10/03/2026
Funny how growing and gathering kai can reconnect you to things you didnāt even realise youād lost.
Late night thoughts.
Tonight I found myself thinking about how our journey into mahinga kai really started. I was lucky growing up around it. Fishing, diving, butchering homekill ā beef, pork, venison, chickens, ducks, all sorts of fruit trees. That was just normal life for us - not that I ever appreciated it at the time.
My grandparents grew up in a time where you hunted, grew, farmed or gathered your kaiā¦ or you didnāt eat. There were no other options. It was strict. It was hard. But it was also what connected them to the land and to each other.
My PÄpÄ used to talk about sitting on the riverbank eeling for hours. Mahinga kai takes time and patience. While he waited heād hear different birds calling and slowly learned the difference between them all. Heād watch the insects in the water, notice which ones the eels fed on and which ones they weren't interested in. At the time he wasnāt thinking about connection or mindfulness or anything like that - he was just trying to feed his whÄnau. He had nine siblings at that time. Survival was the goal. But looking back now, that was also the beginning of his relationship with the whenua.
And strangely enough, our own journey into mahinga kai didnāt start from some romantic love of the whenua either.
It started out of desperation.
During COVID our pÄpi was only six weeks old and suddenly the shelves were empty. Formula was sold out everywhere because other mums were understandably panicking. I remember sitting there thinking that the money we had in our account didnāt even matter if there was nothing left to buy.
That feeling of not knowing how you were going to feed your baby does something to you.
Just like my grandparents, it pushed us back toward the basics. Toward learning how to provide for ourselves and our tamariki.
And now here we are generations later, fishing in the same spots. Our kids swimming in the same waters their tīpuna did. Eating kai from the same whenua and awa that fed our ancestors.
The only word I can find to describe how it feels is magical.
Iāve struggled with depression myself over the years, and something Iāve noticed on this journey is that when your connection to your awa, your whenua, and your maunga becomes strongā¦ the outside world doesnāt hit quite as hard.
When you spend time with the taiao you start to realise pretty quickly how incredibly resilient the whenua is. And I think thereās something in that for us as people too.
My grandparents had childhoods most of us today would struggle to imagine. But I never once heard them talk about life with bitterness. They spoke about those times with honesty, sometimes sadness, but also with appreciation. They found richness in life through each other and through the natural world around them.
Later in life when they began weaving tikanga MÄori back into their everyday lives, a stronger sense of belonging and purpose seemed to come with it.
Iām not even sure where I was going with this anymore...
I just keep coming back to how beautiful it is that through something as simple as growing and gathering kai, we can reconnect with our ancestors, our whenua, and each other.
Maybe thatās something our KaumÄtua always understood.
When the whenua begins to heal, the people start healing too.
And honestlyā¦ I think thatās pretty bloody beautiful.
