Rotorua’s Raukura Huata celebrates culture and connection through kai Māori

TikTok creator Raukura Huata celebrates kai Māori and cultural connection.

Raukura Huata is at times a reluctant TikTok phenomenon. Born into what she describes as “a highly politically engaged whānau”, she was encouraged by her brother Te Otāne to open her life up on social media.

Her posts – a mix of politics and moments of joy, one shared meal at a time – have engaged a community of young followers, with 100,000 following her TikTok, and more than 24,000 on Instagram.

Huata has a background in media and marketing but now works as an engagement strategist. A cursory glance at her content shared across TikTok and Instagram shows the preternaturally stylish woman dining at the likes of Tāmaki Makaurau foodie hotspots Onslow and Lilius.

But it’s her videos of a very different kind that have caught the attention of her legions of followers.

Usually filmed at home in Rotorua or visiting whānau in Hawke’s Bay, Huata prepares kai Māori like toroī, fermented pūhā and mussels, or karengo, perhaps grabbing a freshly gathered kina and washing it down with a glass of crisp Chablis. A trained sommelier, her food and wine pairings are inspired and inspiring, and a generation of younger followers is lapping it up.

One of her TikToks, in which she prepared a tītī (muttonbird) boil-up has more than 2.9 million views.

Talking to RNZ last October, Huata said: “It warms my heart to know that [my videos are] an insight for our younger wāhine ... on how to have healthy relationships with each other and kai.

“Kai connects people, and I think actually further than that, kai connects people to people. It connects people to our place and people to our whakapapa.”

Raised by paternal grandparents in the small community of Bridge Pā in Hawke’s Bay, she describes her caregivers as “humble people that worked the land”.

“I was lucky to grow up with the privilege of access to the best ingredients, and seafood just caught and bought home for tea,” she says.

Weekends preserving and bottling Hawke’s Bay’s golden queen peaches loom large in her memory.

“When the big cauldron of boiling water was bubbling away to sanitise the mason jars and we’d be put to work peeling ... My grandparents would make 52 jars of everything, so every night you would open a jar and have plum or pears … delicious.”

She credits those early years as the probable beginnings of her passion to explore the provenance of food.

“Being raised in a world of access to all of these old traditions like preparing a hangi and stewed foods from meat most would discard,” she says.

Her working parents also travelled extensively, and she would accompany them on trips to countries like France and China, where her imagination was further piqued.

“We were quite curious as children, and fascinated seeing the similarities between how foods were eaten in places like France and China.”

There, she noticed every piece of an animal would be consumed, nose-to-tail style, unlike the sanitised, neatly packaged lamb chops being served up in Kiwi homes.

A move to Auckland for university saw her living in a student hostel, “and it goes without saying that the food I was eating was not great”, she says with a laugh.

“I went from freshly grown, caught and picked ingredients, and delicious kai … to that. So I began exploring, and thankfully found places like the Ōtara markets where I could get more of the food I was used to at half the price.

“I discovered more and more how much I not only loved to cook, but also the act of shopping for ingredients.”

The more she discovered on her bus trips south, the more fascinated she became, and that curiosity still lingers today.

Huata’s irrepressible enthusiasm for exploring new flavours is what has drawn almost 100,000 followers to her TikTok alone, where you’ll see her cooking up a bag of just-delivered lamb tails on a homemade tail pit one day, and then attending New Zealand Fashion Week Kahuria shows the next.

You can also see her collaborations with New Zealand growers and chefs, a standout being a very organic one she embarked upon with Onslow executive chef Glen File.

“I have been eating at Onslow for years,” she says, “well before I had a platform. I love their food philosophy, and that when you walk in, there’s a big portrait of Hinemihi (the 19th century meeting house taken to England in 1892) on the wall. It’s a place where the manaakitanga is always on point.”

One night while dining she had what she calls “a very light-hearted chat” with File.

“I said, ‘we need to do something Matariki together in here’. And he jumped on it. We didn’t have very long to turn the evening around, and then tickets sold out so quick we ended up putting on a second night. Oh my God. But it was awesome.”

She says the event and the process of collaboration “was a proper expression of what our ancestors meant when they were signing Te Tiriti”, working together, with mutual respect.

Did she have a clear vision in mind of what she would share when she started creating online?

“No, and I still don’t actually have a plan,” she says. “I probably should start thinking about that.”

She’s aware that in comparison to her younger brother, Te Otāne, who highlights topical political issues to inform and engage, her content can seem a little frivolous, but ardent followers will notice moments of action amidst the caviar and champagne.

“He reminds us of our collective duty to fight for our own liberation and that of others,” she says, “and I’m showing ways to fight for topics that are really important to me, while also finding joy in order to sustain that protest.

“I’m very conscious that the privilege of my audience comes with the responsibility of upholding some positive messages, which is what I think we all need right now.”

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