Feeding Indigenous Aotearoa better

How Aotearoa imagines our food futures – the role food plays in our lives, our cultures, our economy, our media representations, our marketing campaigns – will depend on the available vocabulary we have for thinking about food and its value to society. The diverse realities of Māori offer important perspectives on how we might imagine and participate in our nation's food futures. This article provides an overview of our recent Kaupapa Māori research project Kai Atua: food stories for hope and wellbeing which explains how food is part of an Indigenous woven universe made up of human communities, ngā Atua (deities), economic and social forces and the natural world. We argue that this interconnected approach to food offers pathways of hope for whānau and communities who seek to disconnect from our current broken food system and we shine a light on existing successful small-scale food growing practices within Indigenous Aotearoa that contribute to greater wellbeing for both tangata and whenua.