New Zealand’s food distribution system is vulnerable to disasters. Shanti Mathias talks to community farms, food rescue groups and researchers about what a more resilient food future might look like.
This longread is part of What’s Eating Aotearoa, an editorial project made possible by the generous support of readers.
One of the most widely circulated images of the Auckland Anniversary floods in 2023 was a torrent of brown water deluging a supermarket. “Online shopping is here!” declared a cheerful red sign. Beneath, road turned river, and above a gloomy sky. On TikTok, too – one of the first places people looked for information – there were dozens of apocalyptic short films: the normalcy of a supermarket, familiar aisles and the glistening packages in the meat section, drenched. Customers bewildered, still pushing their trolleys.
A few weeks later, the pattern of disaster within the normalcy of a supermarket unfolded again. After Cyclone Gabrielle devastated the Tairāwhiti and Hawkes Bay regions, supermarkets quickly emptied. Some didn’t have power; many were operating with cash only as communications breakdown meant there was limited Eftpos functionality, creating long queues for a sporadically working ATM. Stores rely on digital, internet-connected systems which also limited how they could operate with communications cut. Dozens of stores were closed; once they could open, heavy lift helicopters were temporarily used to provide limited resupplies to stores while roads were closed. There were fears of severe food shortages: clean water and food had to be trucked in.
If, in “peacetime”, as researcher Gradon Diprose puts it, supermarkets are criticised for being manipulative in their pricing, disasters reveal our overreliance on the duopoly for food. “We don’t have a national approach to our food distribution where we’re not thinking about the supermarkets,” says Diprose, who has examined the response to Covid, the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle. “Some supermarkets weren’t even able to open, and that literally restricted access to food in many areas.”
Last year’s cataclysmic rain wasn’t the first time New Zealand’s food security has been threatened by devastating events. In the last 15 years, the Canterbury and Kaikoura earthquakes, Covid, and floods in Ashburton and the West Coast have all impacted food supplies – and highlighted the urgent need for better food security policy.
“Let’s put it this way,” says Jo Fountain, who has researched the response to the Kaikōura earthquake. “If all the roads to your town were cut tomorrow, where would you go for food?”
To her, the question is an urgent one. Living in Lincoln, just outside of Christchurch, Fountain thinks frequently about what might happen if the alpine fault, along the spiny centre of the South Island, has an earthquake – and there is a 75% chance that will happen in the next 50 years. “The whole South Island will be in a state of chaos,” Fountain says. “You can’t expect people to sweep in with food resources.”
Not to mention the other disasters: more rain, fires and earthquakes, tsunamis and eruptions. Each of these has the possibility of disrupting the already fragile food distribution system in our narrow country, filled with brittle transport links, as well as being vulnerable to restrictions in imported food.
If her access to supermarkets were cut off in summertime, Fountain reckons she could live off her garden for a week or two, although she’d get sick of zucchinis and tomatoes pretty promptly. She has enough in the cupboards to provide some carbohydrates and protein. Beyond that, she’d have to look around her community – even though subdivisions are slowly but surely replacing orchards in Lincoln’s lush arable land. But not everyone is so lucky.
“It’s all very well talking about vegetable and community gardens, but disasters don’t affect people equally,” she says. “We saw that in Covid: some people were stocking up on toilet paper or milk, but others didn’t have the financial resources to buy in bulk, didn’t have a deep freeze to store food, didn’t have a garden for vegetables.”
Some of the risks in how New Zealand’s food is distributed were clear following the Kaikōura earthquake, creating a community eager to think of sustainable solutions. Kaikōura was named for the abundant seafood available in the area. But reliant on a road and a train line sandwiched between the ocean and the mountains, the community had to throw out thousands of litres of milk from dairy farms who couldn’t ship their products, and smell the rotting carcasses of kaimoana perishing in the air, suddenly above sea level, while they waited for urgent shipments of vegetables and protein.
“People had to live off frozen sausages and vegetables – it was that irony of food insecurity in a place of plenty,” Fountain says. Community discussions afterwards had some ideas about what would help next time: “You need those local networks – who has a generator or a deep freeze? Who has the capacity to kill some of their beasts? Who has a big vegetable garden?”
“Our food systems are built on the idea of just-in-time – there is no long-term plan, there is no national [food] storage,” says Diprose. He’s keen for that to change, contributing to a policy brief as part of the Resilience to Nature’s Challenges National Science Challenge, a project whose funding ends in June. One key idea was having a national emergency pantry in each region that would keep long-shelf-life food, regularly cycling through products so they don’t expire.
The lack of long-term planning was obvious during Covid. “Food got channelled even more through supermarkets,” Diprose says. Vegetable markets and smaller distribution locations were often closed. “That matters in terms of access: supermarkets can be more expensive than other retail options.”
But despite the fears of severe food shortages during Cyclone Gabrielle and Covid, shortages didn’t get that bad. Why? Because there are already groups that know how to redistribute food: the somewhat informal network of food rescue organisations, churches, marae and food banks.
“These groups are brokers between people who need food and people who have food,” Diprose says. There’s significant division about food rescue groups: are they an unfortunately necessary stopgap in a wasteful system or an essential service? “It’s not revolutionary – but food rescue does important things in the meantime,” Diprose adds.
In the immediate aftermath to Cyclone Gabrielle, for instance, several big food producers immediately got to work: Sanitarium and Fonterra, with support from the NZ Food Network, sent trucks to Hawkes Bay that arrived within 12 hours. There’s much to criticise about how big corporations profit from a concentrated food market but –“that was faster than much of the Civil Defense response,” Diprose says.
