Change is not always expected. It sometimes comes like a wind that changes the course of your destination. All one can do is embrace the breeze and change the direction of your sails.
And if life is changing, that is okay. Justin Bonello’s life can be viewed from two defining strands. The first consists of memories of his childhood which include an old crêpe pan and his grandmother’s recipes. “I still have the same pan now, and in fact, my son has learnt how to make crêpes in the same pan, so will my daughter,” he enthuses. The second strand is his life as a filmmaker, which was what he returned to after losing everything from an unfortunate IT business venture.
After 15 years creating films and travelling, Justin realised that he had changed and had more control over his life. It is his passion for responsible knowledge sharing and the spirit of Ubuntu that spurred Justin to think about food security in urban cities and the cultivation of young agents for change, through his market gardens project “Neighbourhood Farms”.
Ruda had a chat with Justin Bonello about his passion for cultivating change agents, business and his adventures.
Transcript:
R: Hello, and a very warm welcome to another session of The Change Exchange, my guest today, TV chef, author of several cookbooks, inveterate traveller, and also father, husband …
J: Cook, traveller, dust kicker …
R: And now…
J: Film maker and gardener.
R: And now very active gardener, and we’ll get to that. I want to start your story right at the beginning. Two things in your childhood would come together later in your life, the first one was your grandmother giving you a pan when you were seven?
J: Ja, Ruda, you know, my mom and dad used to travel quite a bit, and granny Elizabeth would come down from Pretoria and would look after my sister and I, she taught me how to make crêpes when I was seven years old, and I still have the same pan now, and, in fact, my seven year old son, Sam, has learnt how to make crêpes in the same pan, and Gabby, my four year old daughter, will as well, and it’s important because I like to think of children in urban environments as part of what I call the “Forgetting generation”, because you don’t pass knowledge across to them, they generally never pick it up again, so if you don’t teach them how to grow their own vegetables, cook their own food, that disconnect and that forget becomes a bigger and bigger problem, not only for them, but for their children one day as well, so, you know …[intervenes] [0:01:22]
R: They think vegetables grow in Woolies, well not grow, just are …
J: Exactly, it comes shrink-wrapped in polystyrene, you know, and that’s the wrong thinking, and I think all parents have an obligation to make sure that their children don’t forget.
R: But many people bake with small children, and the small children do not go on to be cooks. Why did you retain it, why was it important in your life, why did it become important in your life?
J: Ruda, actually it was, when I was growing up, we travelled a lot as kids, the school holidays, the long weekends, every weekend we went away, either to the Bree River or up to the Wild Coast, to the Transkei, and my cook’s journey really started out of having to understand or know the necessity of how to prepare nature’s bounty, so, you know, in the beginning, when I was younger, there were lots of terrible experiments, raw, sandy, overcooked, burnt, that sort of thing, but so you learn as a cook, you know, you have got to pay the school fees, and that’s where it started. Then, when we started going away in my late teens, I was always the guy who cooked because I had this knowledge that I had built up over the years …
R: And you must have enjoyed it, otherwise you wouldn’t have stepped into that role?
J: Well, I mean, you know, cooks can be rock stars, you know, you can be the centre of attention in many respects, you know, you’ve got friends, I mean, friends who dive and spearfish and can harvest from that, and I could do that, and then you could cook it as well, and even then, in those sort of formative years of my cooking journey, and my friends had started forgetting how to cook, you know, that knowledge hadn’t been passed on that would have traditionally gone from grandmother and mother to son or daughter, so I held onto it fiercely so that I was the cook.
R: But the other strand that would later become important was your mother’s profession, she was a television producer and you worked as a runner, as a gofer, as everything.
J: Yes. Ruda, I have these memories in childhood of being in the Tankwa Karoo with Manie Van Rensburg, Grethe Fox, Brian O’Shaughnessy, Ian Roberts, and they used to form those Afrikaans movies back in those days, Verspeelde Lente, Anna, I was on those sets as a kid. Brian O’Shaughnessy taught me how to play Poker, you know, and he is died now, but that was my journey so many years ago. So my mom at that time was doing continuity on movies and then she had moved up the food chain, and then she became a producer, so by the time I was 14, I was running on commercials, and at the time it was great, you know. I think the film industry can be a kind of siren to you in some respects, you know, she is very appealing, but after a while I sort of got to a point, I was carrying crane weights, and you know they weigh 10 kilograms each, and you walk, I was walking down the beach with crane weight and the director had a shot in his mind somewhere down the beach, and I thought what am I doing, I am selling …
R: And why?
J: Yes, what is this? And at 19 or 20 I said, no, that’s enough, thanks, and I actually got out of the film industry, I didn’t see any sense in telling the “unwanted to be unwashed”.
R: [Laughter]. Oh, you’re a snob. [Laughter]. But then you tried IT.
