Naz Khanjani is a social influencer, a professional boxer, a reality star, and now a vodka baron. “We’re drinking sexy back,” says her new product. Josie Adams tried to do just that.

Disclaimer 1: this article contains discussion of alcohol consumption and being sexy. The Spinoff does not necessarily endorse either of these things.

The Notorious N.A.Z., Naz Khanjani, has launched a vodka empire. She’s most famous for her role on season two of The Bachelor NZ, where she came out the real winner in the end: she knocked off every other contestant on her “hit list”, and accurately predicted the final couple would break up. At the reunion show, when an audience member called her a bitch, she had a strong comeback. “Do you want to come up here and say it? I fucking dare you,” is a line permanently engraved on my brain, and I hope to one day use it on live TV.

She’s well qualified to make a sexy drink, being the sexiest person in the public eye. Naz’s Instagram is full of life affirmation (“stop stressing over shitty people”) and sultry photoshoots. She sells fitness tips and runs a beauty blog – two of the sexiest fields of work. Now, she’s thrown her creative mind and her absolutely shredded bod behind a vodka.

“I was very drunk at the reunion,” she confessed to me. Motivated by her drinking habits, she channelled her Piscean energy into creating a lean drink – something she and her gal pals could guzzle without any nutritional guilt. The drink uses natural ingredients, no preservatives. As the ancient proverb says, “you are what you eat,” and I planned to become pure coconut-derived electrolyte.

Ketonic Vodka debuted earlier this year, catching flack from the Advertising Standards Authority almost immediately. One advertisement for the drink read, over a photo of Naz, “Want to know what sexy tastes like? Come and meet Naz and have a taste.” Other slices of marketing implied the drink was healthy. “We can’t say it’s low carb or low sugar. We can’t suggest alcohol is healthy,” said Naz. “But I would choose to drink this,” she added as a personal note. In something of a tone shift, the Playboy-esque ads have been replaced with a factory-based, classically-soundtracked promo video filmed by drone expert Freddie McKenzie.

“I’m drinking sexy back,” read the slogan on the box. I was sucked in. I could stand to be a good 20% sexier. I didn’t know if drinking a lot of vodka RTDs would make it happen, but I was willing to try. I didn’t want to get white-girl wasted by myself, so picked an occasion: a staff dinner. This seemed the most appropriate setting in which to get boozed up and sexy.

Disclaimer 2: For legal reasons, I must make it clear that drinking this vodka did not make me physically sexier in any way. The only thing that changed was my self-perception.

Ketonic #1

The first round of voddies is open to everyone at The Spinoff. “Who wants a Ketonic Vodka!” I whoop. No one cheers in response. That’s OK. The night is only beginning, and we have a whole box to get through.

One of Ketonic’s slogans is “flip me to mix me”. This is not the same as shaking it. “Don’t shake it, because it might explode,” the sage herself warned me. “Just a couple of flips.” The flipping moves the ingredients around, so when you open the bottle you’re hit with the sweet scent of lemon instead of the carnal musk of coconut water.

Senior writer Alex Casey is pretty keen on the voddies. “If you don’t look at it or smell it, it’s actually pretty tasty,” she says. She does not like coconut water. I love keeping my magnesium levels tip-top, so am happy to stare this drink in the eye and down it.

8/10 sexy: trying something new.

Ketonic #2

Everyone else is moving onto beers, rejecting the opportunity to grow their palates. More for me. At 5% alc/volume, Ketonic matches up with beer pretty well but doesn’t have the same bloating effect. That’s right, thanks to Naz I can keep up with the lads without feeling pregnant with yeast.

Disclaimer 3: “Ketonic” is just a fun name and is not associated with the ketogenic diet. Naz’s vodka is not making me lose a beer belly nor any other weight. The only sources of weight loss in my life are sweating and peeing.

Everyone else drinking their big man beersies and them wanting none of my turbid voddies is making me feel insecure in my masculinity, even though I am a woman. I think about acting out aggressively, maybe by calling someone a cuck or miming wanking. Then I remember: Naz wouldn’t let peer pressure bother her. I finish my drink.

