Luca Ririnui
For the Year 6 Bellevue School student, the best thing about the Tauranga Montessori institution’s gold-medal-winning Food Over Fear garden project was seeing the plot he and fellow student Clara Douglas designed come to life at the New Zealand Flower & Garden Show.
After creating your Food Over Fear garden, do you have a favourite food weed? I like the black nightshade berries. Often mistaken for its counterpart deadly nightshade, black nightshade is fully edible and delicious. One way you can tell the two apart is that black nightshade has white flowers and deadly has purple. The black, ripe berries of black nightshade are best, because the green, unripe ones are toxic.
Are there any weeds you eat now that you didn’t eat before? While we were making the garden, I tried a lot of the weeds, but to be honest, I haven’t really eaten any weeds since then. My mum drinks thistle tea, though.
Do you have a favourite vegetable? Avocado, even though technically it is a fruit. I also like garden peas.
Do you like to try new foods? Yes. I do it quite a bit when travelling with my family. We were lucky enough to be in Italy last year and I got to eat lots of pizza and pasta with different toppings and sauces. I especially liked trying all the different gelato flavours. I also liked the food from the street markets in South Korea.
What do you normally have for breakfast? Ricies with full-fat milk or toast with Vegemite or crunchy peanut butter.
What’s your usual school lunch? A wholegrainbread sandwich with cheese and sometimes salami, which I toast on the toastie machine at school. Also, some rice crackers, usually seaweed and another flavour, some kind of sweet biscuit, grapes and a granny smith apple.
What’s your favourite dinner? Mexican food. We usually have chilli, nachos and guacamole.
What do you eat for snack break at school? Usually I’m not hungry enough to have a snack break, but when I am, I just have my apple.
Can you tell us about the “free is best” message that was written on your garden fence at the show? It was just saying there are options other than pricey food from the supermarket, and sometimes you might even find weeds growing wild in your backyard with the same, or even better, nutritional value than shopbought fruit and vegetables.