Fish not being used to their full potential

• Author: David Fisher
• Published date: 25 May 2023
• Publication title: Northland Age, The

“Is it someone being lazy or someone who doesn’t know how to utilise it,” asks Keryn Pivac, operations manager at Ngāpae Holiday Park at Waipapakauri which smokes and shares fish frames and heads

“The beach is our second home,” she says of Te Oneroa-a-Tōhe, the long stretch of sand inaccurately named Ninety Mile Beach. “We probably see six to eight frames every trip we do on a daily basis.

“Everytime I see them wasted on the beach, I think ‘oh guys, we could have had those’. It’s a terrible thing to see people wasting it because the heads and the frames go a long, long way.”

Pivac and partner Kaio Hooper live at the holiday park where she is operations manager. The park runs a manaaki freezer where donated frames and heads are stored for regular smoking.

From there, the food finds a welcome home among guests at the park. “Our goal, vision and mission is to show manaakitanga at the holiday park,” she says.

The food is also distributed to and welcomed by the wider community. And that welcome is not only those who enjoy fish as part of their diet — there are whānau whose needs are much more basic.

“A lot of people are doing it quite hard at the moment. One good-sized snapper [frame] could feed two or three people. Two good-sized snappers smoked could feed a family of five or six.”

It’s an effort that was particularly welcome during Cyclone Gabrielle when power in the area was knocked out. The smoker was cranked up, Hooper got on the tools and the freezer emptied as food flowed.

Pivac says an unknowing eye might look at a frame and think the meat was gone but once smoked, bones lift away and reveal a meal or two that would otherwise go wasted. And smoking the heads and frames isn’t the only way. Boiling the fish...