There’s something a little bit magic about people who feed others for a living. Food is so rich with meaning for so many of us, and the lockdown world we’re in has meant we’re all cooking more every day, whether we like it or not. Thankfully we are happy cooks most of the time but even still…we’re now months into all meals at home all the time, often pulled together after long work days that offer no headspace to even conceive of what dinner should be until the time for dinner has arrived, some constraints around supply (lolz), and don’t start with the drama that shopping is now. There have been tears. There have been some Interesting meals, many involving the cook’s best friend, an egg. And there has been plenty of delicious, too, helped in large part by the inspiration and generosity of people like chef Danielle Alvarez, the good people of Good Food, and always, dearest chef Jeremy Lee keeping us all entertained on Instagram with his sketches and his beautiful at-home meals. And too many more to name.

This crisis gives us plenty of things to worry about, from the gigantic to the teensy. For us this includes our food people - the restaurants, their suppliers, the grocers, the farmers, the chefs, the bakers, the butchers, the cheese-makers, the chocolatiers, the coffee roasters…the list goes on. How will they hang on when they’ve been forced to shut their doors, when they’ve been locked out of the places they love and have built through years of sweat and toil? And what about the people who work for them? Here in Wellington, people like Coffee Supreme and the Shelly Bay Baker jumped into the fray early, ensuring they could keep on feeding people by post and delivery van. The work, we know, has been long and exhausting and WE ARE SO GRATEFUL. Grateful for every cup of Bob-o-Link, every hot cross bun, every slice of toast that hasn’t been produced from the sometimes-balky home starter.

As the lockdown restrictions have eased, more of our beloved food people have been able to come online, in an often total reorientation and reinvention of their business models, to both feed people and keep their businesses afloat. Which brings us tonight, when we finally had a meal not entirely prepared by ourselves, with the treat of a produce box from Wellington’s Rita restaurant. We knew it would have some pantry items and some produce and beyond that … well, it would be a surprise. (We’d also ordered a wee cake and a custard square because, well, weeks of sometimes Interesting meals make you a bit eager where treats are concerned.)

So you can imagine the joy of opening this box, full as it was of beautiful food and, there’s really only one word for it, love. Homemade passata in a jar, fresh herbs, an amazing aioli, beautiful vegetables and a gorgeous loaf of bread. A few perfect limes! Tomatillos! Radicchio - are you serious? MY STARS. Things that make a cook’s heart leap. All packed up with notes explaining what was in the box, who made it, and some ideas about how to use the jewels inside.

So a heartfelt thank you to Kelda and Paul and the rest of the team at Rita, and all the other food heroes out there who have kept things rolling, like our local Baker Gramercy (oh croissants), Rich and People’s coffees, the good folk behind the foodie collective @pandemicpack and the many, many others so eager to get back to opening their doors later this week. We wish you all the best - from an appropriate distance, of course. But someday when we can we might just give you a big ol’ hug and embarass the dickens out of you.