The food was sent to marae and community groups like the Māori Women’s Welfare League and Super Grans. Food rescue group Gizzy Kai was also able to get food further up the East Coast through pre-existing relationships. “The best way to prepare for disaster is to have strong community relationships and networks,” Diprose says.
Most regions of New Zealand grow food but, as Kaikoura residents discovered, the supplies tend to be highly concentrated: whole swathes of the country dedicated to cows, or wine grapes, or apple orchards. While there are geographic reasons for the concentration of certain kinds of food in different areas, that also makes the food systems more vulnerable to disruption.
“The Christchurch earthquakes made it really obvious that we had a food security problem,” says Hayley Guglietta, a passionate gardener who is chairperson of Edible Canterbury, an organisation focused on providing a variety of edible produce in Canterbury to make their food systems more resilient. The group has connected a network of 50 community gardens in Christchurch and has advocated for more edible food to be grown in the city’s parks, as well as using pre-existing food resources – like creating foraging maps for fruit trees in the city’s Red Zone.
“It’s a new-old way of thinking about food,” Guglietta adds. ”You don’t have to go to Bunnings to buy seeds or compost – seeds can be shared, compost can come from your back garden. We’re only 100 years away from that thinking, but once food becomes a matter of [a corporation’s] profit, we are so far removed from the possibility of food being something shared for free that it seems unimaginable.”
In preparing for widespread disasters like floods and earthquakes, it’s also possible to learn from those at the front of responding to the more everyday, background disaster of poverty. When I call Jo Wrigley, manager of Waikato’s Go Eco, she’s busy thinking about the logistics of what her team will be doing the next day: harvesting hundreds of heads of corn, damaged by insects but still good to eat. They’ve only just got through the leftover meat from a meat festival the week before, which they mainly gave to night shelters.
Go Eco’s food rescue programme is a significant operation: they have two trucks and dozens of volunteers picking up food waste from supermarkets as well as leftover harvest. Often, that food is packaged, and can have less nutritional value. “We want to increase the amount of fresh produce we collect – we are moving more into gleaning and harvesting food that would otherwise go to waste.” Gleaning is the traditional process of allowing people to collect remaining crops from a field after harvest. Food is then taken to various community services that provide kai to people in need.
Designated as an essential service during the pandemic, Go Eco worked closely with MSD to distribute food during lockdowns. “Food banks shine in responding to crisis,” Wrigley says. While many people need more support than just kai, having food available can be a key way to attract people to other services.
But food rescue systems depend on the inbuilt waste of supermarkets. “Things like white bread are always over produced, there are marketing reasons for this,” Wrigley says. The consequence of shelves full of plump, soft loaves is what she and her teams see the next day: piles of that same bread given away to people in need so that the supermarkets are always full of fresh abundance. “At the end of life no one wants to buy [food] so it’s passed down a food chain to the poorest people,” Wrigley says. Her team saves thousands of kilos of food each year, and still more ends up in dumpsters.
Guglietta is critical of how supermarkets sanitise their wasteful systems by using charities to redistribute food, often without much money. “In a non-disaster period, why do supermarkets have so much they can give truckloads away? Why are organisations applying for funding to pick up and redistribute that food?”
What everyone agrees on is that food rescue groups and community resources are filling a crucial gap, particularly in times of disaster, but that New Zealand’s food security needs to be addressed with a national policy. “Until we have a national food system, we’ll be wandering around trying to find food for those who can’t access it,” Wrigley says.
Groups like Go Eco and Edible Canterbury also have uncertain, short-term funding that often doesn’t pay for staff salaries. “People’s time is often given voluntarily – but they’re the relationship holders who make things work,” Diprose says.
Consistent funding could help, ensuring there are knowledgeable networks ready to leap into place when the next disaster comes. Diprose points out that there’s lots that is working about food rescue groups at the moment, who have cultivated strong local relationships and have a national organising body. There just needs to be more certainty that these groups can stick around.
Ultimately, food security means that food sources need to be distributed and various, spread across the country at large and small scales. At the upper end of Symonds Street, there’s one more place where the story of New Zealand’s food resilience is being written: the Organic Market Garden, or OMG, urban farm. “Six years ago, this was an empty lot,” says Arlette Barraclough, the group’s communications manager. Nestled against the City Rail Link offices (which owns the land and allows OMG to be there), the approximately 450sq metre site occupies every centimetre of space available. It’s hard to believe it could have been empty: despite the traffic on the grey road, the land is abundant. Banana trees lean against each other and small carrot seedlings are poking their heads up from the dark earth.
The farm supplies local restaurants and nearby families with subscription produce boxes. “Families come with little kids and the kids get to see where their food is grown,” Barraclough says, holding the leafy tendril of a pumpkin aside for me as I follow her through the garden. But that only provides for a few people; nowhere near the scale, the pure number of calories, that supermarkets provide. But OMG’s real goal is for the boundaries of its farm to spill far beyond its small lot: they sell seedling subscription boxes for people’s gardens, and work with networks of community growing spaces across Tāmaki Makaurau, sharing seedlings and knowledge.
“We give people little packs with guidelines so they know what works well together, so they can grow it themselves,” Barraclough says, gesturing to a whiteboard filled with tidy details: planting broccoli next week, coriander in late winter. They also run courses and workshops to increase people’s knowledge about growing food.
Perhaps the biggest test came when the farm encountered cataclysmic rain last year, along with the rest of Auckland. “Actually, our soil held up really well,” Barraclough says. They didn’t get many tomatoes, and their zucchini were a bit battered by wind. But the day after the cyclone, while communities in Auckland’s West Coast and the abundant growing regions of Hawkes Bay faced closed supermarkets, they had food to harvest.