Cannons Creek has 14 shops in a block and outside the dairies there are ten signs offering specials. Four offer deals on fizzy drinks, three promote bread , and there’s one each for bananas, baked beans and spaghetti.

Typically the top ten grocery items sold in supermarkets in New Zealand, says Tim Borrer of the Cannons Creek Community Pantry, which is striving to offer an alternative.

Tim quotes Mark Winne, a well-known American food and community activist, saying that “the rich get local and organic; the poor get diabetes.”

In Cannons Creek some of the community are trying to break the dependency on processed food and takeaways and to promote better eating habits.

At the Pantry, one of the activities of Wesley Community Action in Porirua, volunteers are still packaging up 30-40 food parcels a week for the needy. But the action has moved well beyond this task.

Volunteers have dug up the front lawn outside the pantry ‘s building on Mungavin Avenue to grow fruit and vegetables.

Right now they are harvesting a big crop of apples, and over summer have been growing zucchini, sweet corn, beans, silverbeet and lettuces along with potatoes, tomatoes, and blueberries.

Ten dollars gets a family a bag full of fresh fruit and vegetables – about half the supermarket price for the same quantity. Two hundred families are taking part regularly.

“We want to make fresh stuff more affordable and more accessible to people in our area, and we are showing people how to plant their own gardens.

“We’ve now got over a hundred gardens up and running, and we are also running workshops to help people with cooking what they produce,” Tim says.

The community pantry gets money from the Ministry for the Environment, the Dove Foundation (a Christchurch charity funded by an IT company), and the local Mana Community Trust.