J: It’s such a silly story, man. I actually wanted to be an animator, and my sister wanted to study fine art and my dad said, that’s fine, I said I wanted to do fine art, and he was like, not a chance in hell, because I had sort of stereotypical things that the men in the family had to focus on things that were business orientated …
R: You wouldn’t be able to provide.
J: Yes, that’s in their mind set. So I went to CPUT and I studied Information System Analysis and Design on the hope that it would get me into animation, and it didn’t pan out that way, and I ended up after completing my studies working in a darkroom wearing a suit and tie, and I was a miserable person, you know, I had grown up in the outdoors and I was boxed into this little space, staring at a screen, and I realised that wasn’t for me. There is more, hey, I have got like a whole journey. My life has been quite strange and bizarre, and a series of, probably unfortunate events or serendipitous events, depending on which way you look at them.
R: So what ended the IT stretch?
J: The IT, I was asked to design a system for a clothing company, a database to manage their order, stocktaking systems, et cetera, and I spent two years doing that, and then I was offered an opportunity to go on my own, and I was 25, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and knew everything about business, and it took me three years to lose everything that I had. I was, you know, I had a supplier who wasn’t very ethical, and I will never forget, he owed me R500 000 back then, and I sat in his office, my grandmother just died, and I said to him just pay me my money, and the next day they phoned me and said come collect your cheque, and I went, we still used cheques in those days, I went in to collect my cheque and the accounts clerk said, no, you’ve got to go and pick up your returns, and I was in the clothing industry and there were just boxes and boxes and boxes and about a half a million Rands worth of returns, and the advice I got at the time from my attorneys was you can fight this and it can take a lot of time …
R: So they gave you the returns instead of the cheque?
J: They gave me small cheque and a large amount of returns, and I tried to trade out of it, but you know, when you don’t pay your creditors on time and you lose your credits, then everything turns to cash, and it wasn’t much longer after that that I lost everything, house, cars, friends, well, they weren’t friends, the friends, the true friends remained friends.
R: What’s that like? How does one go through that and come out the other side?
J: Ruda, you know, if it hadn’t been for my mom and my sister and my dad, I actually thought about killing myself at the time, which was a really silly thing to think about, you know. You think that your world revolves around how you are financially, and that is not really the truth, and, in fact, if it hadn’t been for the support of my mom and sister and dad, I think I wouldn’t be here today, and it’s silly because it is not the be all and end all. [0:07:36]
R: Ja, but that’s what it looks like from where you are now.
J: Now, sure.
R: Yes.
J: But when you are in that tunnel, it can be really dark, you know, and it was like that, but then again, you know, I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t gone through that, and in life you are the sum of the good, the bad and the ugly, and, yes, when you’re in that dark place, it’s difficult to see that, but I wouldn’t have become the person I am if I hadn’t gone through that journey, and it’s why I got back into the film industry, so, you know, there was a positive, but …
R: If you say that’s why you got back into the film industry, was that just something you knew and there’s a possibility?
J: So IT were so far smoothing that in the years I had been in the clothing industry, I had become a dinosaur, so I did not have the skillset that was applicable in the market anymore, and the only place I knew to go back to was the film industry, and, you know, I love the film industry, there is one thing about it that really is amazing, and it doesn’t care your colour creed or religion, it doesn’t care your background, anything. All we care about in the film industry is work, and I worked, so I …
R: Yes, you do the job, you deliver the product, that’s fine.
J: Yes, and so I ended up working as a catering team leader for a catering company and, I mean, in the film industry unit manager’s hours are terrible, the catering team’s hours are even worse, you know, we can be in the kitchen at 02:00 in the morning and finish at 10:00, 11:00 the next night, and I did that for a while, and I didn’t really enjoy it, you know, factory food and so just churning the stuff out and feeding huge big crews and things wasn’t really what I envisaged for my life as a budding, I guess foodie in those days, and I started unit assisting on sets underneath the unit manager, and then one day we were doing a bit television commercial in town for the Discovery Channel, and the unit manager’s sister died in a car accident and they bumped me up to the unit manager to run the job, and then it was no looking back for me, and then I was a unit manager, and it was while I was a unit manager that I watched an episode of Jamie Oliver, and he did this great mean and then he invited the council workers in from the street, and I was like who would do that, invite a complete stranger into their house to break bread and things, that’s not the South African way. So I got together with all the film industry friends I had and I said I want to shoot a pilot, and I went off and shot a pilot …
R: Were you still cooking privately?
J: No, in my capacity I was …
R: But you knew that you could do this?
J: Oh, yes, yes, I mean, that’s what I did.
R: Yes, ja.
J: I was, you know, you always want that person in your group of friends that cooks and loves cooking and breaking bread, et cetera, so that was always underneath everything I was doing, and the experimenting hadn’t stopped and the understanding of food evolved quite considerably, it went …
R: So you shot a pilot …
J: A pilot.
