Foodprint is already popular in other towns and cities across New Zealand and launched in May 2022 in Hamilton, Raglan, Cambridge and Te Awamutu.

It launched its service in Taupo and Rotorua last week, on September 17.

The Kiwi-owned app provides a platform for local eateries to sell surplus and imperfect food for a discount to prevent food waste. Read more

So far, the group has dished out 40,000 meals across Canterbury.

Steve Hill and Adam Kreisel are the brains behind the not-for-profit organisation.

They say that 500kg of venison mince has been donated to Rangiora's Hope Community Trust over the past 18 months.

This has found its way to 17 community groups and foodbanks which then distribute it to the people who need it.

Waste not, want not

Hill and Kreisel aim to donate 500kg of venison mince to the free food freezers every month.

"Last calendar year we did just over two tonnes. This calendar year our target is five tonnes and I think we're about to blow that a bit.

"Next year hopefully we can get 10 tonnes" they say.

Kreisel said the idea to distribute the meat came about when he and Hill were out hunting together and agreed they were gathering too much meat to eat.

"Our families could take only so much… We sort of came up with the idea that it had to go to people that needed it a lot more than we needed it."

They designed a logo for Hunters for Hope and approached the Hope Community Trust in Rangiora.

"They said 'yes please - we'll definitely take it', and now that we've started giving it to them, they're [the meat packs] getting spread out more and more throughout North Canterbury, which is great" Kreisel said.

Community effort

The Trust now has fridge freezers strategically located round across North Canterbury so hunters can donate their surplus venison.

"We collect together and run a batch of mince once a month.

"We also get venison trim donated from a couple of large-scale hunting operations that are absolutely fantastic support to us, and without them it wouldn't be possible.

"When we do big events like the North Canterbury Hunting Competition, the hunters ... donated between 100 and 120 deer.

"We processed them over the weekend with a team of guys, and we've got that mince ready to go into the food bank on Thursday this week.

"We've had a lot of friends approach us as well, saying 'Hey, we're keen to get on board and give you guys a hand' because the animals we took from the competition did need to be skinned, boned and put into the chiller.

"There's a bit of work involved. We had a crew of 14 guys on board yesterday all helping to do that, which was great."

There's a real mix of volunteers Hill says.

Old, young, retired - even "Dad's Army" - Kreisel's father and his mates.

Everyone, it seems, wants to help.

Source

• RNZ

The expectation from neighbours who are disturbed by poor behaviour is that Kainga Ora, or the police, or "government" in general, should "crack down hard" on those who ignore or defy the rules and normal conventions of good citizenship.

This might entail sanctions or evictions.

A couple of points here. I use "poor behaviour" advisedly because it arises from two forms of poverty, the first being relative financial poverty.

As Bob Marley sang: A hungry man is an angry man. Cost of living get so high, rich and poor they start to cry, they say, "Oh! What a tribulation."

The second (and, I would argue, more disabling) form of poverty, is poverty of spirit.

This arises when people feel they have no agency, no power to shape their lives and the circumstances of their wellbeing.

I appreciate that the political mood of the moment is to smash and bash the non-compliant.

But another (and more likely to be effective) approach might be to work with social housing tenants to describe, and then define, the social environment in which they want to live. It's called intentional community building.

Building Intentional Communities

I believe that one of the elements that confounds the successful utilisation of Aotearoa's social housing is the lack of intentional community building and the absence of attention to the social architecture of residential tenancies in social housing complexes.

What might that look like?

In 1973, as a community volunteer, I was the fieldworker for the Wellington Tenants Protection Association. We organised a rent strike against a Wellington rack-rent slumlord.

When we brought the tenants together, we discovered that, over and above the immediate concerns of their rents and tenancies, they were also facing issues of food security.

As they were already collaborating over the rent strike, it was a simple step to set up a food co-operative and to bring immediate relief to each whanau by providing affordable good-quality kai.

Moreover, in Newtown at least, we set up a community garden and established play groups and holiday programmes at the nearby community centre.

When people have a shared vision and a channel through which to co-operate, life becomes better. This is hardly rocket science.

Here's another lesson. In the late 1980s, I was awarded a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Scholarship. I ended up working with the Easterhouse Festival in Glasgow, Scotland, an arts-based community-building programme.

Easterhouse is a suburb of Glasgow, and a housing project there was intended to be the solution to the poor tenement housing in the Gorbals, an area in the city of Glasgow on the south bank of the River Clyde.

By the late 19th century, the Gorbals had become densely populated with poor quality overcrowded housing. Poverty was commonplace and violence was endemic. In a word, the area was a slum.

After World War Two, a comprehensive slum clearance programme led to whanau from the Gorbals being relocated to Easterhouse.

