Features
What can we do with Crooked Possibilities?
Author. Stone Soup — 17/ 09/ 2023
Luca McLean talks to Crooked Vege Ōtaki about getting back to the basics.
Features
Che Guevara, Chez Panisse
Author. Stone Soup — 10/ 09/ 2023
Why are the politics of the alternative food movement in wealthy countries so underwhelming?
Features
No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating
Author. Stone Soup — 21/ 08/ 2023
Alicia Kennedy is one of the most interesting voices to have recently emerged in food media. Of New York origin and currently based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she is an incisive, funny and fearless essayist traversing the intersections of food politics, gender, labor, economics, race, coloniastion, climate and more. Multiple Stone Soup contributors have pointed to her newsletter over the last few years, as Alicia’s writing and attitude share the punk ethos and DIY spirit that motivated the birth of Stone Soup.
Features
Let them eat Sushi!
Author. Stone Soup — 25/ 09/ 2022
By Natalie Brittan
It all started when I said I was going to pack sushi for my children’s lunchboxes.
Features
Soil is Sacred
Author. Stone Soup — 11/ 09/ 2022
By Nick Stringer
Scientists have only just begun to understand the universe of life beneath our feet. But the sacredness of the soil was known to ancient cultures and communities.
Hospitality/Dining
Cafe-Hospo and Single-Use Serviceware: The Story of a Dysfunctional Second Marriage
Author. Stone Soup — 28/ 08/ 2022
By Laura Cope
Fortyish years ago, when they first became a couple, Cafe-Hospo and Single-Use Serviceware shone. Single-Use Serviceware was the ultimate head turner: convenient, flattering, charismatic. So, what happened? How did this seemingly perfect, reciprocal relationship morph into increasing dysfunction?
Features
Stop Greenwashing my Greens
Author. Stone Soup — 21/ 08/ 2022
By Divyaa Kumar
On Ugly Food in our Supermarkets, and Food Waste Solutionism
Features
Digging for Clams
Author. Stone Soup — 14/ 08/ 2022
By Akiko Kurematsu
While writing my first book, a memory that was lost to me for decades returned.
Features
Metanoia: The hard work of changing our minds.
Author. Stone Soup — 02/ 08/ 2022
By Sarah Hopkinson
Imagine thriving food production systems within Aotearoa that are not only environmentally just, but socially equitable too.
Video
Indigenous Food Sovereignty
Author. Stone Soup — 06/ 09/ 2021
Our friends at Happen Films have made a short documentary with Dr Jessica Hutchings, on Hua Parakore and indigenous food sovereignty.
Features
Emergence
Author. Stone Soup — 19/ 08/ 2021
Stone Soup Volume 11.
“Inside the word “emergency” is “emerge”; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.” – Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
Features
The gardener
Author. Stone Soup — 19/ 08/ 2021
New growth emerges from the tips of wise and weary fingers. The sun has returned, like the warm presence of a friend. Flowers shoot from their sleeping bags ready for the day — dark red of feijoa flowers, the yellow of nasturtium and the bright orange of calendula.
Features
Te Mahi Oneone Hua Parakore: A Maori Soil Sovereignty and Wellbeing Handbook.
Author. Stone Soup — 19/ 08/ 2021
What would Māori health and wellbeing look like from the viewpoint of soil?
Features
Tipu shoots
Author. Stone Soup — 19/ 08/ 2021
On what has turned out to be a muggy and cloudy spring day, I’ve driven past the northern shore of Lake Rotorua to arrive at the Te Puea orchard. A basic shed greets me and it’s ghostly quiet. It turns out, the action is at the back – behind the nursery and veggie patches, about 60 hands and feet are busy planting.
Features
SOURCED
Author. Stone Soup — 19/ 08/ 2021
A project to change our relationship with food and drink By Dr Anna Sulan Masing and Chloe-Rose Crabtree.