R: With no idea of where you’re going to take it?
J: No, nothing, I just had the idea, and it was about celebrating what I thought was the way that most South African did it, what they did on weekends, so, you know, go away with a group of friends, eat, me merry, drink too much, and I centred around the world, including South Africa, to the SABC, the BBC, the ABC, American Broadcasting Corporation, again being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and not understanding how the industry worked, it was, I think, a fortuitous place to be in because I didn’t know there were any rules, and the big …
R: And you had nothing to lose, really.
J: Nothing whatsoever, you know.
R: Ja. [0:11:13]
J: I had already put my proverbial ugh-ugh on the block and was going to go for it, and the BBC wrote back, David Welling from the BBC wrote back and said if you produce the series, I will take it. So he committed to a presale and borrowed money from my mom, and I went and shot the first season of Cooked, still paying her back that initial money, by the way
J: Moms are amazing, and the rest is history, you know, I have now done, I don’t know, 30 odd television shows, some I have hosted and most of them I created, and you night recognise some of them, everything from Charlie’s Cake Angels to a series called “The Ride”, a series with Riaan Manser, Bear Country, Terewa, aag, lots of shows, and I’m proud of them, you know. I think in some respects through the shows that I created I was becoming an ambassador for South Africa to the world, and indeed those shows have been on air in every country in the world, from South America, America, Asia, the East, BBC, Discovery, Nat Geo, the whole lot, and …[intervenes] [0:12:21]
R: Was there a moment when you knew that this was now a business that would live, because in the beginning it’s just you and just doing your little thing…?
J: Ruda, no, and even now, you know, the South African film industry is a really tough one, you know, we’ve got, we’ve only got three broadcasters, SABC, as you know, is in turmoil yet again, eTV has got a different focus to the type of content that I produce, and MNet back in the day was quite focussed on its content and what it did, so to produce content here, and then you have got people in a country with about 11 official languages, and all sorts of things, where the rest of the world doesn’t care about any of that. So it was quite a difficult place because we didn’t have a local home and we had to create content that would appeal to an international market, and primarily the work was, I’ve got shows that have never been seen in South Africa, you know, a six part series on the Karoo, it has never been seen here, and that makes me quite sad because I do, I love this country, I celebrated in every inch of my being and there were these hurdles in the way that looked at people differently, it’s unnecessary, you know, at the end of the day we are all exactly the same, we just want a roof over our heads, be able to put food on the table, put our kids through school, you know, have a little bit of money in the bank account, and it doesn’t have to be like that …
R: Does the, does the web open up new possibilities that you can put that kind of stuff, at least put it out there once it’s paid its way?
J: Yes, most definitely, and I’ve started dabbling in that, and it’s quite an interesting space, but it’s how do you economise it again, you know …
R: Ja, no.
J: You-Tube want to have a billion people watching it before you sort of start making any money out of it and, you know, Netflix and Co that have come into the South African market have really created quite a disruptive space, and that’s driven my metrics because they know what people are watching, when they’re watching and what type of shows they’re watching, and then they can commission shows that appeal to the market, and they’ve recently approached us in South Africa, and it’s interesting because I always look for something that’s a flagship show in the country that’s produced by local producers, that has international legs to sort of jumpstart the local film production community with Netflix, so it could be interesting to see where it goes. Yes, online is of a help, but it’s also quite a cluttered space now, and I am sure you feel some of that as well, you’re bombarded by Twitter and Facebook and WhatsApp, and your emails and all these other platforms, and it’s quite overwhelming, you know, I don’t think I’ve put a Tweet out, a Twit out in eight or nine months. I just don’t have capacity anymore, and I don’t think anyone has capacity to listen to all of it anymore, I certainly don’t …
R: No, you have to narrow it down, ja. How long has it now been since you made that first show, about 15…?
J: I am 47 now, ja, it’s about 15, 16 years ago, ja …
R: 15 Years, ja. What have you learnt, not just, I mean, of course you’ve learnt content, but personally about, it’s been a really busy 17 years?
J: And I’m still learning, and the worst part about my own personality was that I’m a viper, I tend to react to situations to quickly, and my close friends will tell me a number of times that I must rather be the boa constrictor and slowly strangle them versus reacting so fast, that’s the one thing, yes, control for me personally, I used to react too hard and too fast, and even I was at a safety talk in Ocean View on Monday or Tuesday night, and one of the guys from school, a school safety program stood up and they were talking about how they’ve put security guards at a school in, a high school in Ocean View, but the crime hotspot is opposite a primary school, and I was like how can you have it there and not over there, what are you doing about that, when it wasn’t the forum for it. I should have just discretely written them a mail afterwards instead, what are you doing, so that journey continues. Then it’s about people, you know, good people mean good things, surround yourself with kings and queens and you will always be royalty, you know, but if you surround yourself with rubbish, that’s what you’re going to have in your life, in fact, I read a post somewhere this morning which spoke about how children that surrounds themselves, you can tell a lot about people by the people that they surround themselves with, so I’m a lot more cautious than I used to be in the early days, I have a tiny group of really good friends around me that are my support system and, ja, people, that’s the most important thing, and all the rest of it is superfluous.
