Rediscovering Food Through Resilience | Sydney MAD Mondays

for many years as I'm sure many of you know Indira was a familiar and much-loved face on our screen reading the nightly news on SBS back then the world seemed a little bit less of a mess if Indira was telling you about it in her personal life Indira is a cricket tragic and a great home cook her journey of resilience came about through reinventing herself and finding new meaning purpose and joy on the small balcony of her inner-city home please welcome Indira Thank You karo and I too would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet tonight and acknowledge their elders both past and present and emerging for those of you old enough to remember my days of reading the news on both SBS and ABC that was now almost 20 years ago yes we've all aged quite a bit since then and I do find it hard to believe that so much time has actually passed because they were very seminal times for me there was a lot of amazing global conflicts and events going on at that time a very important time that laid the foundation sadly for a lot of the conflicts that we're now going through globally but what happened for me covering a lot of those international stories is that I realized the narrative as news journalists and broadcasters that we were giving our audience wasn't really giving the full picture I think what news does really well is it tells you what's going on what it does really badly is it doesn't tell you how to fix things and how to make things better so I found as a storyteller that I was giving my audience that the heavy weight of the problems of the world but not really giving them much insight in what they could do to rectify it and I was feeling that very personally as the person giving this information so I decided to take some long service leave and explore the world as it really was rather than the world through a journalist's eyes which can be a little jaded at times and we're isolated too physically in a lot of ways where our news gathering services and buildings are we really are very removed from the community from the community that we're meant to be connected with an understanding so I spend some time traveling through Asia and Europe but not as a journalist I'd changed the lens and I think that that's so important to do when we get stuck in in looking at the world through one particular set of premises and I just thought I'm going to try to be as normal as I can and just be like everyone else so I hung out with farmers I hung out in schools schoolteachers just trying to see what was really happening and as I discovered we were missing big parts of important stories in the news media I decided when I came back to Australia that I wanted to explore world issues and conflicts but not through the eyes of a journalist and I got a posting with the UN agency in Geneva and started looking at global food programs because I could see that so many of conflicts were happening around the world were being driven by food and water shortages more and more and we're finding that obviously now 20 years later that's it's at the bat the foundation of so many conflicts even what's going on at Syria at the moment we don't cover it very well in the news but that that conflict was driven a lot by a serious drought that happened at the same time as the rise of Isis forcing farmers to leave their drought affected farms into the cities and into the hands of Isis but again the mean it doesn't really cover that side of the story and when I'd finished my time at the UN I realized that this had to be the foundation of every news story that I told it had to come from how we could fix the food and water shortages and you know and try to find a peaceful solution to conflicts through those through those filters and at the same time the issue of climate change was becoming a lot more people were aware of it I was lucky enough to be selected by Al Gore is a climate change presenter and that again was another big change in my awareness I realized that now as we are finding that climate change was going to make those food and water crises even worse than we would ever imagine and make those conflicts around them even worse as well so when I came back to Australia after being armed with this new insight into what was driving conflicts I stood on my little balcony and Potts points on the 13th floor 20 square meters and intellectually I felt I understood the the drivers but I didn't understand in how this affected me as an individual because there's an urban dweller like a lot of us we have lost contact with nature you know urban settings I didn't know how food was grown I didn't really have a lot of time to cook my own meals I didn't know any farmers or growers in in this urban environment and as in in terms of growing food or being connected to birds and animals and insects I mean that that was something that you know I didn't think was possible in that environment I went to a farmers market one day and the farmer offered me a delicious sweet tomato and I popped it in my mouth and it was the most delicious tomato I ever remember dating it was sweet and juicy with a crispy juicy shell and I realized that that was what I needed to connect with I went back to my balcony and I had this epiphany moment I was going to turn that small balcony into a veggie patch I had no idea what I was doing I'd never gardened I'd never grown anything before and my husband thought I was mad most of my friends thought I'd flipped a lid - and I live above a Woolworths so it just didn't make sense to my neighbors why would you want to grow an eggplant that took three months to grow when he had them underneath grow you know for free almost ten cents sometimes but I realized that there was going to be some connection I was going to learn from the process so I rang Peter candala Gardening Australia arity told me about putting some manure and you know soil in pots and lugged it up there and put in a few seeds and honestly I had no idea what I was doing I didn't know how successful it was going to be but I was I was determined to be present and be connected and try to learn and understand as much about the process as my plants are willing to teach me and shock her in that first year I managed to grow 70 kilos of produce on that small balcony 43 different herbs and vegetables there's some sorrel the Kylie asked me to bring along tonight that we served from my balcony yeah great fun and everything I grew ended up tasting it better than anything I've had before in supermarkets even some farmer's markets because it was so fresh I amazed myself probably more than anyone else because how was I able to do this I didn't think I had the special skill set required but then the more I watched and learned I realized that a hundred years ago each and every one of us was doing this we were growing our own food cooking our own food and only in a hundred years we'd moved away from this how had we lost these very very key important life skills so it led me to write a book called the edible balcony about how to grow food in a small space that became a best-seller my beautiful publisher Julie gives us here who guided me through that process and it led to my second book the edible city which is about my beautiful association largely with the wayside chapel and the lovely vegetable garden that we built on the rooftop off the Wayside Chapel 200 square meters of beautiful fresh produce just up the road from where I live in Potts Point and we also put in some beehives and that honey Kiley uses in her pork buns at Billy Quang so it's a beautiful community connection that all these growing adventures have had in my community what I've learned from it I think is my early life now I realized was one of extreme resilience really I grew up in South Africa my parents were Indian South Africans we lived in five different countries before I was 13 and I realize now that a lot of what I'm applying to how I look at resolving and solving global conflicts is from that very early resilience that I was taught from moving countries and adapting to new environments and new countries and cultures since I was very young so I'm very fortunate now that this garden has become a wonderful foundation for traveling the world and lecturing and talking and sharing skills with other people living in over and waisted urban spaces that don't think that they can grow their own food we are helping refugees indigenous communities homeless communities around the world to convert these wasted spaces so for me it's precious because it's ensuring resilience right at the core of the heart of every community because when you have a safe food supply that resilience is is much more guaranteed so it's a wonderful journey that I've been on and a wonderful journey that so many people that I've got in this room actually has shared with me and helped me and taught me along the way so thank you very much it's been a wonderful resilient journey so thank you [Applause]