Walk 57, 4th January 2021
Atiu Creek is a working farm park which was owned by Pierre and Jackie Chatelanat. They gifted it as a park to the NZ people and the property is being run by the Auckland City Council.
We knew Jackie and Pierre from our work as IT Consultants. I couldn’t have met better people. They were gentle, humble and always interested in us. ♥
We’ve gone for several walks on the farm. The tracks are well maintained and there are beautiful views over the Kaipara.
Walk: Northland 38
Pierre’s work with Composite Flour
Besides developing Atiu Creek, Pierre worked for a time with the UN FAO developing composite flour. He wanted me to scan the pages of a book he produced about it. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to type any explanations of the photos but the pictures show what he developed. I remember him telling me the woman on the cover of the book is wearing a dress he picked for her.
These are the pages of the book I scanned for him in 2011: Composite Flour.
Jackie explains: “In the 1960s Pierre found himself in charge of a mission station in New Guinea for two years. This was a turning point in his life as observing the local villagers drying and preserving sweet potato so successfully he realised the possibility of applying the same principle to all food crops, such as taro and sago, and later sorghum and millet. This started him on a project which by a chance meeting with one of FAO’s food technologists was to take him to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
He was invited originally to join the Freedom From Hunger Campaign to develop his ideas and always on a voluntary basis spent almost thirty years eventually initiating his own project which he called the Composite Flour Programme. This was to encourage developing countries, especially in Africa, to increase and use the cereal crops they were growing already and so reduce dependence on wheat imports. He compiled two technical books during those years, mainly for cereal chemists, which were then distributed to all UN members.
1n 1986 with the farm at Atiu Creek in such good hands, he felt able to resume his research work on composite flours. He and Jackie travelled to 19 industrialised countries to document their sophisticated use of cereal crops produced by the third world and their acceptability world-wide. FAO has now a library of information and photographic evidence on the use of composite flours and is available to all, especially and hopefully those developing countries who need to increase their food production.”
Links
Pierre’s legacy lives on at Atiu Creek
♥
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