Every March, when feijoas start dropping, New Zealanders greet the first arrivals with excitement (or, in a few cases, disgust). Over the following weeks, the green glory keeps falling, and as April wears on, the trickle of thuds thickens to a flood.
By the season’s peak, even diehard fans struggle to keep up with the exuberant abundance of a mature feijoa tree. So, after you’ve eaten your fill and made a few cakes and muffins, do you just let them decompose into the grass? Run them over with a lawnmower? Sweep them into your green waste bin?
Or, at a time when increasing numbers of people are going hungry or feeling isolated, is there something more useful you could do with them?
“There is no reason this precious fruit should be rotting on the ground,” says Michelle Blau, general manager of Fair Food in Auckland. “This is food, not a decoration.”
On a mid-April weekday morning, Fair Food’s Avondale headquarters smells delicious and is bustling with a diverse array of people. A sign on the wall reinforces the mission: one in five Kiwi kids lives in homes where food can run out, 7% of New Zealanders go hungry every week – and yet the country produces enough food to feed 40 million people. Organisations like Fair Food exist to try to fix that broken equation.
Volunteers are chopping capsicums and carrots in the kitchen, and in the warehouse out the back, staff and more volunteers are sorting produce into vegetable boxes. Some of the fruit and veges arrive in trucks from supermarkets – the day’s rejects, formerly headed for landfill, though most of it is still in great shape. Other produce, like a huge box of feijoas that arrived yesterday, is donated directly by commercial growers or members of the public.
“Oooh, feijoas,” says Michelle Guillard, hopping out of a van at the back entrance. “I just love them, I eat them 24/7.” She’s a volunteer with the Hope Centre Food Bank in Kelston, one of the 60 West Auckland community organisations to which Fair Food supplies meals, preserves and fresh food each week.
Guillard, who doesn’t have a feijoa tree of her own, enthusiastically taste-tests a couple. But the rest will go down well at the food bank, says manager Shirley Angus. “People take anything,” she says – even chokos. It’s pretty bad out there, and seems to be getting worse. “Lately, we’ve been getting up to 25 new people a day. That’s big. During Covid, we got a lot, then it settled down to 5-6 new people a day, and now it’s right up. It’s sad.” It takes courage for newcomers to walk through the door, she says.
While the food bank team load up and head out, Fair Food chef Adele Duncan considers the bucket of fresh feijoas she has brought in from the trees at her place, which will be distributed among the vege boxes. Any that are a little past it she will turn into chutney or jam – a skill learnt from her grandmother during her Central Otago childhood. “I’m a mad preserver,” she says.
Usually, she mixes donated apples with the feijoas, since they can be a bit polarising or, for new arrivals, unfamiliar. “When you’re on a serious budget, you get more and more safe with your food choices. Food is so emotional for people. You want to stick to flavours you know, for budget reasons and for comfort reasons.”
As with everything she makes, she is trying to strike a balance between comfort and nourishment. “I’m very aware of making the food approachable,” she says. The vege soup, for instance, “doesn’t need to be a punishment. It shouldn’t be some sort of scratchy jumper.”
It’s a far cry from Duncan’s previous jobs working in high-end restaurants, including for Peter Gordon in London, but just as satisfying. “Not to sound cheesy, but it is really all about meaning and connection.”
Fair Food will gratefully receive your excess feijoas, and so will other similar organisations nationwide. Iain Lees-Galloway of the Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance says, “Every one of our members tells us that the need in their community outstrips the supply of food that’s available to them.
“The message is really consistent. We’ve got different kinds of organisations working in different regions with different demographics, from Northland to Southland and everywhere in between, and all of them are telling us the same story: hunger is greater, and they don’t have enough food to meet the need that exists in their community.
“If people can deliver extra food in the form of feijoas or anything else, they will be able to use it and get it out to people in need.”
If you notice a neighbour’s feijoas going uncollected, Blau adds, consider knocking on their door and asking if they’d like some help gathering up the fruit. Make some into jam or chutney and donate that, or simply bring a bucket into your nearest food rescue centre. “We will never get too many feijoas,” says Blau.
There’s a queue of organisations hoping to receive kai from Fair Food, which already feeds 1600 people a day. “Even if someone dropped off 1600 feijoas, that’s just one per person – and no one eats just one.”