3/10 sexy: ostracised by the community.

Ketonic #3

I pour this one into a glass so it looks more mysterious. I was also mysterious, or at least more so than usual. I usually regret everything said around drink number three, but thanks to the all-natural ingredients of Ketonic I’m feeling easy, breezy, and beautiful. I haven’t hit on anyone, or mentioned my period even once.

It’s time to chug this back and hit the road. The Ketonic team likes a night out at Roxy – you can catch me and Naz cutting shapes and sipping lean voddies there on the 27th. Sadly, on this particular day the good ship Spinoff is heading to Satya, which is almost as good. I am not allowed to bring Ketonic into the restaurant and must make the switch to bubbles. Sorry, Naz.

Disclaimer 4: The Spinoff’s drinking culture is actually very responsible and relaxed but I felt that, as a journalist, I had a duty to fit in as many Ketonics as possible. No one became ill nor injured from the events of this evening.

6/10 sexy: the promise of a good night out, but no Ketonic Vodkas.

Ketonic #4:

It’s midnight on a Wednesday and I’m in a bar in Kingsland dripping candle wax onto myself. The guy across from me is pretending this is a normal thing to do, for which I am grateful. I don’t think he’s finding it sexy. In his defence, he’s seeing this all through beer goggles, not Ketonic ones.

Sexy is about digging yourself, and I’m feeling my oats. There’s wax everywhere. LCD Soundsystem is playing over the speakers. I’m feeling the spirits of Romantic poets lurch through my veins. My synapses fizzle with lean energy. I write a poem for Naz on my phone.

How do I love thee, Naz?

Let me count the ways

Naz give me my sin again

Vodka lovely and temperate

Now is the winter of our discontent

made glorious summer by this voddy

Out, out brief wines!

Bubbles are but a walking shadow, a poor Ketonic

If Naz be the food of love, eat on

10/10 sexy: have become a poet.

Disclaimer 5: Drink Responsibly.

About as far as you can get from Aotearoa’s rural heartland, a new breed of farmers are rethinking the way we grow. 

At the heart of that shitshow of an Auckland city confluence where Symonds St, New North Rd, Khyber Pass and Newton Rd come together, observant passers-by will notice an unlikely thing. Amid the multiple lanes, the carparks, the apartment buildings and the takeaway joints, there’s something different. Something unexpected.

Google Maps will tell you it’s a nightclub called OMG. While that indeed would be a good name for a nightclub, Mr Google is mistaken in this instance: OMG stands for organic market garden. We’re talking bees, rather than beats.

“It’s basically biological farming that not only grows really good food for us, but for the soil and all the pollinators as well,” explains gardener Levi Brinsdon-Hall, who runs the show.

“What we do is grow food at a greater scale and a greater density, with diversity as well. It’s basically biological farming that not only grows really good food for us – healthy, nutritious food – but also grows really good food for the soil and really good food for all the pollinators.”

OMG is part of For the Love of Bees, an Auckland Council-funded project that its instigator, artist Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, designed as a social sculpture to invite Aucklanders to imagine their city is the safest space in the world for bees. “We use bees as the magnet for ecosystem thinking, because people are much more open to thinking about bees than they are, say, soil biology,” she explains.

“The primary concern for bees is lack of habitat and the quality of that habitat, so there’s the growing of more foraging habitat and then there’s insuring that that habitat is basically free of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.”

The group took on the sloping 600 square metre space on Symonds St at the end of last year. “Two months before Christmas, it was an empty site,” says Smuts-Kennedy. It had been used for different community activities in the past, but she saw the potential to do much more.

Brinsdon-Hall came on board and since December has spent more than 700 hours transforming the site into the thriving garden it is today, with over 1000 hours of help from volunteers. The garden is enabled by City Rail Link, the government/Auckland Council project, and poster placement company/arts supporter Phantom Billstickers, with some funding from Waitematā Local Board.

