Mainland rolls out the welcome for royals
Chef Michael Van De Elzen has had an awful 2019: throat cancer, a near-fatal quad bike crash, and the death of two loved ones. He tells Steve Kilgallon how family, tears and a new TV show have helped him through.
police had apologised and corrected the record.
Police could not comment in time for publication, but in a letter from police legal services to Pulham, Christine Scott says police didn’t notify her because ‘‘there was no risk of foreseeable harm resulting from the breach . . . In our view (the apology) is the appropriate remedy in this instance.’’
Scott said the breach wasn’t as serious as Saleh’s because Pulham was only named once in the disclosure, and it didn’t identify her as a criminal. ‘‘The disclosure does not, in our view, reflect her in a particularly bad light.’’
Failing to answer a summons and lying about a crime are both offences.
Parker said police were careless and had ‘‘failed (Pulham) in their handling of this matter from beginning to the very bitter end. They have failed at every step . . . thinking a person would make a false complaint to police is going to make an officer very wary of a person. Everyone should be requesting their NIA alerts from police and checking the alerts are correct.’’
She also disputed that Pulham hadn’t been harmed. ‘‘The information given out about her wasn’t true and made her look like an offender when she was the victim.’’
Pulham is receiving support, and intends to complain to the Privacy Commissioner, but remains troubled by the incident.
‘‘When I found out they were saying this about my character, it put me in a whirl spin,’’ she says. ‘‘I can’t even express in words what that did. I’m the victim here, why am I being treated like this?’’
NEW Zealand’s latest royal tour wrapped yesterday with South Island engagements ranging from botany to charity, but
Prince Charles missed out on at least one local highlight.
The prince spent four hours in Kaiko¯ ura, where he saw efforts to recover from the January
2016 earthquake and visited the marae where tourists sheltered.
After a walkabout through the main street where he met some of the 600 locals out to grab a glimpse of the royal visitor, the prince was taken through a series of displays at the Memorial Hall, entitled The Future is Bright.
‘‘We designed it from the past, to the present and the future,’’ organiser Joanna York said.
‘‘The past starts with the earthquake and moves on through and goes to the innovation that came out of the earthquake, local artists and then in to where the future’s going.’’
Part of that future involved the re-opening of the quake-damaged
Mayfair Theatre.
The president of Kaiko¯ ura community theatre, John Wyatt, had a display complete with a plan for what the new theatre would look like once the $3.6 million project was completed in 12 months’ time.
One artist, Susie Baker, who created images using an old form of photography, said art played an important part in helping children take their minds off the quakes.
The women from the Kaiko¯ ura Bowling Club did their bit for the royal occasion, baking cakes and whipping up sandwiches in case the prince had time for a cup of tea and a bite to eat.
The club’s president, Carol Reardon, said they had been busy all morning making a feast fit for a king in waiting.
‘‘We’ve got sandwiches, egg, and ham and mustard, cheese and pineapple, and then we’ve got the world famous in Kaiko¯ ura cinnamon oysters made by Viv Butcher.’’
Earlier in the day, Prince Charles met members of Takahanga Marae who were involved in helping house and feed the hundreds of tourists trapped in Kaiko¯ ura in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.
The first royal engagement of the day was the Lincoln Farmers’ Market near Christchurch, where none was more excited than stallholder Nataliya Ivashchenko, who is a huge fan of the royal family and follows the Duchess of Cornwall on Facebook.
‘‘It was amazing to meet her. I visited the UK in 1998 and fell in love with the royals,’’ she said.
‘‘Charles asked about our sauerkraut and I had my photo with Camilla. It was very exciting.’’
The duchess remained in Christchurch, where she visited the Battered Women’s Trust, which has two safe houses accommodating up to 40 women and children seeking safety and shelter.
She met with staff and shared a heartfelt moment with two survivors of severe domestic violence.
Her last engagement was a visit to the Botanic Gardens.
As for the Kaiko¯ ura Bowling Club, the prince didn’t have time for afternoon tea. But RNZ can confirm that the cinnamon oysters, a cinnamon sponge with a cream centre, were delicious.
‘I can’t even express in words what that did. I’m the victim here, why am I being treated like this?’ TANIA PULHAM
RNZ
THERE have been times this year when Michael van de Elzen would drive his quad bike into the middle of a paddock on his rural property, far from anyone else, park up, and burst into tears.
The isolation was a good thing, because he didn’t want to see people. The isolation was a bad thing, because he knew he needed people around him to lift his depression.