R: Tell me about your new venture, “Neighbourhood Farms” you are calling it?
J: Yes.
R: Ja, and how did you get into that and why, and what do you want to achieve?
J: That’s a really long story. So a couple of years ago I filmed a series in conjunction with one of the local retailers, and it was an exploration into the food production facilities in South Africa, so everything from agriculture, vegetable farms, cold storage, the whole lot, feedlots, and on one of them I met a farmer in Pearston called Roy Heidenrath, who was practicing predator-friendly methods around his Angora goat production, and he was suffering, you know, pre-putting in the Anatoli dogs and mimicking the grazing patterns of migrating springboks, et cetera; his losses were ridiculous and they put the Anatoli dogs in and his losses reduced by 93%, or something like that. Then I was introduced to that conversation to Dr Bool Smuts, he runs the Landmark Foundation, and he was doing a lot of predator conservation work, especially around leopards in the Baviaanskloof, and I then started speaking to farmers in the Karoo and I was trying to understand what’s going on with our farmers in South Africa, and it’s a very simple equation, actually, and so I sound like I’m jumping all over the place, but there is a point to this. In the old days farmers and consumers were connected like this, and if we weren’t the farmers ourselves, and what’s happened over the ensuing years is that there has become this huge divide, but it’s an economic scale at the same time, so consumers are paying what they should be, but the pressure is always pushed backwards onto the farmer and they are the most important people in our lives, you know, no-farms-no-food. You never hear about a seventh generation doctor, teacher, lawyer, and you’re not only a seventh generation farmer, it’s not unusual for a great grandfather to finish a project that a great grandson started off, but we are marginalising them, and, in fact, that same farm that I was on as a nine year old child, it’s called Elandsvlei in the Tankwa Karoo that those movies were filmed on, and incidentally, in Denis Reitz’ book, where he writes about finding this oasis in the Tankwa Karoo, it’s the same farm. Kobus Van Hough, the farmer, said to me, “Justin, 20 years ago, 200 lambs to market bought me a new bakkie; 200 lambs to market today doesn’t pay the deposit on the bakkie, what has happened to what I do that I am worth so little?,” and they were quite scary words for me, and I understand, I know that’s what’s happened to the farmer, they’ve lost the centralised abattoirs, sorry, they’ve lost the small town abattoirs in favour of centralised ones, animals have to travel further, and they grade the farmer’s meat, so it doesn’t matter what effort is put into them, et cetera, and he knows what he’s done, he doesn’t get value for what he’s done. Then I started coming across real predator conflict, farmers protecting their livelihood, and that was happening because they reduced margins, they were farming in areas that they hadn’t farmed in traditionally. When the ANC came into power, they introduced a great concept but not very well thought out, called “Tenure”, which was based on the principle that if you had lived on farm land or a farmhouse, you would be able to stay there for the rest of your life, but what happened across the board, across the entire of South Africa was that people who had worked on farms for generations with those same families were literally kicked off the ground, and you can go to any small town to South Africa today and you will see a huge informal settlement, it doesn’t matter where it is, and those were people that were traditionally housed, clothed, fed on farms, and at that point they got introduced to drugs, gangsterism, et cetera, but in terms of the predator conflict, we lost the shepherds of the ground, and that’s the only real cure for predator conflict, is to have people …
R: Someone there.
J: Some on the ground, and that’s how our great grandparents and things looked after their animals, they didn’t have animals just roaming out in the wild, and they had far more wild animals out there; that’s how they protected their livelihood. But I started thinking, like how do you work towards saving those wild and rural spaces, and I realised the problem was not there, the problem was us in urban environments, you know, the pressures for all wild and rural environments come from cities. So I started breaking apart cities, and we know that 70% of the world’s population is going to live in urban environments, and indeed in South Africa by 2030 …
R: 70%?
