Diet of a uni student
On bulk buying ramen and learning not to be an 'almond mom'.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter presented in partnership with Farro.
“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life – where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”
I always come back to this quote from artist and author Miranda July because I feel the same, except I also want to know what they are eating and what the inside of their fridges and pantries look like. With this thought knocking around my skull, I reached out to a few people and asked if we could sit down, share some food and talk about their eating life, whatever that might mean for them.
And so on a windy Wednesday morning, I met up with Caitlin at her local, One Sip Coffee in Te Atatu. Caitlin is a 20-year-old student studying Health Science and Chinese at the University of Auckland while also working two part-time jobs, at Briscoes and doing document digitisation at an office. Just this week she has moved out of home for the first time and is living with her brother and a friend in a house about 10 minutes away from her parents. She also used to be in my whānau class, in one of my previous lives as a secondary teacher, during which time she discovered my anonymous food Instagram (teenagers are true detectives) and showed me hers – @caitsfoodbank – which remains one of my favourites. Below is something like a highlights reel from a very long conversation over hot coffees and warm cheese scones with lashings of salted butter.
Your Instagram makes it look like you buy lunch from Munchy Mart every day. Is this true?
Not every day! I used to not eat enough because I was too stressed and busy with uni and two jobs. But I’ve been eating more fruit and vegetables lately – I bought frozen fruit and I’ve been making smoothies! And now I bulk buy energy drinks and ramen at the supermarket which saves me money. Did you see that picture of me holding the noodles in my hands? I forgot a bowl so my boyfriend bought a bowl of noodles and took them out so I could cook mine in the bowl, then I ate them from the wrapper and he cooked his.
Aww that’s sort of romantic! But wild of you. So how much are you usually spending at Munchy now – and what do you buy?
I try to limit it to under $20 a day, maybe $10 or $15. I usually get a steak and cheese pie or a sausage roll and an Assam milk tea – usually strawberry, green tea or original, and I’ll often shout one for my friends then they’ll shout me back another time. I also started making coffee at home which saves me money, so now I only have it out as a treat, that or a hot matcha.
How are you feeling now that you’ve moved out and have to pay for all your own food?
I haven’t cooked properly since I was 10 – I was a superstar child chef from watching MasterChef Junior. I recently found all my old cookbooks in the garage! Women’s Weekly baking ones, Chinese, Taiwanese, Indian… but I just got too busy. In high school I tried to meal prep because I was going to the gym a lot but I couldn’t keep it up, I was too busy and tired and I felt bad using all of Mum’s groceries but I didn’t have any money. We did our first flat supermarket shop the other day and I think I spent about $30 on my own stuff – noodles, oat milk, Yakult, muesli bars. I saw my brother buying all this meat though and I was like, how do you know which meat to get? I bought some the other day and it was like $15 but I’m not sure how to cook it.
You eat a lot of meals out because you’re always at work or uni – what are your go-to spots?
BannSang, The Don, Eden Noodles, Xi’an Food Bar – which you recommended! And I love Go-Go Music café. I have morning friends now so I’ve been going to cafes, like here (at One Sip), Beekeepers Wife, Black Cottage, Little Sister. I hate franchise cafes, but sometimes my friends make me go to Coffee Club or Columbus. Do you know The Concourse? There’s this great place there called Cielito, they do the best tacos – my friends will come from the other side of Auckland for tacos there.
What would you say is your approach to food, or your philosophy of eating?
I used to be kind of an “almond mom” – I was such a skinny kid that I was always encouraged to eat more, and then puberty hit and I was eating more so I gained weight, and suddenly it was the opposite. I’d see relatives and they’d be like, you’ve put on weight! So from about Year 10 to Year 11 I was calorie tracking, it wasn’t sustainable. Then in Year 12 it was lockdown and I was rotting at home, staying away from social media and disconnecting from the real people I knew. I thought, if I stopped looking at these people, maybe it would help… but it wasn’t until uni when I made all these new friends that I realised I’m a person, I deserve to feel good.
