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Linda Woodgate: Exponent of organic food and healing arts at Arcadia

January 17th, 2012
By David Armstrong

From "career woman" television executive to owner of Arcadia Organics shop and cafe and champion for organic eating and natural health practices has been a radical step for Linda Woodgate, but one which is paying off through obvious inner contentment.

Linda and her husband Peter have lived in Motueka for eight years now, having made the big move from England because they were convinced there was more to life than the hectic life in the television and video industry.

Now, having doubled the foot traffic for the shop and cafe and brought it closer to to the mainstream of thinking on food, they hope to sell the business to concentrate on their health and healing practices.

Linda was born in Hertfordshire, UK, and developed a liking for working with communications equipment and the humans that used it. Her first training and job out of school was operating a GPO telephone switchboard, and then she worked as a radar plotter in the Navy, doing land-based air traffic control for computerised or real war games and joint maritime operations.

By her late-20s she moved to working for at a police college in Exeter, looking after their audiovisual and video equipment and eventually specialising in training policemen how to talk directly with ordinary people through the media.

"The Chief Constable was introducing a new concept of community policing," she says. Before then the police spoke to the public only through spokespeople, but Linda was involved in training about 2,500 police at all levels to talk directly with the media. "It was making them much more human."

After doing that for about eight years, she got a job with a small private television company which specialised in making TV programmes for large companies working on promotions. It was there that she met her husband to be, Peter, a location sound recordist.

She was in her late 30s, he was younger. "I was a career woman then. I also had a hectic social life too, and I didn't want to slow it down by being attached," she laughs.

Her work at the TV company was a huge step up in challenges and rewards - plus a lot of travel - for Linda. She had to be on top of the whole production process. "I was really good at coordination, so I was production manager to start with, sending crews around the world, organising their schedules, making sure they had the resources they needed, coordinating the editing process."

During the eight years she worked there the company grew from eight to 150 employees, and in the process her job title changed, eventually becoming the manager and organiser of conferences and huge product launches. She also began training senior company executives in speaking at these occasions and to the media. "I didn't teach them to sound like politicians; I taught them to be more natural and approachable in their communications."

In the early 1990s Linda and Peter began discussing making a change in their lives, including working from home rather than taking on so much travel. "I wanted to explore taking a year off working and also to find out what it would be like to be bored, so Peter and I took a year off in 1991 and went to Australia.

"I don't think we knew it at the time, but that was the start of the change of our lives," she reflects. "Maybe the television industry wasn't really where we needed to be or even liked it any more."

It took them a while, though, because when they returned to the UK they fell into old work habits for several years, though this time freelancing, including the production of a music video by singer Peter Gabriel. But gradually through the nineties both Linda and Peter began building on their interest in a healthier lifestyle and easing out of the television industry.

Linda began studying for a qualification in teaching adults, and the couple took some time to renovate a building into their "dream house". They finished it just when Peter decided to stop work and begin training in holistic massage, so they had to sell it.

"We knew there was more to life than what we'd been doing," she says. "We knew there was an invisible world around the physical. There is energy around us, there is synchronicity, that it works very well when you're happy. Being from, if you like, a computer geek background, I needed to have proof that such things were happening, that maybe I didn't need a pill to fix myself.

"We started to meet people who were looking more to the energy and healing side, the spiritual aspect of yourself."

In amongst that, things were happening food-wise. "We were great steak eaters and enjoyed wine, lovely big roast dinners, and that sort of thing." But they started cutting down on the meat in their spaghetti bolognaise because they were finding it a bit heavy, and slowly they found they had less desire for so much meat. It was no sudden decision, just a slow elimination over time.

Linda also had a bad reaction to some wine one day. "That's weird," she remembers saying, "I love wine. Must be a cheap wine." But all the others she tried for a while gave her throat a burning sensation. So wine joined meat on the gradual elimination list. Smoking cigarettes too.

In 2001, both now moving into health and spiritual healing, they decided to act on a 1991 promise to travel again within 10 years, so they set off for New Zealand with some money in the bank and the ability to buy and convert a van to travel the country.

They did head massages at festivals, meeting "lots of fantastic people" along the way. They decided they would like to stay, and just happened to see an advertisement in a magazine for the sale of the lease on Arcadia Organics in Motueka. "It was just a feeling, a gut reaction, the synchronicity, so we drove down to meet the owners and decided to do it.

After going through the paperwork to get business visas, the approval came quickly (eight days rather than the predicted eight months) and on September 1st, 2003, the deal was done.

With no knowledge of retailing and little more about organics, it was a "steep learning curve" involving lots of reading and talking with people. The primary goal was to raise awareness of organic food, natural eating and nutrition, and to get people thinking about what they eat and how food affects the body.

For those who haven't been in Arcadia recently, the property includes the shop, cafe and two rooms for alternative health treatments. It's a busy little hub for natural foods and remedies, and Linda says that not only has there been a doubling in the number of customers but she's also seen a change in attitude of 'mainstream' shoppers.

More light in the arcade and a brighter colour scheme for the shop and cafe, together with casual but neat presentation, has encouraged a broader acceptance of the business beyond being just for hippies with dreadlocks and unpleasant aromas.

Many of the people coming into the shop are asking questions about their own personal health issues and receiving advice or guidance into the therapies offered. And outside the shop, Linda is available to talk to any groups such as schools, rest homes and functions about organic food and natural health, not preaching but "offering choices".

Linda has also been keen to offer her skills from her television production days for the benefit of Motueka, and is into her second term on the Our Town Motueka committee. "I have capabilities in production coordination, networking and getting to know and motivate people," she says.

"Our Town now has a few new people in businesses in town who are more motivated and getting things done. I like having lots of things to do and can help in organising events and people. What I've always done is motivate and organise people to come together to create an event or get things done."

One of her desires is to help build the concept of 'Destination Motueka' - encouraging people to come to the town for attractions in their own right, rather that just as a gateway for other attractions such as in the national parks.

 
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