J: Seven, zero, ja, it will probably be more, and that’s actually a good thing because it is taking people out of rural spaces but concentrating them in urban environments, and the city is a really strange environment; it’s the environment that humans created for themselves, they are centres of culture, education, learning, hospitalisation, the way we live, the way we bring up our children, but we don’t actually know how to live in them, and the longer we live in them, the greater the disconnect and the forget become. So it becomes a worst case scenario for us because we’ve become so alienated from wild and rural environments and how we grow our own food that we assume the modern production cycle and retailers and things is the status quo, and it doesn’t have to be like that. So I said whatever I did would have to work in cities, it would have to work with children and, you know, I am getting long in the tooth now, I am 47, and I see my own efforts with my own children and teaching them about the outdoors by growing their own food, and indeed children across cities should be the agents for change into the future, and we have to give them the tools to understand how they can live a better life, and that’s not only about edible education, it’s not only about giving them a space where they can have an outdoor classroom, where they can connect every subject that they study to the outdoors, it’s about showing them the processes, how food is grown, how is it harvested, and then showing them how the food moves from farm to shop, and then to the dinner table …
R: So how does this play out in practice, it’s not, you don’t…?
J: I know, it’s so difficult, it’s the how, the why, the what, the everything. Okay, so how it plays out in a neighbourhood farm, I put a business case in front of the Premier and the Department of Agriculture, and it was a very basic premise. Nine tenths of all projects at schools fail for two reasons, food-based projects, they are not economised, so do gooders put lots of money into spaces and then they want to give the produce away, secondly, they rely on the parentage body to run or maintain them, and with respect, educators have enough on their plate as it is, and parents in urban environments are really under pressure. So if you’re going to create anything that is around food-based gardens at schools, you’ve got to economise them and you’ve got to manage them, so …
R: Economise in the sense of monetise, they must pay their way?
J: They must pay their way, the produce must be sold, and we, myself and my co-founder, Eric, spent a lot of time looking at market gardens, and market gardens have been around in the human’s history for the last couple of hundred years, that’s how we’ve grown food. So we realised that you need a 1 500 square meter market garden of bare minimum size to be able to pay for its own input and ongoing maintenance, labour costs, et cetera, and then we had to scale that up to a much bigger number, we we’ve got over 6 500 square metres of market gardens running at the moment …
R: At how many points?
J: I know I sound like I am all over the place. So our first garden was at Kommetjie Primary School, we broke ground in March, we planted on the 18 April, we had our first harvest at the end of June. That garden has produced over 2 tons of organic vegetables produced at the school since June. We then put in a slightly bigger on at the Vals Bay Hospital, and it’s important because your schools and your hospitals and your libraries and things are the hearts, it should be the hearts of your community, we put in a bigger one at the Vals Bay Hospital, we planted that one on the 10 July, we did our first harvest this week. We put a 2 500 square metre garden up at Laerskool Paul Greyling, and that was planted this week, it will harvest at the end of September …
R: But if it’s a financially viable, almost a business unit under professional management, how are the kids involved, how do you teach the kids?
J: Okay, sure. So we had our first focus on the economic heart of the project, the promise that we made to the Premier was just that this project would be economically sustainable with no support from anyone else, and, in fact, we would be able to expand, so we had a focus on the market gardens first. Simultaneously, though, we were putting in the permaculture gardens, the outdoor classrooms, et cetera, at the schools as well, so a tangible link between the market gardens and outdoors and the educators and the subjects, so that children could study in the outdoors with the market garden and …
R: But this depends on teachers, teachers knowing what to do and wanting to do it …
J: Most definitely, sure, but not necessarily, because there’s a number of NPOs who have been doing really good work, and when we found our NPO we said we said we didn’t want to be stepping on anyone else’s toes, we didn’t want to have to become masters of the skills that we didn’t have, and in permaculture there’s a principle called “integrate not segregate”, so we didn’t want to take anyone out. It was about how do we utilise existing organisations that are doing good work to compliment what we’re doing, so whether it is the Seed Foundation, Soil for Life, Trees for Africa, why don’t we work together, I mean, that’s what Ubuntu is about, why do we have to try and own the whole world. That’s the sort of capitalistic mind-set that says you must control everything, actually, in social enterprise you want to work with each other towards a common goal, so …
R: So did they come in and teach the children?
J: They will be, Ruda, they will be, yes.
R: Oh.
J: And again it was a timing issue. We first had to secure the economic viability of the project, you know, if money grew on trees we would be millionaires, but it doesn’t, and we have an obligation to all the people that we employ locally to make sure that their salaries are paid at the end of the month, pay the management team, et cetera. Now that that’s established, our focus switches to the most important part of the conversation, which is how do you make children agents for change into the future, and I have a question for you, Ruda, what’s your first memory of growing something?
R: Well, I grew up in a rural area and I suppose it’s not growing something myself, it’s harvesting oranges and selling them at the side of the road.
J: An entrepreneur early on. Nine tenths of people will tell you the bean, that little bean that we wrapped cotton wool, where you watched …
R: At school, oh, yes, yes, yes, we did, ja.
J: And nine tenths of people, you’re one of the handful who don’t or have responded differently. The Premier’s memory was being in a greenhouse with a horticulturist grandmother, so she caught me out in some respects, but nine tenths of people will say the bean.