Easterhouse is a physically isolated suburb six miles east of the city centre, poorly served by public transport and cut off by the M8 motorway that runs along its periphery. Sound familiar?

Because the social architecture was ignored, the whole effort was a disaster. Easterhouse became infamous as the worst place in Great Britain to live.

When I visited Easterhouse, tenants were housed in blocks of six flats, three stories either side of a common stairwell. The stairwell had become a pissoir. There was broken glass and dog-shit everywhere.

Despite the lofty ambitions of the planners and the noble intent of the politicians, this urban environment was riddled with poverty, poor infrastructure, shoddily-built and maintained housing, and a lack of local investment and employment opportunities.

In recent years, I've watched Kainga Ora's intensification of housing, particularly in Auckland, and more recently in Napier and Hastings.

Existing housing stock has been demolished and the classic quarter-acre sections on which one whare previously sat now feature two duplexes.

Four whanau now occupy the same area of land once occupied by one. Huge developments are planned, and housing minister Chris Bishop wants councils to make space more readily available.

But where's the evidence of the human planning — the social and interpersonal architecture, not just with the social housing tenants but with their neighbours and community?

I've been reminded of the spectre of Easterhouse and fear that we are about to repeat the same mistake.

I think I'm pretty much up with the play about what's possible in social housing. I chair the Waiohiki Community Charitable Trust.

We are a social housing provider, and, before Cyclone Gabrielle, we administered 14 social houses, predominantly in the context of papakainga. We're about a decade in.

Like my cousin Murphy, I'm a relentless optimist.

When we built our first papakainga, I thought that the provision of warm, dry, safe, housing at an affordable rent, and with security of tenure, would win the day.

Tenants would say: "Wow! How lucky we are. Let's look after this place and create a wonderful environment."

Not so. We had to cope with cuzzies who had city habits and weren't used to shared spaces. We had some with unacceptable behaviours who had to amend their ways and habilitate.

It wasn't easy, and in some instances, it was personally challenging and downright unpleasant.

But we prevailed. Now, post-cyclone, people are more appreciative.

The mara kai is pumping, we've planted hundreds of native trees, and those hedges that survived are trimmed and tidy. Tenants are proud of their environment, and it shows.

So, back to Kainga Ora. The housing need is great, and so are the social needs of our whanau.

Where to start

If we want to tackle domestic violence, sub-optimal childcare, abuse of intoxicants, be they licit or illicit, and dare I say it, gangs, then a good place to start is literally on the social housing whanau doorstep.

Ministers whose portfolios cover social housing, Chris Bishop and Tama Potaka, have an opportunity here.

They could choose to step away from the oppressive and alienating approach that this National-led coalition government seems determined to take around Maori and Pasifika issues by facilitating intentional community building.

Imagine gathering prospective tenants together before occupying a new housing estate, sharing a kai and having a korero about how they want to live together.

The same could be done with existing clusters of social housing tenants and their neighbours. Maybe involve social service providers.

We can move the community discussion away from complaining about problems to discussing solutions and opportunities — in other words, assist the shift from pathology to potential. It needn't be a complex process.

It's doable. So, let's have a crack at it, eh?

• Denis O'Reilly lives at Waiohiki in Hawke's Bay where he chairs the Waiohiki Community Charitable Trust. He is a writer, social activist and consultant.
• First published in E-Tangata. Republished with permission.

It is one of several points the Commission made to Parliament's Economic Development, Science and Innovation Select Committee.

The Parliamentary Committee is trying to reign in the excessive market power of the supermarket duopoly.

"The supermarket duopoly combined with the slow train wreck of the housing crisis has families scrambling to find enough money for food and other basics," says Peter Garrick, the Executive Secretary of the Justice and Peace Commission of the Catholic Diocese of Auckland.

Garrick told the Committee that the slow train wreck has been allowed to happen under the unwatchful eyes of repeated governments of varying political colours.

Accompanying Garrick was Lorraine Elliott, the dioceses Vicar for Social Impact and Communication.

Speaking for the most vulnerable, Elliott reinforced one of the findings of the March 8 Commerce Commission's study showing major grocery retailers were earning $1m daily in excess profits.

Elliott said where food makes up a major part of the weekly budget families are being held hostage to unfair prices for food and other basics.

Favouring regulation as a way of control, Elliott said Maori and Pacifika communities are particularly vulnerable.

Supporting the Grocery Sector Covenants Amendment Bill, the Justice and Peace Commission wants to see the Bill strengthened in three areas -

• framing the prohibition on the anti-competitive covenants more broadly so that other forms of retail do not continue to suffer
• ensuring lease agreements that feature various types of rights of first refusal (ROFR) don't hinder the lease of the land to another supermarket or food distributor without significant penalty
• ensuring supermarkets can't unreasonably delay new developments by endlessly raising objections to the District Plan or the Resource Management Act.

