good food boost logo

When the world seems so gut-wrench­ingly awful and determ­ined to crush the most vul­ner­able even fur­ther into the ground it’s kind of hard to write about events and launches and deli­cious food (yes, truly we are the ones suf­fer­ing, etc. Not). So if we can spot­light people doing good work, like Epuni School’s Unity Garden I guess now is even more import­ant than ever.

The gar­dens came up dur­ing talks at the launch of the Sus­tain­able Busi­ness Net­work & Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil’s Good Food Boost  pro­gramme last night.

Four busi­nesses will be chosen to be part of an eight-week pro­gramme to receive sup­port and guid­ance from lead­ing ment­ors to give their good food busi­nesses a boost.

The Good Food Boost has been run in Auck­land by the Sus­tain­able Busi­ness Net­work and Auck­land Tour­ism Events & Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment (ATEED) for the last three years. This is the first year the com­pet­i­tion is com­ing to Wel­ling­ton.

I have had some ..feel­ings… about a num­ber of factors about dif­fer­ent aspects of “eth­ic­al choices” and sus­tain­ab­il­ity before (such as: afford­ab­il­ity, access­ib­il­ity, cloth­ing labels that don’t make clothes over size 14, Nadia Lim imply­ing learn­ing to cook via My Food Bag is a solu­tion for a dis­ease that is cre­ated by poverty and a mil­lion oth­er things that basic­ally all boil down to priv­ilege) so look­ing at the entry cri­ter­ia for what counts as ‘Good Food’ makes for encour­aging read­ing:

Good food:

  • Is leg­al, safe, healthy and nutri­tious
  • Con­trib­utes to loc­al eco­nom­ies.
  • Reduces ‘waste’ and inef­fi­cien­cies.
  • Pro­tects water, soil and biod­iversity.
  • Is trans­par­ent about where it comes from and how it is grown and cared for.
  • Recog­nises and enhances cul­tur­al diets and food prac­tices.
  • Increases the mar­ket share for good food.

Those are all things I can get behind. And of course, I sup­port people mak­ing eth­ic­al food choices for them­selves and their fam­il­ies. I want those choices to be avail­able to every­one.

My thoughts are all really rather jumbled right now after today’s heart­break, but one thing I am clear on: can we please keep speeches at events to under 20 minutes if there’s no seat­ing? Even when people have great things to say! And also, if you’re a food busi­ness some­where from the Horowhen­ua to Marl­bor­ough, the Good Food Boost is a great oppor­tun­ity, and you should get amongst it.