R: Yes.
J: Now tell me about your Standard 6 biology lesson and plant structure?
J: But you will remember the bean.
R: Ja.
J: And that’s the critical thing about what I think of as “edible education”. Now, when children are learning about geography and they are in the outdoors and they’re seeing the sun’s inclination and the change of that from summer to winter, and why does the south wester blow in summer and the north wester before the big storm, and that sort of thing. Then you hold onto that information, and indeed every subject in the world is drawn from out outdoors, it doesn’t matter, maths comes from it, geography, science, chemistry, they are all drawn from the outdoors, and I just make it real …
R: I can see that this is really, I mean, this is where you want to be now. You’ve said to me earlier that you cannot carry on living at the pace that you’re doing. Why, what is bringing that change, you’ve done it for the past 20, 25 years, but you say you just, you have to make a change now?
J: I am busy writing my eighth book at the moment, it’s called Rethink, and one of the subjects that I delve into is, now I’ve lost my head for a moment, one of the subjects that I delve into is how we’ve allowed ourselves to have the wool pulled over our eyes, and a prime example is free range chicken, you know, we have this thought that free range chicken is better for us and then we buy free range chicken over battery chicken, they are still slaughtered at 42 days, that is the chicken. If you lead the label carefully, it doesn’t say that there’s nothing in there, it says no rooting, growth promoters or antibiotics are given, it doesn’t say it’s not there, and it was tied into things like we spend more time watching cooking shows nowadays than actually cooking, and I was guilty of showing a lifestyle to people which was entertaining, I have no doubt, but it was almost alienating people from food even more. So I will look at this plethora of cooking shows that are out there, and you are seeing a guy who use polygraph foam and something from here and something from there, and the average person cannot replicate it or even match up to what those people are cooking anymore, and I believe the end result is that they walk into the supermarket and they buy a pre-made meal, and I’m guilty of pushing that story. Now I’m responsible to sort of wind back the clock and create a better space.
R: And in terms of how that will play out in practice in your life in terms of will you still get up at 03:00 every morning and work until 20:00? You have two young children, you’ve said that you want to spend time with them.
J: I am, and, you know, the irony is I measured the other day the amount of quality time I spend with my children, and I think I’m just as guilty as most parents are nowadays, and it worked out to less than 10 minutes in a day quality time, and I think it is, you finish work, you’re tired, I need a little bit of space, and suddenly it is 20:00 and they’re in bed, and then you take them to school and they’re gone, and then the weekend you’re recovering so much. Yes, I will work from 03:00 in the morning and I am a workaholic, but when you’re leading with your heart, it doesn’t feel so bad, I mean, listen, I go to be at 20:00, I am still getting a good couple of hours’ sleep every night. Is it sustainable? I do not know. I’ve been burning the candle on both ends for so long that it’s imbedded in who I am. I’ve had some health scares in the last couple of months, I had a 175/140 blood pressure, and that’s heart attack working space, and about a month ago again it was 145 over something, I forget, and I look at them as warning signs for myself and for my health and my life, that if I don’t change elements of my life then, you know, I will be, I will have a bunch of friends standing around me sort of waving me goodbye in a coffin, you know, and that’s not what I want for my children …
R: And you won’t be there.
J: And I won’t be there, exactly. So, no, it’s not sustainable but, you know, I think the work ethic is sustainable, you know, you’ve got to, anything that you do you’ve got to put the effort into it, there is no easy ride, and in social enterprise you almost are more obligated to do good and be squeaky clean than in any other space, you know. If you’re using ground or donor funding and things, you have an obligation to deliver to society, but the reward could be really amazing. You know, if I can change enough people’s thinking or that government takes the program that I’ve created on as policy and implement it at the 15 000 odd schools in South Africa, then we would create a whole new generation of children who think differently. If we create local employment opportunities, if we create the local wellbeing economy, and it’s happening already, so, I mean, I’ve seen it. I had Alan Winde at the farms last night, he phoned me up at about 05:00 and said I’ve got an hour before I’ve got to be at an engagement in Simonstown, can you show me the farms, and I took him through to Kommetjie Primary, and we’ve got a little shop, it’s not very big, it is three square metres by three square metres, and the thing I was most proud to show him was the bread in the shop, because when we opened it and now produce moved 50 metres from the garden into the shop and the local community buys it, there is bread that is baked in Masiphumelele on our shelves, and the baker’s name is Vincent, and he walked into this little vegetable shop and he said, “I am a baker from Masiphumelele, can I sell my bread here?,” and that was my dream. In our lifetime to have seen the death of the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, and it’s all being replaced by generally large corporations who don’t have our wellbeing at heart. Generally it is an extractive process, it’s focussed on drawing as much money as they can out of us and tunnelling that money into a handful of a few shareholders, and I think corporates have a bigger obligation to actually start investing in society instead of treating us like “cows to be stripped” mind, but Vincent was the prime example of how local wellbeing economies can be created. He has a space where he can sell his bread to an affluent community member and you’re creating employment and entrepreneurial opportunities in an under resourced or poor community, and that sort of thinking, I think, is where we have to go going forward. We have to create social enterprises that actually focus on you and I and our neighbours and our larger communities to create a better space for all of us, and we have that power.