In rapid succession, van de Elzen had been diagnosed with throat cancer, been badly injured in a motocross bike accident, undergone radiation therapy and had his best friend and stepfather-in-law both die. There were, he says, ‘‘some pretty dark times’’.
His celebrity chef brand is one built upon chirp and broad smiles, but for most of this year, he’s avoided anyone outside family and close friends. As the fog lifts, he’s ready to talk about 2019, his annus horribilis.
Until the TV thing happened, van de Elzen was a regular chef. The realisation that he didn’t want to be stuck ‘‘in a stainless steel box for 14 hours a day’’ came when he got the Food
Truck TV gig. One of 20 chefs interviewed, he’s not sure why he got the job, because he says his early screen tests were ‘‘shit’’ and he needed a lot of coaching. Perhaps, he thinks, its because they had a kitchen he could use.
Anyway, the show – in which he toured the country in an old van, selling healthified versions of classic takeaways – was a hit. Van de Elzen sold his Mt Eden restaurant Molten soon after, in 2011, then ran Food Truck Garage, and then co-owned an upmarket Ponsonby chicken joint, Boy and Bird.
He found that one tough and so he decided to start from scratch on a 6-hectare block they got in Muriwai (a coastal village west of Auckland).
Van de Elzen says he barely looked at the house (‘‘absolutely knackered – we had to redo everything’’) – just the land and the soil. He loves it. He says they’ll stay for at least a decade.
He has been working on the farm for four years now, planting and working the soil. He has cows, chickens, bees.
Next year, it will be ready, he says vaguely. He won’t let us visit the farm for the photoshoot, and I suspect it’s to continue to hide whatever it is he’s working on. Sleuthing his social media suggests it’s some sort of rural cooking school.
It certainly shouldn’t be a restaurant. At first, he offers a ‘‘maybe’’ to the prospect of opening one in Muriwai, but later in the conversation, he tells me quite firmly he’s finished with all of that. ‘‘Life is too precious. It goes so quickly. I loved it [owning restaurants], not going to do it again.’’
Instead, until 2019 happened, he appeared to be enjoying a slower, more bucolic existence. He grew up rurally, on a poultry farm in Henderson Valley and wanted the same for his children, Hazel, 8, and Ivy, just turned 7.
‘‘I always wanted my kids to grow up on a farm. In the holidays, I would hang out with dad, go out on the tractor with him, or out fencing. I do the same with the kids today: tell them to go outside, ‘see ya, go somewhere, we don’t care, just go outside’ . . .’’
So things were going well.
The house was being renovated, the land worked, and van de Elzen, who wouldn’t mind you saying he was from the commercial end of the chef spectrum, had parlayed his Food Truck fame into TV advertising gigs, hosting TV show Good Living, food ‘‘ambassador’’ roles, his own Good from Scratch food label, cookbooks, some speaking work and a regular Newstalk ZB gig.
But in late 2018, he first noticed his voice beginning to fail. He traced it back, he thought, to a bonfire at his neighbour’s place where he’d accidentally breathed in some ash and felt it burn his throat.
‘‘My voice was everything – it was my livelihood, and I was losing it,’’ he explains. It was starting to cost him some gigs, and he worried more would follow. I put it to him that he was conscious he had to retain some base level of fame to keep earning, and he agrees.
On December 20, van de Elzen and family were on route to his stepfather’s place in Waihi when his throat specialist rang to say he had cancer in his lymph nodes – but it was treatable. He was booked in for a course of radiation in the new year.
2019 began, and on the fourth day of the year, back in Muriwai, van de Elzen, family and friends were in the sand dunes for a night’s camping. He and a mate, Dave, decided to go for a ride on a couple of motocross bikes.
They rode over the lip of a dune, only to find it had a sheer 20m drop on the other side. Van de Elzen’s bike fell on top of him, one end of the exhaust pipe landing on his leg, the other on his helmet. Dave broke three ribs, but was able to drag the bike off van de Elzen, who couldn’t move, then ride off for help. When a helicopter rescue crew returned to winch him out, the wind had blown the sand over both body and bike, making him hard to find. Van de Elzen had a bruised back, torn ligaments in both knees and a broken ankle.
He spent two weeks recovering in hospital over Christmas and New Year. When he was released, it was time for his radiation to start.
As a sufferer of claustrophobia, he says it was ‘‘hideous’’. Five times a week, for six weeks, he would wear a mask specially moulded to his face so tight it was hard to breathe, then lie in position, with your head still, and everyone else outside the room, while the red light descended. He couldn’t do it – he would be violently shaking on the bed, and have to be sedated. It got easier, but it was still tough.
