SOUTHERN comfort
“I think to be good farmers means becoming guardians of the land. We’re here to protect it”
Nadia Lim dusts the flour off her hands and pulls on her gumboots. She’s just whipped up gnocchi from scratch and is now striding off across the lawn to pick an armful of silverbeet and lettuce from the garden. “It won’t take me long,” she says, swiftly evicting a chicken from the vege patch on her way back to the kitchen.
The Kiwi food icon might be in the middle of a photoshoot, but feeding people is what she does, and she’s right – it doesn’t take long to whip up the most delicious lunch, almost all of it sourced straight from the land that she and husband Carlos Bagrie call home.
“All we need now is a goat,” Nadia says as she dishes up generous slices of silverbeet tart, gnocchi baked in tomato sauce and a green salad. “As soon as we have our own milk, we’ll be pretty much self-sufficient. And I’ll never go to the supermarket again!”
This idyllic existence is a far cry from the inner-city Auckland lifestyle she and Carlos gave up just 11 months ago. Here on their magnificent 1200-acre sheep and crop farm on the outskirts of Queenstown, the My Food Bag co-founders are joyfully reinventing themselves
