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You can still support your local suppliers in lockdown. Photo: File
You can still support your local suppliers in lockdown. Photo: File

SocietyAugust 9, 2017

No, poor New Zealand families can’t just ‘grow their own vegetables’

You can still support your local suppliers in lockdown. Photo: File
You can still support your local suppliers in lockdown. Photo: File

Parents in low income families are always being told that if they are having difficulty putting food on the table that they should just ‘put in a garden’. But, as Rebekah Graham and Kimberly Jackson explain, their research with New Zealand families shows that it’s not as simple as it sounds.

To protect the privacy of research participants, pseudonyms are used throughout this article.

Anne lives in a tiny two-bedroom unit and experiences constant anxiety about stretching her resources to feed herself and her baby. There isn’t enough money from her welfare provisions to pay for housing, bills and adequate food. She purchases cheap dollar loaves of bread from the local corner store to stave off her hunger pains but the lack of nutritious food means she is unable to produce enough breastmilk to feed her baby. This has created a vicious cycle of hunger and sleep deprivation, eventually culminating in an emotional breakdown at a local family support centre. Anne, along with an increasing number of New Zealanders, is experiencing ongoing food insecurity.

Food insecurity occurs when people do not have consistent access to sufficient, nutritionally adequate food. According to the most recent data available from the Ministry of Health, 7.3% of New Zealand households are experiencing low food security and frequently have insufficient food. More recent research tells us that food insecurity among low income groups in New Zealand is increasing. This means that more and more New Zealand’s families are struggling to put enough food on the table.

It is often assumed by many, most vocally in online comment sections, that growing one’s own fruit and vegetables is a realistic solution to food insecurity. There is a nostalgic appeal to the idea, embedded in notions of ‘Kiwi can-do’ and assumptions about previous generations who uncomplainingly grew abundant food. When asking ‘Why don’t people simply grow their own food?’ the underlying judgement is that when people do not grow their own food it is due to laziness and a lack of initiative. There is the assumption that people living with poverty and food insecurity have the time, resources, knowledge, support, space, physical ability and good health to prepare and maintain a garden.

The reality is that people on low incomes tend to work very hard; many do like to grow produce, often employing great ingenuity to grow a few items. Sophie, for example, juggles paid work, benefits and the care of her young son. She has very little space to grow food, but uses pots for herbs. She does not feel confident about how to grow food, having no experience of it and limited knowledge: “I tried it! I’m not very good at growing things!” The ability to indulge in the longer trial and error process of learning requires resources Sophie doesn’t have. The priorities for Sophie are increasing her paid work hours and helping her son with school homework, leaving little time left over for growing vegetables.

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Like many people living with hunger, Anne has found that better-off New Zealanders often don’t understand the reality of food insecurity: “I don’t have a veggie garden and people are just like, ‘grow food’, and I’m like yeah but then you’ve got to get the plants and then you’ve got to wait for the food. I need food now. Like, that’s a long term solution…Even getting seeds, you know, how long does it take for that seed to grow? You can’t wait for that seed when you need [food] today.”

Low income families are typically juggling multiple demands, insecure housing, and complex health issues. Those ‘on welfare’ are commonly also juggling paid work and caring for others. These families are spending increasing amounts of time navigating overly administrative welfare processes designed to tighten eligibility. The assumption that those who are ‘cash poor’ are therefore ‘time rich’ is a mythology from the pre-precarity era.

Sissy, for example, provides care and support for her elderly mother, who requires transport to and from hospital for treatment, as well as for her grandchild who is in and out of hospital with a chronic respiratory illness. The effort involved in providing care for family members in hospital has absorbed much of her time and energy, and she has struggled to manage preparing and maintaining a garden as well. Despite this, she has a few plants (see below). However, as the image shows, the few additional vegetables it offers are not enough to adequately feed a growing family.

Sissy’s vegetable garden

Insecure housing is a key barrier to gardening for those on low incomes. The average private residential tenancy in New Zealand lasts just 15 months, with half of all tenancies ending before ten months and a third within six months. Recent NZ-based research shows that low income families in private rental accommodation are more likely to move house more often, which is stressful and time-consuming. In addition, moving house makes it difficult to create a garden which may yield produce too late to be useful to those who have invested in it.

Ginny expressed concern about planting trees as her Housing NZ tenancy is renewed every three years. Nevertheless, she has planted a small citrus plant, and hopes that she will remain there long enough to enjoy the fruit it produces.

Ginny’s citrus plant.

Using gardening as a solution to food insecurity reflects assumptions commonly made by people who are food-secure. In other words, growing your own food tends to work well when you are in a position to take risks with expenditure, have time and resources, good health, and a secure and suitable housing situation. These are the very resources that families living with food insecurity struggle to access.

In short, growing your own vegetables is not the panacea to food insecurity that many food-secure people think it is. Indeed, given the ongoing housing crisis and retrenchment of welfare, accessing food (and especially nutritious food) is likely to become more and more difficult. For many people living with poverty, maintaining a backyard vegetable garden is at best a top-up and is rarely a food source capable of sustaining a family.

When you consider the shortfall in people’s food budgets – the gap between what they need for a nutritional diet and what is available to spend – it is easy to see that merely implementing a backyard garden is not enough to ameliorate hunger.