For three weeks afterwards, the burning feeling in his throat and the pain felt terrible. He stayed home, with the ‘‘worst sore throat you’ve ever had, times ten’’. His taste buds went temporarily AWOL, and for awhile he couldn’t speak. He wasn’t a nice bloke to be around at that time, he suspects.
For a couple of months, he kept to himself, working on the farm and taking long solo bike rides along Coast Road with his dog, Hector, trotting alongside. He was, he says, slowly building himself back up, and just about coming right when one of his closest mates, Stephen Ward, whom he’d been through chefs college with, was killed in a car accident in Titirangi in May. . It was only a few weeks after the death of his wife’s stepfather. ‘‘I’d be out on my quad bike in the paddock, park up and just burst into tears. No reason, noone around, just cry . . . it took a long time to get back from that.’’
He was offered counselling but realised that, for him, the therapy was three things: the local community, his mountain bike, and his wife Bee (Belinda).
‘‘A lot of people would clam up and say ‘I will deal with it’, and it doesn’t work, because you need support,’’ he says. ‘‘We didn’t tell anyone I had cancer
‘Mentally I am probably stronger for what I have gone through . . . I’m also feeling a bit more mentally determined to do things now, not next week.’ MICHAEL VAN DE ELZEN
but people kind of found out through the grapevine, and turned up.’’ People brought books, meals, chutneys, walked his dog. He cried a lot.
And he began cycling again. He now mountainbikes 50km in the tracks of the nearby
Woodhill Forest. ‘‘The day I got on that bike, I knew I was getting back to the old me again.’’
He’s got lots of good things to say about his wife and her role in his re-emergence. The nicest, I think, is when he says how proud he is of her. They’ve been together a long time, first meeting in the kitchen of a restaurant called Antiks on Dominion Rd in about 1996, when van de Elzen was 24.
In London, where Van de Elzen worked crazy hours at the 500-seater restaurant Bank, they shared a couple of flats. But only in the second one did they actually pair up, nudged together, he says, by friends. They worked in a luxury hotel in Ireland for a year, then came home to buy out a grimy old German-Thai restaurant in Mt Eden, which became the multiaward-winning Molten.
Bee van de Elzen says
Michael did get angry with the world on occasion during his treatment. What she found hard was the feeling of helplessness: ‘‘You can’t swap places: if I could’ve, I would’ve.’’
She cried on the back deck on occasion, but gardening, tennis, and her daughters have kept her on an even keel. ‘‘You realise you have two little girls and that puts things into perspective.’’
Her husband is now equally cheerful.
And as his mood is returning, so too is the work. He’s got a new TVNZ show lined up, Eat Well for Less: ‘‘It’s a good fit, is kind of all I can say. It’s a food show. Well, it’s a bit of everything.’’
Mentally, he says, he’s fully recovered. Physically, not quite – he’s still got rehab work on his knees and ankles. Actually, ‘‘mentally I am probably stronger for what I have gone through . . . I’m also feeling a bit more mentally determined to do things now, not next week. I want to make the most of every moment now. And I probably hug the kids a little bit harder.’’
In September, he was given the all clear on his cancer. He has begun work on the radio again and filming on the show. He’s a bit croaky. He has to do voice exercises every day. But ‘‘2020 will be a great year,’’ he says, rolling out that big smile. ‘‘We’re back.’’
t’s a very privileged position to be in, when you can afford to not eat everything,’’ food systems expert Emily King says.
In King’s Waiheke Island backyard, chickens roam near the vege garden. Peek into her cupboards and rather than a hodge-podge of food packaging, clear jars with dry stocks are front, centre and labelled.
The director of Spira helps businesses and organisations better understand their food systems to avoid waste, and King was named a global food leader by Food Tank in 2017.
The former environmental lawyer practises what she preaches. Her home is a zero food waste zone. King plans meals for the week so her family doesn’t need to buy more than they need. Her jarred dry foods ensure she knows the inventory of her kitchen, so there’s no doubling up, and she can make use of anything that’s about to go off. She grows her own veges, and scraps are either composted or fed to the chickens.
She says we can be more ambitious about our individual waste and aim for zero.
‘‘It’s time for us to really be more conscious of the impact of our food systems on the environment because it’s one way we can be doing better. It’s an easy way to make a difference,’’ she says.
While plastic has become the emblem of a wasteful society, its existence intertwined with a planet that is doomed to climate change, Kiwis throwing out tonnes of potato peel, broccoli stalks, meat offcuts and mouldy bread, are contributing to our carbon problem.
Figures from studies vary, but around a third of New Zealand’s food, variously estimated at being worth somewhere between $800m and $2b, is dumped into landfill. When it’s dumped, it gets buried; and food without oxygen releases methane.