"Alleviating the exploitation of consumers by the present supermarket duopoly won't be an easy fix. It will take determined, careful effort on many fronts in order to make a difference," warned Garrick.

The Commission is urging the Government to prepare legislation to establish a dedicated regulator for the grocery sector that will -

• ensure access to wholesale grocery items for new grocery chains
• establish an enforceable code of conduct between major retailers and suppliers to prevent exploitation
• facilitate planning regulations about supermarket development so that developments are not endlessly delayed.

Garrick told CathNews that he does not think it will be easy to rein in these two giants - even in Australia where there is a third chain, the two main players have 82% of the market and have very aggressive policies to expand their retail range and use restrictive covenants to keep out others.

However, the Commission remains committed to doing what it can to speak up and help protect the most vulnerable.

Source

• Supplied: Auckland Justice and Peace Commission.

Advocates for Auckland Action Against Poverty (AAAP) and beneficiaries using their services say the support offered this year did not match that of the first lockdown.

Just surviving is a struggle that is seeing the demand for the Auckland City Mission's services soar. The Mission says people seeking help over the past three months has been the highest in its 100-year history.

It is currently distributing more than 1600 food parcels every week, more than double what was being given out pre-Covid-19.

Missioner Helen Robinson says the demand shows how many people were living without enough money for food.

"We're conscious of people particularly who are on casual labour or even on contracts, people who have been receiving the wage subsidy gratefully - but if their rent or mortgage payments constitute a significant part of that, then what's left over is very, very limited."

With Christmas coming, the Mission's worried it won't be able to provide up to 9000 boxes of food and tens of thousands of presents for families who will otherwise go without this festive season.

The Mission is hoping for supplementary help from the public in the form of donated food and gifts, as demand this year is likely to be higher than the Mission itself can supply, Robinson says.

"In fact, we've been doing the most of what we can do for the last three months so this planning for Christmas is truly kind of the last draw of breath that the Mission can give this year to respond to the level of need," she explains.

An AAAP advocate says the people they worked with "just wanted money for food".

Scraping money together for kai often means falling behind on power, internet and water bills.

The advocate also says people saw getting a loan from the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) for clothes and household appliances as too hard during lockdown. They are just trying to survive by whatever means they can.

"I suspect that in some cases people have also found other ways of getting the money needed to survive such as allowing their school-age children to get part-time work," the advocate suggests.

They feel the ministry workers are being "far less generous-spirited" than in last year's lockdown.

"The response from MSD just seems to show a total failure to comprehend the enormity and seriousness of this pandemic and the problems it is causing for the very poorest members of society."

The MSD refutes this, saying client surveys show "high levels of satisfaction" with the Ministry's service, with 93 percent of applications for food grants approved last month.

Source

• RNZ
• Stuff
• Image: The Spinoff

The golden arches were first sighted in Porirua in 1976. Just 20 years later, there were 100 McDonald's restaurants in the country. Nowadays, fast food restaurants are an omnipresent feature of the landscape of urban New Zealand.

Kiwis flocked to the cities in the latter half of the 20th century, and as we moved, so too did the source of our lunch and dinner.

New Zealand has the third-highest adult obesity rate in the OECD, and rates continue to increase - yet in many of New Zealand's most socially disadvantaged suburbs, fast food and other unhealthy options are often the only pick on the menu.

Children living in deprived neighbourhoods are almost three times as likely to be obese compared to those living in more affluent areas, according to the New Zealand Health Survey.

The Government has taken a broad approach, focusing on messages of nutrition and increased physical activity.

But researchers from Auckland University of Technology say the answer lies in building food havens - places with food that is culturally accessible, affordable and desirable, found on a family, community or local business level.

"... Healthy eating campaigns that ignore the cultural meaning of food may miss their target audience, and there should be more focus on promoting healthy food that people in communities over-represented in obesity feel connected to."

The need for food havens first occurred to public health researcher Dr Radilaite Cammock when she was trying to find groceries for her kids in her South Auckland neighbourhood.

"The idea came to mind when trying to find a healthy market to give my kids' food," she said. "I couldn't find anywhere good close to where I live."

Cammock says change needs to come from empowering communities rather than expecting the big corporations to do a sudden U-turn on providing healthy food.

"If you look to the big food organisations to change, you miss some great stuff that can change in the community," she said. "We've spoken to young entrepreneurs who are trying to sell healthy food with a cultural connection."

In South Auckland, enterprises like Papatoetoe Food Hub and Otara Kai Village have been providing healthy and affordable kai with a focus on culture and community.

Developed by the Southern Initiative, Papatoetoe Food Hub wants to build supply and demand for good food in South Auckland.