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— Wellington editor
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ParentsAugust 8, 2017

What it’s like to grow up poor in New Zealand

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Kiki Van Newtown, mum of two and a musician, shares what it was like growing up on welfare, and the lessons she learnt from her own mum about how to survive while poor.

There’s a running joke in my family that my mum sent me to school one day with half a raw swede in my lunchbox. It’s a true story which wasn’t originally intended as a joke. Joking about it is something you do years later as a way to rationalise growing up poor, where half a raw swede was all your mum had left to feed you.

The thing about being poor is that nobody ever intends to end up that way. My family were always working class, but I was about seven when I realised we were actually poor, after my dad’s gambling had drained any financial stability from our family. This was the beginning of my education on class and neoliberal economics. Mum left him and we moved into the cheapest house she could find. Her bedroom there was where I first ever saw her crying about bills.

The next few years were lean, but were softened by the fact we lived rurally and most of our days could be filled up with a bike, a water bottle and a Marmite sandwich. As I got older though, I started to realise how blame is assigned for poverty. As a kid I knew I was poor because other kids told me. They told me with taunts about my clothes, or rescinded invites to parties because I didn’t give good presents. Their parents told me by criticising me for holding my cutlery wrong, or commenting on my tatty appearance. The vernacular of exclusion grew into my childhood – no summer holidays, no horse riding, no trips to the snow, no Roll Ups or Le Snaks, no Mambo t-shirts. Just after I turned 13 we moved to a nearby town, and I took up a paper round which paid for my first high-school uniform the next year.

The thing about being poor is that it’s never just one thing. There are new tyres and new shoes and constant bills and these are all woven into the careful choreography of staying afloat. There is no amount of budgeting that will alleviate poverty; there is only the skill and strategy that people living on the breadline know well. It is the monthly dance between having your power or your phone cut off, and it is the knowledge that it only takes one additional obstacle before you fall.

When I was in third form one of my siblings became seriously ill and Mum spent her time driving between her multiple jobs and Starship Hospital. I barely saw her at all during these weeks, as she’d be working night shifts, then day shifts, then evenings at the hospital on repeat. I would get myself to school in the morning, and return home in the late afternoon, handwash my only school shirt, eat toast for dinner, and do my homework in front of the TV while my shirt dried on a clothes rack.

Over the next several years it became a variety of normal if the power was cut off when I got home. It wasn’t weird that we didn’t have a phone for long periods of time. It wasn’t strange that we didn’t have any food in the house, and that a $20 note left beside the fridge was my lunch and dinner for the foreseeable future. I would walk around the corner to the phone box and call the power company to negotiate turning the power back on, and then walk to the fish and chip shop because a scoop of chips was only $1.50, and there was no electricity to cook on anyway. I would practice my viola and set up candles on the table to do my homework, and sometimes I could almost pretend like it was an adventure.

As a teen I learnt that being poor is a collection of experiences that whittles away at your self esteem. I saw the looks checkout operators gave when Mum handed over the letter stamped by WINZ, when we had to put items back because the food grant wasn’t enough to even cover the essentials. I observed the face of our landlord as mum managed to convince him that she would be able to pay the rent on time next week. I watched the pawnbroker shrug as my mum explained that the $30 he was offering for all her gold rings wouldn’t even cover enough petrol to get her to work for a week. And I watched my mum use all of the tricks she had to keep us afloat. Mum’s skill and strategy was magical and fierce, and it did keep us afloat, just. It also gave me a bird’s eye view of how New Zealand’s class system works.

By midway through fifth form the armpits of my school shirt had rotted out. There is a limit to the amount of teenage sweat and cheap deodorant one shirt can absorb, and so I spent the next summer wearing my school jumper no matter what the weather, until by luck I found another school shirt in an opshop. To school prize-giving, I wore the pair of good black vinyl shoes my mum and me and my sister shared.

You learn about people’s values quickly when you’re poor. You learn that people are terrified of poverty. That rich people blame poor people for being poor because they desperately want to believe that their own decisions will keep them from ever ending up that way. People hold on to this because they can’t handle the truth, which is that material wealth is all just down to stupid luck.

You learn a lot about yourself too. You learn that you understand power and fear a lot more than rich people. You learn how to not live in servitude to these things. You learn about hope, and reasoning, and generosity. You learn that money is transient, that sometimes you have it and sometimes you don’t. You learn that the amount of money you have doesn’t equate to your value as a person. You learn about scarcity, and that one is really hard to shake. I often think about the ways Mum tried to protect me from feeling poor and how she managed to preserve a feeling of possibility in our house. I now know that she did it by ignoring what society tells poor people they should prioritise. She decided that sometimes it’s more meaningful for a 14 year old to have their first pair of jeans than it is for a car to have a warrant, and that giving your child a sense of opportunity is worth giving up a well balanced diet for. She decided that learning was the priority and she sacrificed her own needs for it.

When I turned 16 my music teacher gave me a job in her orchard and I used my wages to buy a viola. I recently asked my mum how we could afford for me to take music lessons even when we couldn’t even pay the electricity bill. She replied “because I knew it was important”.

And that’s the crux of it all really. There is no logic to being poor, because it’s not logical that anybody should be poor. Collectively we have more than enough, and we should place value on sharing it. We need to stop equating luck with effort. We need to understand that nobody plans on ending up poor – that the thing about being poor is that poor people do not make themselves poor. It’s our society that perpetuates conditions of poverty which makes people poor. And that needs to change.

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