“In a very short space of time we’ve transformed what was a meadow full of rocks and rubble and grass. There were, like, 10 different species that existed on this plot, and now there are over 100,” Brinsdon-Hall says. “We call this regenerative farming practice – the idea of taking a site of soil and bringing its life force back to it.

“We want to inspire the shift for all these vacant lots and for all the communities that are already out there doing these projects – community gardens, farming, growing vegetables, making productive ecological habitats for the benefit of life,” he adds.

“We want to prove that it’s a possible thing to do – take a small bit of land and turn it very rapidly into a productive piece of land. We believe that this is a really good model that solves a lot of problems we’re currently facing.

“One of the main problems is that this is a very densely developed area – we’ve got apartments everywhere, and people go home to cook in their apartments but there’s nowhere to get fresh produce around here.”

To that end, members of the public can buy produce direct from the garden on Tuesday mornings, and hopefully they’ll soon be selling at the weekend too. Depending on the season, the garden grows everything from eggplants, tomatoes, turnips and chillies to daikon radish, pak choi and kohlrabi, plus lettuce greens galore. Brinsdon-Hall is close to selling enough to cover his wage, and by summer, they are confident the site will be fully self-sustainable in terms of at least one, possibly two living wages.

OMG also works closely with chefs who use the garden’s produce in their restaurants – the likes of Sid Sahrawat across the road at The French Cafe, Fraser McCarthy from Lillius around the corner, Samir Allen from Gemmayze Street over on K Rd, and a host of chef-run pop-ups.

“Chefs go crazy for it – they basically just take everything, they love it,” says Brinsdon-Hall.

“Their enthusiasm has been there for a long time – they go to great lengths to find fresh, local produce that actually has flavour to it, and a good story is really important as well. I see them as being a gateway to culture: food is culture, and you’re reaching a different audience through those restaurants.”

Smuts-Kennedy describes OMG as “climate change-ready infrastructure” on account of 10 values it adheres to, including carbon sequestration, biodiversity, air filtration, water retention, turning food scraps into a carbon resource through composting (the garden takes all The French Cafe’s waste), and heat sinks. She says it’s cooler in the garden than across the road, and envisages having an OMG every one kilometre throughout the city. “Then you’re starting to change the climate of the city.”

The aim is for OMG to be a teaching hub. “One of the things that would enable this to roll out across the city is human capital, literally the knowledge of how to do it,” says Smuts-Kennedy. “How many people in Auckland at the moment know how to run a farm like this? Who is going to help us get the funding to train 25 people in the next year so that we can have 25 farms and then create a system where those 25 people are training 10 people each over the next 12 months?” she asks.

“The average age of a farmer in the world at the moment is 65 years and the access to land is out of reach of most of our young people who want to be farmers,” she says. “We could actually provide a pathway to employment in the cities where we live, because we want them to be growing us safe food today, tomorrow and in 20 years’ time.

“I’m looking at this as a system that will give us security for 200 years. We could build our soil systems so that in 200 years’ time they’re better than they were before our forests were chopped down.

“Within three years we could have this totally handled, but it’s going to take a vision and it needs to be a cohesive vision. We know that there are 100 community gardens in Auckland – how could they as quickly as possible become climate change-ready infrastructure, and then what are the other sites that could be accessed to have one every one kilometre?”

OMG has to become self-sustaining, which hinges on the amount of food it can produce – and what kind. Smuts-Kennedy is adamant it can’t become “a lettuce farm”. “All the models for working on an acre now that are profitable are around producing lettuce,” she says. “And we could do that – we’d love to be profitable and we need to be profitable, but we’re going to make a stand and look at what other carbohydrates and proteins we can grow, because you cannot feed the world on lettuce.”

She wants to step back from OMG and replace herself as project manager in the near future. “I will continue to work at a high level as the vision holder and also continue to come and say ‘we’re not a lettuce farm’, to keep us on track. My job really at the moment is about growing the engine.”

But there’s also the rather pressing problem of OMG’s lease ending in October. “Then we are going to be month-to-month praying. We’d like to find another site. Do a callout – who in the community has the skillset to help us find other pieces of land and would like to become part of our community? Who wants to join in this adventure? For The Love of Bees is nobody, it’s just whoever shows up. And whoever shows up the most is For The Love of Bees.”