Ministry for the Environment figures suggest in the 2016 calendar year, 571,000 tonnes of food waste was dumped in landfills by businesses and households. According to data from the National Food Waste Prevention Project, held between 2014 and 2015, 229,002 tonnes of food were being sent to landfill through kerbside collections.
The ministry estimated for every tonne of food chucked in landfill, almost 0.33 tonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gasses were generated.
The waste isn’t just in the food – meat and vegetable production uses water, electricity, labour and transport resources. Anyone who has attempted to grow veges, only to see it eaten by a bird or wasted in the fridge, will know the pain.
According to a Love Food
Hate Waste project, bread, oranges and mandarins, potatoes, beef, cakes and leftovers are the most chucked items. The average family is dumping 73kg, or $563 worth of food, every year.
The country’s food wastage issue was considered so urgent that the Environment Select Committee launched a review in August 2018, looking at prevention. It invited submissions from councils, supermarket groups, waste minimisation groups, even the New Zealand Defence Force.
Independent specialist adviser Miranda Mirosa, a University of Otago associate professor, was in June appointed to analyse the submissions and make a report with recommendations to the committee. Committee chair Duncan Webb says the final briefing was nearly ready to be presented to Parliament, and the public, in about a month’s time.
Select committee member and Labour MP Angie Warren-Clark is perhaps the most enthusiastic member of the panel (‘‘Did you know if food waste was a country it would be the third largest emitter behind China and the USA?’’ she asks in one email), owing to her time working with Tauranga Women’s Refuge, which was a food rescue recipient. Being on the receiving end ‘‘revolutionised’’ its service delivery.
‘‘So when I came to Parliament I wanted to see if there were other opportunities in the food chain to reduce waste and hunger,’’ she says.
To Warren-Clark, a New Zealand with zero food waste must be addressed through the entire food chain – from the tonnes of hail-damaged fruit or over-planted crops, to manufacturing, supermarkets, food industry practices and purchasing models, to consumption trends and consumer preferences. Ideally, she said, everyone would have worm farms or composts, and food waste would be picked up by councils across the country.
In her own household she uses beeswax wraps and Tupperware for food storage (‘‘I’m a reformed Tupperware addict’’), ignores best-before food labels (‘‘I sniff my milk, lol!’’), shops once every three weeks or so (though she travels frequently), and throws old fruit and bread into the freezer. Meals are sometimes put together from
a ‘‘what’s in the fridge?’’ dive. She cooks the entire broccoli, including the stalk, buys fresh, in-season and local, and isn’t fussy about ugly fruit and vegetables.
‘‘A wonky carrot still tastes the same.’’
A canvas of the submissions made to the committee reveal organisations deeply concerned with the issue. Dunedin District Council’s senior strategy officer for waste solutions, Catherine Irvine, was specific in pinpointing Kiwis’ wastage habits: supermarkets were reluctant to sell ugly fruit, fewer people were eating unattractive meat cuts, like offal, households had only basic cooking skills, eateries were serving meals that were too large and weren’t promoting doggy bags, and restaurant meal garnishes often went uneaten.
Auckland Council’s 17-page brief said a recent survey revealed half of Aucklanders admitted they’d only make an effort to reduce their carbon footprint if it benefited them in some way, such as cost savings or health benefits. More than 80 per cent knew food waste was wrong. It recorded that in 2016, 20 per cent of its landfill waste was organic material – 137,000 tonnes worth. ‘‘For Auckland, food waste and food insecurity are two areas of increasing concern, particularly as one may go some way to addressing the other,’’ the submission read.
Experts in the field including Kaibosh, KiwiHarvest and WasteMinz gave their input.
New Zealand Defence Force chief Air Marshal Kevin Short told the committee it did not comprehensively measure its wastage in its own quarters or through its contracted caterers. In October 2018 a pilot study was under way at two locations to quantify food waste using an AI technology called Winnow, but the Defence Force was unable to provide an update to the Sunday Star-Times about the results.
Wellington City Council suggested its ratepayers could save $100 million if they weren’t throwing food away. It suggested relaxing ‘‘visual appearance’’ and food safety label standards – including use by and best by labels – in supermarkets.
Nic Turner, founder of Mainstream Green, which teaches waste reduction, says the message is usually brought home to people when they think about waste in financial terms. ‘‘You’re just throwing away money.’’
For those without space for gardens, worm farms and compost, the easiest way to avoid sending food waste to landfill, is not to have any waste in the first place, she says. ‘‘The biggest