In the market
Another option is to trade them. For years, Hastings-based Rob Harbers’ feijoa tree was too small to produce enough fruit for him to make his signature chutney. He heard about a Facebook page called Magic Beans, and joined up. Now, a free nationwide app, it works like a kind of virtual, cash-free marketplace, where members – dubbed “Beanies” – swap excess produce or preserves with others in their region, or simply give it away.
In Hawke’s Bay in autumn, feijoas are frequently on offer. Harbers picks them up by the kilo, makes feijoa chutney, then swaps the chutney for other things – some home-grown garlic and basil, for instance, which he then makes into pesto, which he then swaps for something else … and on and on.
Harbers doesn’t have his own compost bin, and making 60 jars of chutney produces a lot of feijoa skins. Turns out there’s an app for that, too: ShareWaste. On it, he connected with some neighbours just around the corner, and he drops over to their place a few times a week to add his green waste to their compost bin.
The neighbours are Beanies, too, so he knows his compost contributes to growing more shared food. The circularity appeals to Harbers, as does the feeling of circumventing the capitalist market, and it has enriched his sense of community. “It does connect you with people around you.” He goes to pro-Palestine rallies with his new composting friends.
Creating those connections is part of the reason Magic Beans exists, says co-founder Sarah Grant. “What grew from that is a movement of people who value fresh food, community, sharing skills and knowledge, the ability to reduce waste, and who seek a bit of independence from the commercial food-production system. It’s really multifaceted.”
The site originated in Hawke’s Bay, and many users are concentrated there. But last year, the app went nationwide and now boasts tens of thousands of members. There are plans to expand internationally.
“Feijoas at this time of year are a hot commodity on Magic Beans,” says Grant. “People use them for all sorts of cool stuff. There are feijoa jellies, frozen feijoas, feijoa vinegar.”
Her favourite is dehydrated feijoas made in a solar dehydrator. “It turns them into lollies; the kids love them.” Cut the ends and the skin off and slice them into 4mm slices, she advises: much thicker and they’ll take too long, too thin and they’ll get stuck. Then you can swap them for something else you need.
Pest practices
In the north of the country, the recently arrived insect pest guava moth has put a bit of a spanner in traditional networks of feijoa exchange: no one wants to give or receive fruit that’s riddled with worms. My mum’s experience suggests this is another reason not to let those feijoas rot on the ground.
Around five years ago, my parents’ feijoas at Leigh, north of Auckland, were badly affected by guava moth, at least early in the season. For the past couple of autumns, though, my mother – who doesn’t even like feijoas – has collected every feijoa lying beneath the trees, sorted out the best ones for Dad, for friends, or for me and my partner and kids when we’re visiting, and fed the rest to her three cows. The animals happily chomp up the fruit, caterpillars and all, and Mum’s diligence seems like it may have disrupted the moth’s lifecycle (they can’t reproduce in the belly of a cow). This year, there was barely any damage.
Mum’s instinct mirrors a traditional practice in the feijoa’s native heartland in Brazil. When I visited an Afro-Brazilian quilombo community there – part of the research for my feijoa book – people told me they dealt with excess feijoas by letting their pigs in under the trees. Not only did the pigs’ feasting control the local insect pest, a type of fruit fly, but also the quilombolas reckoned it made the pork taste delicious.
In New Zealand, guava moth aside, the time-honoured method for dealing with too many feijoas is to bring bags full of them into your workplace, or leave them in a box – or even a wheelbarrow – on the street. For the first time this year, the feijoa trees my family and I planted at our home in Raglan are producing enough that we can give some away. Putting my own box at the end of our driveway felt like a rite of passage.
As I stood there, a neighbouring family crossed the road to chat, and their five-year-old picked up a feijoa and started slurping. I was reminded of a conversation I had recently with writer Charlotte Muru-Lanning, who first connected me with Fair Food. Even as social safety nets are stripped away, living in a country where people give each other feijoas makes her feel like there’s a kind of connective tissue linking us all together – green sinews snaking through the suburbs, joining neighbours, colleagues, strangers.
Pick up those feijoas. Share them. Just don’t let them rot.
Kate Evans is the author of Feijoa: A Story of Obsession and Belonging, which explores the meaning of feijoas here and overseas and includes recipes collected on her travels.
