Angela Clifford

The Chasm between Commodity and Culture; traversing our way back to our food

For the last 145 years, Aotearoa has sent most of its food to the rest of the world. The logistics of this has meant we’ve consolidated and commodified our offerings, necessary in a world of globalisation, efficiency and just in time supply chains. Cheap energy and a relatively steady geo-political landscape and climate have made this possible. Over that time food has become financialised – its purpose to return maximum profits to shareholders, not to feed us.

We have lost a lot in this system - the thread between eater and grower, kai and te taiao. We became known for ingredients, not relationships. That's what commodification does, it collapses food's value into price alone, and severs everything else that food actually is - culture, community, medicine, memory, whakapapa, a living connection to soil, ocean and season.

This talk explores the widening chasm between food as commodity and food as relationship, and what it takes to find our way back across it. Drawing on thinking such as food as commons where communities, not markets alone, hold the authority to grow, share and govern what feeds them. It sits alongside a decade of Eat New Zealand's grassroots work reconnecting Aotearoa to its land and ocean through kai. Angela Clifford will speak to what's been lost in that disconnection: small growers pushed out, eaters who've never met a farmer or fisher, communities going hungry beside a national table piled high for sending elsewhere.

But she'll also speak to what's returning. A different kind of food story is being grown: one rooted in manaakitanga, in relationship with te taiao, and with each other.