Since July 2019, they've repurposed around 300kg of unused produce a week - some from Papatuanuku Marae and Pukekohe farmers - but mainly from the New World across the road.

Bin says they may be the only business in New Zealand based on rescuing food.

"It's a whole cycle. Our food waste goes into compost, which we then use in planter boxes where we grow our own food. We've been composting about 100kg a week."

They hope to be part of shifting South Auckland's dependency on fast food. Continue reading

• Image: Newsroom

Food insecurity, or food poverty, is defined as not having enough appropriate food.

The City Mission says information about food insecurity in New Zealand is outdated and sparse.

But research led by the mission's general manager of social services, Helen Robinson, estimates about 10 per cent of the population is experiencing food insecurity.

The survey involved 650 people who had accessed the organisation's foodbank.

19 per cent of children live in families which lack food security

A 2019 New Zealand Health Survey estimate indicated that although the majority of children live in food-secure households, many New Zealand children do not.

In 2015/16, almost one in five children (19.0%) lived in households with severe to moderate food insecurity.

Women, Maori and Pasifika

Predominantly, women were the face of food insecurity and were bearing the greatest burden of poverty.

Maori and Pasifika people were also over-represented amongst those living with food insecurity, the City Mission said.

The research found that nearly 40 per cent of those surveyed have struggled to access enough appropriate food for themselves and their household for two years or more.

People who didn't have enough food were more likely to be emotionally unwell and were distressed some of the time.

Linked to poverty

The City Mission said food insecurity is linked to poverty.

Once housing costs were paid, low-income individuals and families were often forced to choose between buying food and other essential costs.

When there wasn't enough money for food, people either ate poorly or missed meals completely.

The City Mission has called for action

• Hold an annual survey to gather information about how adults and children are affected by food insecurity
• Develop a national food strategy giving vision and direction, cohesion and coordination to ensure everyone has enough appropriate food
• Consider women-oriented interventions, such as raising the level of the sole parent support payment, and providing further financial assistance to women raising children
• Raise income levels.

Click here to donate to Auckland City Mission

Source

• rnz.co.nz
• health.govt.nz
• Image: aucklandcitymission.org.nz

Its Social Services general manager Helen Robinson (pictured above) said that, for many families, once they had paid rent, debts, power, transport and medical costs, there was little left to spend on food.

Robinson said that an economist's assessment found that a family of three supported by a single breadwinner working a 40-hour week on pay just above minimum wage would have $6.43 per person per day for food.

"Which is simply, as you and I know, just not enough," she told Breakfast host John Campbell.

People often pay the rent, electricity, send their children to school and pay medical bills, but end up having to reduce costs on food - including the kind of food and amount of it, Robinson said.

"Being food-insecure affects your physical health, it affects your mental wellbeing, it affects your ability to learn at school, relationships you have, it affects your spirit," she said.

Statistics recently released by the Ministry of Health showed one in five Kiwi children were living with "food insecurity", meaning there was an uncertain or limited amount of food available to them.

The City Mission is launching its annual winter appeal. It is trying to raise awareness and funds to support those facing insecurity about where their next meal comes from.

"Our appeal is looking to raise money to continue to run the services and support we provide to Auckland's vulnerable citizens, we also want to try to raise awareness of food insecurity and how devastating, wide-reaching and long term the effects can be," Robinson said.

Click here to make a donation

Source

• stuff.co.nz
• tvnz.co.nz
• Image: stuff.co.nz

Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana told the BBC the Church has never been against natural family planning.

During the Pope's trip back from the Philippines, the Pontiff invited people to some form of birth control, the cardinal told the BBC.

This is "because the Church has never been against birth control and people spacing out births and all of that. So yes, it can offer a solution", he said.

"Having more mouths to feed is a challenge for us to be productive also, which is one of the key issues being treated over here [in Paris at the COP21 talks], the cultivation and production of food, and its distribution.

"So yes it engages us in food security management, so we ensure that everybody is fed and all of that.

"The amount of population that is critical for the realisation of this is still something we need to discover, yet the Holy Father has also called for a certain amount of control of birth."

Cardinal Turkson was at pains to stress that artificial birth control methods such as the contraceptive pill were still beyond the pale as far as the Church was concerned.

"You don't deal with one good with another evil: the Church wants people to be fed, so let's do what the Church feels is not right?

"That is a kind of sophistry that the Church would not go for," he said.

Cardinal Turkson, who heads the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, is believed to have played a significant role in the drafting of Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato Si'.

Speaking in Paris, the cardinal called for a strong agreement that would protect the most vulnerable nations.

He said climate change was a looming ecological disaster.

Sources

• BBC
• Daily Mail
• Image: Catholic Herald