Food tells a story. And Freerange Press wants to tell the story of New Zealand’s contemporary food identity, and how it impacts our culture.
Freerange Press crowdfunded with us last year to publish Don’t Dream It’s Over: Reimagining Journalism in New Zealand. This year, they’re reaching out to their crowd again in order to publish this cultural cookbook of food stories from Aotearoa. Through essays, profiles and recipes, Kai and Culture canvasses a range of views and stories from local food cultures, experts, and chefs – but now it needs your contributions to tell all those stories. So to find out more about why you should be pledging, we had a chat to the team at Freerange Press.
Why do you think this campaign is important?
Food is such a strong part of culture and it is a great lens through which to look at ideas and issues, because everyone shares in the experience of food. We wanted to tell the story of Aoteroa’s local food cultures because it feels like a contemporary food identity is emerging – where we are confident in our produce and where we are beginning to understand our place as a Pacific and multicultural nation.
So through talking about our food culture, and the people involved in creating local food identities, we also talk about the issues that intersect with it – from the environmental impacts in producing food through to food security and resilience. A range of chefs, producers and writers share their views and stories.
This is a cultural cookbook – recipes, essays, profiles and heaps of photos – and we hope that this format invites more people to read it and engage with our food culture and its contemporary issues.
What motivated you to reach out to your crowd?
Basically we have a cash flow problem. We are printing in New Zealand, which is expensive, so we need to make some pre-sales of the book to help pay the bill (because we need to pay this before we sell books to the bookstores). So we are asking people to order a copy of the book, which they will receive hot off the press. But we are throwing in a copy of one of our classic publications to say thank you to early supporters. And all of this just in time for Christmas!
What do you have planned for the rest of the campaign – anything for us to look forward to?
We will release some behind the scenes material of the book-making, some sneak-peak content and also run a draw for some of our lovely wares. The first 60 pledgers will go in the draw to win a wee Freerange gift pack.
Anything you’d like to shout out to your crowd?
We want to thank all the early supporters for getting behind us thus far. We also want to ask people to support us – a small, independent press – to get this book to print so that we can share our local food stories with Aotearoa.
