Chef Rob Oliver cooking up a storm

For celebrity chef and activist Rob Oliver, the revolution will be televised. The Pacific food revolution, that is.

Oliver was recognised for his services to the food industry and Pacific communities in the New Years Honours List.

You may recognise Oliver from My Kitchen Rules New Zealand or the Māori reality cooking show Marae Kai Masters.

He is now the founder of the TV-led multi-media movement Pacific Island Food Revolution, which is encouraging Pasifika people to return to their traditional cuisine via a cooking show of the same name.

• Robert Oliver on steering a Pacific food revolution 
• Pacific Island Food Revolution: a fun cooking show with a mission

Oliver's food journey began when he was growing up in Fiji at a time when food, community and wellbeing merged seamlessly.

"I’ve always loved food and really I guess it was from being brought up Fiji and everyone shops in the market and it’s this whole vibrant experience.

“Coming from New Zealand... we left New Zealand when supermarket culture was emerging, and it was all about sanitising. And then you go to the supermarket in Fiji and it’s all about gossip and laugher and really beautiful – what we would call now – artisanal foods. I got hard-wired into that, really.”

Oliver sees cooking and sharing food with people as an act of love that nurtures a bond.

“I felt that the generosity of the food experience is what kind of binds people and society together. Quite early on I was aware of that.”

After living in Fiji, Oliver moved to New York City where his cheffing career really took shape.

In the early 1990s, he developed food programmes to feed the homeless and African migrants with AIDS. 

Being a creative chef became just one part of the food narrative for Oliver. The other part was hunger.

“I’d never seen homeless people before. There was no such thing as a homeless person in the Pacific at that time…

“I was just naturally attracted to providing for people that didn’t have [food]. I also worked with people who were like that. I was working in a New York restaurant called The Cupping Room and the owner of that place was very much into ‘we’ve got leftovers, what can we do with them?’ I reached out to a group of chefs around me and that project kind of grew.

“I was heavily influenced by a woman called Gail Kelly back then and I’d been looking for like a gang. Through her, I met all these people who were really into community service and were heavily involved in Native American advocacy. The whole kaupapa around that involves looking after the community that’s right beside you.”

Oliver says he loved activism more than his day job and made life-long friendships during that period.

Working to help develop and build resilient communities was already a feature within the Oliver family.

His father was one of the original development entrepreneurs of the 1970s in Fiji and Samoa and his approach influenced Oliver's thinking and approach in later years.

“His whole approach to development wasn’t about ex-patriots coming back into the Pacific and saying ‘well, if you be more like us you’ll be better off'.

"It was very much about understanding local brilliance and letting it breathe and letting it dictate really a sense of cultural sovereignty. His work is still copied and talked about today.”

After New York, Oliver took his knowledge and enthusiasm for America's burgeoning 'farm to table' movement to the Caribbean.

He persuaded his employer at a resort to source local produce from farmers, instead of relying on imports.

“I didn’t realise at that time that local cuisine was what made all that work. Local food on the menu needs local farmers and that’s part of the farm-to-table design in many ways. And I just reflected on the fact and in the Pacific, the same situation was very heavily Western-orientated, [both] menus and also a lot of food imports.”

The realisation that indigenous cuisine "needed to be packaged up to be understood” led to Oliver writing his first book - the award-winning Me’a Kai: The food and flavours of the South Pacific.

He won the Gourmand Award for Best TV Chef Cookbook In The World for his second book Mea’ai Samoa: Recipes from the Heart of Polynesia.

“It shocked us to win that, but what I took note of was that the Pacific took note.

“The Mea’ai cookbook was full of people’s stories and I always say the story of the food is the story of the people.

“There was a real community of people around the book and I had so much support in many of the countries that we profiled and of course that Gourmand Award, that was a validation of them and their belief in the project and also their belief in themselves, actually.”

Before his Pacific Islands Food Revolution initiative, Oliver had been learned about non-communicable diseases in the region, including diabetes and other illnesses caused by poor diet.

“When I was young [these diseases] didn’t exist. It was obvious there was a change in the way people eat, from the market to the more processed food way of eating.”

The TV show has had a big effect on getting people engaged with indigenous cuisine, Oliver says. After overcoming his reservations about the nature of reality TV, he felt using the medium could really make a difference.

“It wasn’t just about health, it was about giving Pacific food culture a chance to really express itself and there’s a real justice for me in that.

“The Pacific has been through colonisation and in the food space, like in every other part of culture, people get oppressed in the colonisation process. And then the tourism industry had not put our food on the menu and all of the time these people coming in asking for terrible Western food. And that signals to the community that maybe our food isn’t good enough. And globalisation with fast food – it’s just been through a lot.

“I was like 'the original food system is the best'. It’s healthy, it’s nourishing on so many levels, spiritually, culturally, nutritionally, if we could just somehow give it a chance to express and be seen, maybe we’ll get it moving again. That’s where really the Pacific Food Revolution project came about and I knew that if I did that the health numbers would improve as a result.

“So, this idea seemed insane at the time because no one had thought of TV, entertainment and reality TV as being effective in lives and in society. It’s obvious when you see it now but it just didn’t seem obvious then.”

Three years on, with help from the Australian and New Zealand governments, the changing attitudes to local food are astonishing, he says.

“You’re seeing it in the community and on social media. There’s a whole revolutionary process popping up everywhere.”