Volume Two - Editorial

Our second volume of Stone Soup – Autumn / Winter – revolves around the idea of abundance.

Nature is very generous to us in autumn – it is a time of delicious bounty. But winter, in the absence of ingenuity, is a time of scarcity.

So we’ve curated a store of stories to keep you going until spring, which explore both sides of our theme – celebrating how we as humans find ways to overcome scarcities, both real and artificial, through our wealth of creativity, generosity and knowledge.

Harvesting and fermenting grapes in Martinborough; picking and pressing olives in the Far North; planting, sharing and saving real apples from the zombies in Southland; the sharing of knowledge down the family tree in Malaysia and of a Cambodian New Year in South Auckland.

But we also look at the flip side, at some scarcity hacks – like making the things in our cupboards go a bit further by preparing food with what we routinely waste, recipes with nutritious and ignored plants lamentably referred to as weeds, prolific between the cracks with the arrival of the rain. We’ve looked at a couple of our most sustainable and nutritious yet misunderstood foods, oysters and kina: delicacies to those in the know, free to the forager. How to plant a tree in the local park, make your own compost, pickle an old cabbage and perhaps best of all, how to create ‘community unity’ at a Lower Hutt primary school.

We hope you enjoy and find inspiration in these and many more stories in our sophomore effort. We’ll be launching a companion website very soon. Keep an eye on our Instagram for updates @stonesoupsyndicate

The End – Thanks!

At Stone Soup we are lucky to be unlike most other publications, we are not really a business. Instead we are a bunch of people who are passionate about the things we want to communicate and create… and eat.

We’re attached to an old-fashioned idea – deemed redundant by most of publishing – that the magazine needs to drive its own content and editorial decisions and publish journalism and not camouflaged advertising. We want to champion stories about people who are doing real things, people we’re inspired by, not because they’ve paid us but because we find them interesting and think you will too.

So we’d like to thank our advertisers, who, at a difficult time for publishing, have chosen to place old-school ads in Stone Soup, enabling us to pay our printers.

And thanks again to everybody who’s contributed, especially those in the background doing the uncredited work. You know who you are and we really appreciate you.

And finally, a shout out for all of the enthusiasm and support for the first issue. We’re really pleased to have found a receptive audience and hope you like this volume as much as you enjoyed the last.