Features
On Inspiration and personal journeys
Author. Stone Soup — 19/ 08/ 2021
In late May I saw on her Instagram story that Monique Fiso’s mum had pre-ordered a copy of Hiakai — her daughter’s book, which had been three years in the making. Immediately—I mean immediately—I followed suit and waited eagerly for the September release date. Upon its arrival I shared a picture and tried to clip the wings of my pride as I rambled adoringly: “…one day I can be that person, inspiring someone else and making them proud, you know? Representation matters heaps, and not just in childhood. We all need heroes.”
Features
Setting Down Roots in West Auckland
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
“Without effort, no harvest will be abundant” – Burundi proverb
Features
Boy Am I Scared – We Stand Up
Author. Dan Kelly — 18/ 08/ 2021
“One should be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Features
Ron Finley
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
“Because I’m a badass”. That’s Ron Finley’s response as to how he ended up with his own entry in the online video seminar series, Masterclass. And he’s not wrong. Over the past ten years Finley has gone from fashion designer, to the “Gangsta Gardener” of South-Central Los Angeles. Throughout that time Finley has been a total badass, championing the benefits of community connection to food, creating guerrilla gardens in parking lots, rooftops, swimming pools, and getting plants in wherever they could survive, thrive and provide.
Features
They tried
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
“They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.”
Features
Kapwa
Author. Charles Buenconsejo — 18/ 08/ 2021
From lockdown to Open Homes – generating a village through the practice of giving.
Features
Old School Papa – keeping it real, fresh and local
Author. Here's Barney — 18/ 08/ 2021
The first Covid-19 lockdown felt like the return to a simpler time for me. Almost like the time my grandparents grew up in, when it was less of a rat race. I still had the structure of work, but things slowed down. I didn’t see as many people, I had more time to garden and cook, to be more in touch with myself and others – things we usually neglect when we’re working hard on the daily grind.
Features
Liberating local food from lockdown
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
My family lives on Slow Farm, a little patch of sort-of rural land on the edge of a village in the Manawatū. Ashhurst is the name given by settlers, in honour of a man who never set foot in Aotearoa, but tangata whenua called it Otangaki, referring to the act of weeding and cultivating the fertile loam soils left when the Pohangina and Manawatū rivers flooded.
Features
the ultimate, hidden truth
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
“the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
― David Graeber
Features
I once had an office in a flour mill.
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
My flour journey began at Timaru Milling Company nearly thirty years ago, during a year-long secondment in a technical support role for factories using flours from wheat, barley, corn and oats. Built in 1882, Timaru Milling was the first in the country to be equipped with roller mills, and it was later the site for the manufacture of Diamond Pasta. The other factory, Flemings Creamoata Mill in Gore, began as an oat mill in 1893.
Features
From Grain Farmer to Us to You
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
For our small family bakery, the Covid-19 lockdown reinforced how important relationships and a human scale local food chain can be in times of crisis. We are a whanau of six who run a community supported micro-bakery at Hāwea Flat, near Wānaka, making and baking predominantly 100% whole grain sourdough loaves that serve as a functional and sustaining daily staple.
Features
It’s the end of the big menu as we know it, and I feel fine
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
The Greystone cellar door restaurant had to reinvent itself during the Covid-19 lockdown to comply with rules around service. On the fly, we had to work out how to look after our staff and our customers while still being able to serve great food with our wines. We decided to abandon a traditional written menu of many choices and instead ran with a set four-course menu – no choices offered. It might not turn out to be a great idea, it’s early days so who knows, but for now it feels right.
Features
Turning Gold to Lead
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
“All we want is our fucking fish back.”
Features
The earth heals us
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
Features
Together, we grow
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
Katherine Descours visits Julia Milne of Common Unity, to see what’s been going on since Stone Soup was there last, in 2016. Lightly edited for clarity and length.
Features
Acts of Love
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
There have been many times in my working life that I wished I could just have a break. I work as a chef, and it is tough. Often it feels as if there is no time to think about what really matters. I wanted to be a chef from a young age, watching my mother cook from what little we had, every day. Her cooking was an act of love.
Features
“she is on her way.”
Author. Stone Soup — 18/ 08/ 2021
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
