​Mātauranga by German Baker Isabel Pasch #ManaKai

Our Eat NZ Kaitaki Isabel Pasch is a German Baker and owner of Bread and Butter Bakery, she also has a Master of Science in Microbiology. Here she explores the Mana Kai concept of Mātauranga and her thoughts around a collective need to marry the modern with the traditional...

Modernity suffers from a reductionist understanding of how the world works. In the food system this reductionist view has resulted in individual plant- and animal species being continually optimized for maximum yield and output. Food production processes are fine-tuned to maximize profits for producers and growers, squeezing the maximum out of the natural systems or modifying them to produce more than they naturally could. This system is efficient at producing calories, not nutrition. It is hugely wasteful and it doesn’t take the external costs it creates into account. Environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and soil erosion thus pose serious threats to being able to feed ourselves in the future. On the other hand malnutrition and obesity cause a huge toll in human health and the sky-high cost of our medical systems, including the susceptibility to infectious diseases like Covid, can be directly correlated with poor health caused by poor food quality.

What is the way out? Can we go back to hunting and gathering and growing our food ourselves? While this might seem achievable in remote parts of the world like New Zealand, it is not an option for the vast majority of people on this planet. Most people live in dense urban communities, with no access to land, or the food sources in the rivers or seas. And while it is true that humans used to produce food in ways that were more in harmony with nature, it is also true that this was not always successful and starvation, high infant and maternal mortality, due to malnutrition and susceptibility to infectious diseases, were the norm until some 150 years ago. So just going back to the ‘old ways’ is likely not going to be the solution for the future.

But understanding where modernity and science have departed from tradition, possibly to all our detriment is potentially, where we can find some solutions to our modern problems: Traditional indigenous value and knowledge systems, developed by people all over the world over thousands of years - accumulated wisdom derived from careful observation of the natural patterns - passed carefully down generations have been unfairly dismissed by science as ‘voodoo’. I believe it is time to open science up to ancient knowledge systems – like MĀTAURANGA - and evaluate traditional wisdoms through the scientific lens.

Indigenous knowledge system like Mana Kai can provide valuable frameworks and a new lens through which we can understand our role within nature and nature’s role in nourishing us and the planet.

As a German baker, I would like to re-introduce the ancient idea of ‘Guilds’ as a system that has existed for hundreds of years and incorporates the above mentioned principles of traditional knowledge and the dedication to precision, progress, best practice – all precurors of modern science. I believe that the guilds could be understood to exist within the spirit of OHAOHA, RANGATIRATANGA and MĀTAURANGA, conveying economic benefits, distribution of wealth and long term sustainability as well as a passing on of precious knowledge and wisdom, and of respect for governance and stewardship respectively.

Guilds were self managed congregations of manufacturers and producers of human cultural goods and foods. Guilds were founded in Europe in the early 12th century, with the formation of cities and city-states. The trades self organized into guilds of bakers, millers, carpenters, and bricklayers etc. They were an acknowledgement that the urbanisation required specialization and sharing of knowledge and resources. The respective company owners within a given trade agreed on standards of conduct, on necessary training standards for new trainees/ apprentices thus ensuring long term sustainability of the trade. They divided up the territory, access to markets, access to resources, and the most efficient and best use of these resources. Between the members of a guild there was an understanding that everyone within the guild fulfilled an important and necessary role and that the main goal was to provide high quality goods, i.e. bread, for all the people in the city. The guilds were accountable for their members, and customers could take individual bakers to their guild for complaints and dispute resolution, thus ensuring accountability of the producers to the customers. Being a member of a guild meant to respect the standards of the guild, to respect the other guild members and not sabotage their business, steal their staff or their customers and generally accept the responsibility to the people of the city as a whole. Of course there were lots of issues with these systems, including them denying people of other faiths, or immigrants, or women access and in many countries they became encrusted and stagnant and eventually modern capitalism rendered them irrelevant. But in Germany the guilds exist until this day, they have modernised themselves over and over again and provide very high quality education and training for all trades.

To overcome our substantial challenges of modernity as discussed above, the threat of climate change, environmental degradation, the huge burden of food related disease and disability, we need to marry the modern with the traditional.

We need to combine our old wisdoms accumulated throughout millennia, passed down through oral traditions and our historical knowledge with modern science. By looking towards a self-organising system like the guild system, which works on a local and interpersonal level, we can learn how to work within community empowering structures that value tradition, science, community and quality of workmanship.

Nga mihi nui koutou.

Isabel Pasch, Bread & Butter Bakery

Coats of arms of guilds in a town in the Czech Republic displaying symbols of various European medieval trades and crafts (from Wikipedia)