Sophie Gray’s cooking up a change
The Destitute Gourmet has a lot on her plate with feeding New Zealand’s hungry.
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“ verything I do has an air of chaos about it – that’s my ADD superpower,” Sophie Gray tells me frankly. She’s not joking.
She does have ADD, but she says, “It’s not a disadvantage outside the education system. If it involves something I’m interested in, it 100% holds my attention.”
Sophie is probably best known to New Zealanders for her Destitute Gourmet cookbooks, which are full of delicious things you can cook on a budget and came out of a particularly lean period in her own life.
When we meet at her home on Auckland’s North Shore, the former Food magazine editor is calmly organising a stack of donated goods to feed the area’s hungry.
The leafy suburbs of the City of Sails’ northern beaches might seem an unlikely place to find a foodbank, but in these uncertain times, Sophie says there is an overwhelming need. Local foodbanks have seen 30% growth in demand in the past six months. “I don’t think the average Kiwi has the remotest idea how vast and complex the issue of ingrained poverty is.”
“Clients” are referred to her
Good Works Trust Foodbank by a raft of social workers from government agencies and community groups. Sophie says, “I hate the term ‘foodbank’ because, for many people, the bank is not their friend. I’d really like to change the name.”
It was her brother-in-law, the pastor at the Shore Vineyard Church, who convinced her to manage the GWT Foodbank. She was supposed to fill in for the departing CEO for three weeks. A year on, she’s still there and attacking the job with
“I hate the term foodbank because, for many people, the bank is not their friend.”
her characteristic passion.
“I kept sending the board ideas,” she explains ruefully. “I come from a corporate background. I think differently from a lot of people in the social service sector. For example, the space we were working out of reduced our capacity to meet the need, so I persuaded the board to increase our capacity with more shelving and more fridges. Then we reached out to local supermarkets to give us slightly damaged goods or products coming to the end of their best-by dates.”
That ‘Pommy’ girl
Sophie was born in the UK to an English graphic-designer dad and an Australian mum, who immigrated here in 1969, settling in the Auckland suburb of Birkenhead when she was two and her sister Fran was five.
“I had a fortunate, affectionate, comfortable upbringing,” she shares. “Dad was a feminist and was delighted with his two daughters. There was a sense of ‘girls can do anything’ in the house. He supported Mum with every decision she made.”
But her mother yearned for more education, so when her girls were at primary school, she took herself off to Glenfield College as one of its first adult students. She would go on to university and become an accountant.
“Mum was so grateful for her education – she wanted it so much and she wanted it for us, which we deeply resented at the time,” Sophie says with a grin.
School was tough for the little
English girls. “Other kids would persecute us for being ‘posh’ with our English accents. ‘Pommy, go home,’ they’d tell us. Dad felt the burden of making it work in New Zealand, so he was always working and he really didn’t get involved in Kiwi life.”
Sophie’s parents instilled in her a strong work ethic. She recalls,
“They both had a pioneering spirit. They were both entrepreneurial and resilient. They also taught me not to expect things to be handed to me on a plate.”
Sophie’s mum was, not surprisingly, an amazing cook.
“I remember walking up to the little local post office to collect the latest edition of Cordon Bleu magazine. Then Mum would spend Friday and Saturday creating elaborate meals
“In the ’80s, you couldn’t even buy women’s chef’s gear. I had to make do with scrunching up men’s trousers.”
for Dad and his advertising friends.”
With a wry smile, she continues,
“My school lunches were quite different from my friends. They’d have Vegemite sandwiches and we’d get good sausages from the butcher up the road, split down the middle, and stuffed with cheddar cheese and homemade tamarillo chutney. We’d get gateau almondine, while everyone else had chocolate crackles. It didn’t help us integrate.”
ADD meant school was, in her words, “a disaster”. Sophie explains, “I was a trial to the nuns at Carmel College. It seemed my whole life,
I was being told to try harder. I was booted out of maths at 14 because I was so far behind.”
On leaving school, she had no idea what she wanted to do. “Mum packed me off to cookery school.” Ironically, Sophie hated it. “In the ’80s, only
2% of the school’s intake were women. You couldn’t even buy women’s chef’s gear. I had to make do with scrunching up men’s trousers. ”
Needless to say, Sophie didn’t last long in the restaurant industry. She worked briefly as a chef and then made the move into the finance industry. But she would soon need every bit of the resilience she’d gained from her life when, during the stockmarket crash, she lost her job and spiralled into debt.
“I was working for a brokerage house selling exchange trading commodity options. It was a risky area. The market crashed and the company was shut down by the
Serious Fraud Office. The directors were escorted out of the building with their hands behind their backs.”
Although Sophie had done nothing wrong, because of the industry she had worked in, she found her integrity being questioned when searching for another job.
“I had to find someone who was willing to employ me and, like lots of young people, I felt I had to keep up appearances with clothes and eating out, but I was utterly and completely ignorant about managing my own resources.”
Although she eventually got a job as a salesperson at Nestle, Sophie understands only too well how the people using her foodbank get into financial holes. “If you’re a beneficiary, for whatever reason, debt is inescapable,” she tells.
She is blunt in her disapproval of buy-now-pay-later schemes. “They’re a trap. If you can’t afford to save for it, then you can’t afford it.” She identifies three key drivers for people struggling on low incomes – the three Ds: depression, debt and divorce.
But the good news is, as Sophie says, you can get out of debt. And the first step of that, for her, was that she began to “make do” – something that was to become her signature in coming years.
Hunger for change
Sophie met her husband Richard while working at Nestle. “He was cute,” she grins. “He was English, so there was familiarity there and he didn’t talk rugby. He was interested in the same things as me and he made me laugh. He still makes me laugh.” They’ve now been married 30 years and have two adult children, Isabella and Jack.
When the kids were small, the pair decided to set up a marketing business, which they ran from home. “I was terrified of borrowing money, so we just lived off what we had.”
Sophie found the one thing she could really save money on was the grocery bill – and so her Destitute Gourmet brand was born. She says menu planning for the week ahead is a must.
Buy just what you need to make those meals and don’t be a slave to brands. She recommends trying cheaper ones and making them work.
The GWT Foodbank supplies families with three or four days’ worth of food – breakfast, lunch and dinner. Included in the packs are incidentals like face masks, sanitiser and sanitary products. Each is tailored to the needs of the particular family.
Sophie is optimistic about the Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance, a new organisation encouraging food producers to donate surplus food, which they would otherwise throw out, to the needy. Another new group, the New Zealand
Food Network, is charged with distributing these donations to foodbanks like GWT.
She also talks about running a pop-up shop that would sell groceries at affordable prices to the most vulnerable families, giving them some dominion over their food. “If we’re going to do something, I don’t want it to be piddling. We have to solve the big-picture stuff, then we might really be able to make a difference.”
Sophie published her tenth cookbook at the beginning of this year. Destitute Gourmet by Sophie Gray is a collection of 20 of her fans’ favourite recipes from her earlier books, along with 80 new ones.
She is reaching a whole new generation with her canny cooking. She recently spotted some students in a Dunedin supermarket poring over her cookbook while searching the shelves. “It had lots of Post-it notes sticking out of it,” she grins delightedly.
In this digital age, Sophie is, of course, also an “influencer”, although it’s a title that doesn’t sit well with her. She reckons she’d rather be known as an advocate for ordinary people with ordinary budgets.