Two years ago, top Kiwi chef Michael Meredith couldn’t shake the feeling that something major was about to happen in his life.
His restaurant Meredith’s is widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s finest, but the 42-year-old, who immigrated from Samoa as a teenager with his brother and solo mum, had a growing sense that it was time to give back to people less fortunate.
“As human beings, we have a responsibility to help and to try to make a difference if you can,” he asserts. “I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I knew that’s the direction I had to go in. It was intuition.”
At the same time, high-flying marketing executive Lisa King – whose favourite restaurant happened to be Meredith’s – was working on an idea to address child poverty.
She and her then-partner Iaan Buchanan came up with Eat My Lunch, a food delivery service that worked on a buy one, give one model. For every lunch ordered, a meal would go to a child at a low-decile school who would otherwise go hungry.
“I had no idea if it would take off, but I knew I had to give it a go,” says Lisa. “I’d grown up in a very privileged home and lived in this bubble of thinking everyone was as fortunate as us. But obviously that’s not the case and I wanted to do something to help.”
Starting off in the Auckland kitchen at her Mt Eden home, she decided she needed a chef to lend his name and knew exactly who to call.
Fast-forward two years and the dedicated pair – helped by 27 paid staff and a team of dedicated volunteers based out of their central Auckland headquarters – feed more than 1500 children at low-decile schools each day in Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington.
Now, after recently branching into dinner deliveries, the caring duo are launching a cookbook, Food for Good. Filled with more than 200 delicious family-friendly recipes, it’s the culmination of six months’ hard work, with Michael meticulously testing every recipe. Despite being one of Aotearoa’s best chefs, he admits that writing his first cookbook was no walk in the park.
“I don’t work like that,” says the dad-of-three.
“I’m not used to writing things down or using recipes. But I’m really happy with it, especially as each copy sold also buys another lunch for a child. That was the really important part for us.”