R: Your wife, Eugenie, is also very much involved in this whole enterprise. Tell me how you met?
J: She is going to hate me. I always joke that she stalked me. I just finished filming …[intervenes]
R: You’re a very lucky man if that’s the case.
J: No. I just finished post-producing the first season of Cooked and I took all the crew out for a drink, and there was this girl in the corner and didn’t pay too much attention and things, and then I had a couple of more drinks and we went to another pub down the road, and there she was again, and by the time I saw her at the third place …
R: Venue.
J: I had enough, I had some Dutch courage in me and I was ready to talk to her, and I said to her: “Would you like to come and walk my dogs with me tomorrow?,” and she said no, initially, and then I sort of begged and she eventually gave me her phone number, and lo and behold, the next day I got mugged, my phone got stolen and the whole thing, and I had no way of contacting her and things, and you know, when you don’t, when you say to a woman you’re going to phone her and then you don’t, you’re in trouble …
R: Yes, no, that’s the end of it.
J: And it took me two or three weeks to find her and her phone number, and by which date she had sort of brushed me off, he didn’t bother contacting me and that.
R: How did you find her if it was just a stranger and a phone number?
J: I went through all my friends and a guy called, he was, I forget, the steady cam operator, and he said to me, no, I think I know who you’re talking about and things, and then even worse, I mean, life is, you know 6 degrees of separation is rubbish, it is way less. I then found out she was an editor, and my mom, who was a producer had used her as an editor on commercials that they had worked on, so she knew my mom before I knew her, so I was like ridiculous.
R: So what did she say when you finally phoned?
J: Oh, you know, you’re a woman yourself, it’s like, “Why are you phoning me now?,” and that sort of thing. So we didn’t walk the dogs that first time, and even how we got engaged is even strange because I was filming in Eba Island in the far north of Mozambique, and we were flying back from Pemba to Maputo, and we went through an emergency plane landing, I mean, I was fast asleep in the plane and it just dropped out of the sky, and we landed in a place called Nampula, and I will never forget, there were nuns and priests and everyone on the plane and, I mean, you know, LAM can be like flying Russian LAM with chickens on the roof, that sort of thing, everyone was in the bar and the only thing that you could drink, there was whisky, and the nuns and the priests and everyone else was in the bar, and I thought about it and then I was like what was I waiting for because we have been together for about three or four or five years, and when I got back to Cape Town I had R2 000 left in my bank account, I went and bought a wedding band, I didn’t know the difference between an engagement ring and a wedding band, and we got home and I put the ring next to her and I said, “This is for you,” and she opened it up and she said, “This is very nice, what’s this for?,” and I will never forget, I said to her, “It is a wedding ring dofus,” and, I mean, it’s like the worst proposal on the history of the planet, but we’ve been together for 10 years. She is tough, she doesn’t take any BS from me, but she has access to me, and that’s the other side, I still hold a full-time creative job, so working on the NPO I need someone who has access to my mind and what’s going on and what division is and what we’ve got to drive, and she takes no nonsense from me. I could generally tend to be as “slippery as an eel”. If I can avoid work, I will, but that’s human nature as well, we’re all like that; if we can take a short cut we will do it, you know.
R: Ja, ja. So what makes it work, the fact that she holds her own, it sounds like?
J: Yes, yes, and she comes from an only child, only mom scenario as well, so she is fiercely protective of our children, which you need that strength, she is smart, she has got my back, and sometimes I wish I could run away but, you know, those woman, those strong woman in your life are critical.
R: And what does she draw out of you, what do you give her that you give no one else?
J: That’s a touch question. Everything, ja.
R: No, that’s the easy answer, I’m going to insist.
J: Ja, you are Ruda
R: Because you’re such a public person and you’re constantly out there and interacting with everyone.
J: No, and it’s tough, I mean, you know, I go on the road for six weeks in mid-September again, and she’s got to hold the fort with our children and family and things. [Sigh]. Ruda, I think, you know, my life is complicated, you know, sometimes I can travel for up to six months in a year, I mean, in fact, in my first or second born’s life I was gone for six months in a year, and I think I give her the space to be who she needs to be, you know, and when I am here, I support her, so I’m pretty much a hermit nowadays, I never go out, but she is going to an event up in White River for six days and I will take the children and look after them, and it is weird, because …
R: Ja, so it’s a full partnership.
