls “shopping the garden”.

She takes a basket outside and fills it with whatever she finds. As a working single parent and extremely reluctant chef (read: mediocre cook) I sometimes put filling the basket into the too-hard basket.

But whenever I am working in the garden, I look for things I can eat. Cape gooseberries self-seed everywhere and remind me of my grandmother’s garden. In their little papery packages, I think of them as “bundles of joy”.

Local artist Brydee Rood and I are now working on a collaborative project about dock. I’ve learned all kinds of dock are edible, including the invasive Rumex scandens, which has a pleasantly sour taste.

Other weeds I eat include yarrow, chickweed, plantain, nasturtium, hydrocotyle, cleavers, dandelion, and wood sorrel.

While the vegetable drawer in the fridge can become a graveyard for increasingly expensive supermarket vegetables, there is nothing with lower food miles than a plant you pick and put straight into your mouth (provided your weeds are free of sprays and animal urine). Eating green is everyone’s birthright.