Tiny Palates, Big Ambitions

The owners of this Auckland-based meal delivery company want to decolonise your baby’s tastebuds.

— By Nicola Harvey
— Photos by Tim D

Food is a vessel for memory, Tausani Simei-Barton likes to say. It’s a sentiment held within the tender young taro leaves he picks from three raised garden beds in the back yard of his parents’ Mt Albert home in Auckland. The plants descend from a root cutting brought from a village patch in Sāmoa by his mum’s father decades before strict biosecurity measures guarded Aotearoa’s borders.