J: Oh, no, it has to be, ja, and she doesn’t take any shit from me, which is important.
R: And the kids, what, how have they changed you as a person?
J: Ruda, my oldest is turning 21 this year, he is studying environmental science at UCT, he was an early surprize in my life, you know, I’ve never been able to point fingers at him because I was a reprobate growing up, and as a parent, you know, I can’t, I don’t think you can point fingers at them and say don’t do this and don’t do that if you’ve done it yourself, so I am very frank and honest with him, and Gabby and Sam are a little bit more challenging, and they are seven and four, and, you know, there’s a couple of sayings, “Life begins at 40”, and it used to be “Life begins at 40” because your children left home when you were in your 40s, and suddenly you had, you know, financial freedom and things, but, I mean, if my kids have kids when I had them, I will be in my 80s when their children are born, that’s the honest to good truth. Then you add into that the fact that, there’s an old saying about, “It takes a village to bring up a child”, and in an urban environment it’s not that anymore. My mom lives in the Wild Coast, my dad lives in the East, Eugenie’s mom lives in Johannesburg, our friends have children and, yes, you can support each other on weekends but the rest of the time you’re at the cull face looking after your own children, and that side of it is tough, and again, I often feel I can be a better parent, I’m just about tired.
R: Every parent feels you should be a better parent, I think.
J: Parent, ja, but Gabby taught me the most about women. I’ve realised you are like you are from the day you pop out, that’s it, you’re ingrained, that’s who you are genetically, and she has taught me to really, my nickname for her is “the fury”, and, you know, I wake up in the morning and I will say, “Gabby, it’s time to get dressed now, we need to go to school,” and she will look at me and she won’t even answer me and she won’t do anything, and I will say, “Gabby, please, Gabby, please, Gabby, please, what time?,” and she won’t do anything, you know, she is strong-willed, just like her mom. They are both at a Waldorf School, which has been quite an interesting experience for me, and my oldest went through Sacks, and I don’t think we’re allowing children enough time to be children, that’s, you know …
R: Ja, so Waldorf is a very different experience, ja.
J: It is, you know, my sister’s son is at a traditional school and he is reading and writing. My son can hardly write his name, you know, and it’s okay, you know, children, why must we put them under this pressure that makes them into automations and say you’ve got to be this by that age and read.
R: And then the last thing I want to ask you, you’re away so often, what do you come home to, what is home, where is it and what do you, why did you choose it?
J: Okay, so I live in Noordhoek and we’ve got a tiny house
R: Oh, beautiful, hey.
J: Lovely, but we’ve got a tiny house, it is only a 100 odd squared, but I have a 900 square metres garden and sometime ago I ripped up the front lawn, I don’t need grass, you know, and I put in a full permaculture garden, in summer we eat about 80% of our own vegetables, I’ve got beehives, I’ve got chickens in the garden, and it’s interesting you say that because I think a lot of people treat homes like assets and not like homes, you know, they’re too worried it must be prim, it must look like that, I can’t build a wall, I must buy this couch for R12 000. I just do everything myself and, you know, it’s my home, and if I have a vision for my space and my family and things, then I’m going to do it. So it’s chaotic, yes, and the benches I’ve made are all a little bit wonky and the braai is slightly off kilter, and things, but it’s my home, and, you know, I invest my own skills, time and effort into it and who I am into it, and I expect the same from my own family, we make it our home. [0:45:23]
R: And when you stop outside after X weeks way, what does it feel like when you walk in?
J: No, that part is strange, Ruda, you know, when you travel as much as I do and you live out of a suitcase and you take it away from your creature comforts, your family, your home, it’s quite difficult to come back into that space and orientate yourself straight away …
R: And fit into the family.
J: It is, and there’s a bit of, you know, it’s great that my kids can talk to me on the phone, and when they couldn’t, it was really difficult to communicate to them what I was doing and where I was going. I started taking them on the road with me, before they started going to school I used to take them on the road with me for six, eight or nine weeks at a time, and that was amazing, I mean, Sam, at the time he was four, we used to talk about all these different islands that we had been to, and that was a really amazing experience, in fact, Michael Palin puts it up there, he says, “The only bug you want to get when you travel is the travel bug, but God forbid that you get it,” you know, and I think I’ve instilled that in my kids already, but home is, ja, home is where the heart is, hey, it really is, three dogs, two chickens, three children, my wife, you know, and not in that order, please.
R: [Laughter]. Justin, thank you very much for visiting with us, and all of the very best, and I hope you find a way to negotiate this change that you want to make in your life.
J: Ja, no, thank you, life’s a journey and sometimes you don’t know where the next step is going to be or which path you’re going to go on, but generally I find it’s okay, you know, we’ll get there.
R: Very good message to end on, thank you. And so whatever is happening in your life, if it’s changing, it’s okay. Until next time, goodbye.
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