Near the busy intersection on the border of Wellington’s CBD and the suburb of Mt Victoria, across the road from the imposing Embassy Theatre, at the bottom of the curiously named Majoribanks Street (apparently correctly pronounced Marsh’banks, but only posh people said it thus when I was growing up in Wellington), the eagle-eyed will spot a small red sign reading Shoots Microgreens.

Descend the stairs to beneath street level and you’ll enter a low-ceilinged, purple-lit room filled with rack upon rack of trays of little shoots reaching up towards the lights above. Once a nightclub/music venue named Sandwiches, it’s now Shoots, a hydroponic urban farm that supplies eateries around the capital.

Twenty-something different varieties of microgreens and herbs grow here: lemon balm, radish, nasturtium, dill, coriander, pak choi, rainbow beets, shiso and five different types of basil to name just a few.

“We take our cues from chefs in terms of what they’re after,” says Shoots founder Matthew Keltie, “but some plants just aren’t going to grow in that situation, while others do really well. So we’re trying to balance our experience of what grows in the system well and what chefs are interested in.”

Keltie, an agronomist who has worked for Pāmu (aka farming SEO Landcorp) for some years, has had recent success with the oyster plant – which tastes like, yep, you guessed it, an oyster.

“It’s an extremely hard plant to grow and I’be talked to a few people who ended up giving up,” he says. “I’m pretty stoked – in the last 12 to 18 months the most exciting thing for me in the garden has been understanding how that plant survives and flourishes, and it’s only happened in the last few weeks.”

Shoots had its inception a couple of years ago in Keltie’s garage, where he and his business partner began experimenting with hydroponics. “We discovered that a garage in the middle of winter in Wellington wasn’t the ideal place for it, but we learnt enough to understand that there was something here we could explore.”

They moved into the Majoribanks St space about a year ago, and have been supplying local restaurants since. “Some days it’s one step forward and about five back, but other days we have things work and it goes extremely well,” says Keltie.

“It has been a learning process, some days we’ve really struggled. For every solution you find you create two more problems. All the inputs overlap each other so you can’t change one thing without it having an influence on another.

“But we’re at the stage where we’re able to produce really consistent plants of high quality, taste and colour and texture.”

It’s true: the taste is intense, each leaf a flavour bomb exploding in your mouth. That’s all down to understanding the philosophy of hydroponics, says Keltie. “Hydroponics is designed to give the plants what they need for however long they need, but it’s also about tailoring to individual plants so the light spectrum, the timing, the nutrients, is different for each variety. We’ve got them grouped at the moment but we’re getting down to the stage where each variety will have its own recipe to maximise potential.”

No wonder chefs have jumped on board, and Shoots now supplies 50+ cafes, restaurants and bars in the capital – the likes of near-neighbours Ortega Fish Shack and Capitol, as well as Shed5, Floriditas, Hanging Ditch and Havana to name just a handful. “The really exciting thing is because we don’t have any seasons, we’re able to produce some plants that people wouldn’t otherwise have access to,” says Keltie.

Orders are delivered to customers via a three-wheeled battery-assisted bike with a wooden box on the front that holds multiple trays of micro greens, “so we can get from garden to kitchen in the shortest time possible”, he explains.

“We’re growing close to market so we don’t have freight or food miles, and we’re using unused space where we can yield four times as much as what we can in a paddock,” he says. “So we tick a fair few boxes around sustainability.”

In the future, he wants to work on the energy efficiency of the lights – “we’re talking about running it off batteries and having a wind turbine on the roof” – and reusing the trays the plants are grown and delivered in, and is in talks with wholesalers about expanding that side of the business.

He’s also keen to try his hand at other cities. “I know in Wellington we can cover a fair chunk of the city on a bike, but I don’t know the practicalities of doing it in Auckland,” she says. “But picking up our recipe in terms of racks of plants and how we do things, we could apply that pretty quickly.”