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Weekly bites
Chilli oil, chilli crisp, chilli crunch, Sichuan chilli oil, salsa macha. Whatever you call it, this spicy red condiment is a pantry staple in Chinese cooking that can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty when chilli was first brought over from Latin America. With as many recipes, ingredient variations, techniques and uses as there are cooks, chilli oil is good on everything: dumplings, noodles, avocado toast, eggs, even ice cream. Which is why food internet is in uproar over Momofuku – the vast food empire founded by celebrity chef David Chang – attempting to trademark the term “chili crunch” (the American spelling) along with “chile crunch” (the Spanish spelling common in the Southwest). This week, cease-and-desist letters were sent to food entrepreneurs across the US with many of these smaller businesses acquiescing swiftly, unable to afford the legal fees that could come with resistance. Momofuku and Chang have been accused of “bullying mom-and-pop manufacturers that have ancestral connections to a spicy-oily-crispy condiment” and criticised for trying to take ownership of a term that is “merely descriptive.” As one commentator put it, “This feels like the same thing as if they were going after the term ‘hot sauce’ or ‘ketchup’ or ‘mustard’.”
Who can resist a salty golden nugget of fry bread? In an especially mouthwatering dispatch from our What’s Eating Aotearoa project, Vanessa Ellingham describes the history of parāoa parai, making links to its many cousins around the world – skinny churros and youtaio, puffy bhatura and langós. However, perhaps the closest relative is the Native American version, also called fry bread, also a beloved cultural food that Indigenous chefs take much pride in preparing and often served at gatherings, and also borne from a settler-colonial context. You might need to head to the Hangi Shop (or any FB purveyor) after reading this.
Having dinner with friends last night, we got to talking about crying. Unable to recall my own triggers, I asked my boyfriend what films or TV shows had made me cry and he said Masterchef New Zealand, almost every episode. He’s not wrong. Viewers of Season 7 will be stoked to hear that finalist Alice Taylor – now a pastry chef at Paris Butter – has published a cookbook. They may also recognise the title – Alice in Cakeland – from Nadia Lim’s musings after tasting one of Taylor’s notoriously special desserts when Lim commented that she could see Taylor writing a baking book. The book itself follows the same ethos of Taylor’s budget bakes Instagram series, responding to the cost-of-living crisis with an offer of affordable and adaptable recipes inspired by own forever-favourite cookbook, the good old Edmonds Cookery Book.
More-ish:
It’s not local, but it is fun to read The New York Times annual restaurant menu trends round-up and see how they transcend place. A few comments I felt were relevant to our own scene:
Certain dishes and ingredients – fried chicken, yuzu and nostalgic desserts (I’m looking at you, warm cookie with ice cream) – are also abundant across Aotearoa menus, although a similar survey here might note the ubiquity of a fish crudo and some version of heirloom tomatoes with burrata.
Menus have shrunk, and they are bolder and brighter: “It is part of the interior design.”
Line drawings inspired by the likes of Matisse and Jean Cocteau appear all over menus, and we’re beginning to see cute mascots appearing, too.
“Informal is in.” More of this, please!
The Spinoff and SparkLab proudly present: Business is Boring Live!
Idea to impact: Designing waste out of the system
Hosted by Simon Pound, a panel of three leaders in circular business; Sara Smeath, Jayden Klinac and Rachel Brown will share their experiences of building better business systems. Join us at The Spinoff Chambers on the 30th of April for a live pod record with Q + A. Be part of the event, and part of the solution.
To secure your spot, please RSVP: commercial@thespinoff.co.nz by 23 April 2024
Snack of the week
Glico Pejoy Floral Fruit Series, Rose Raspberry Flavour, $5.99 for 48g from Yi Cart Asian Supermarket
I’m not sure what I expected from a biscuit that came in a pale pink, storybook box painted with watercolour roses, raspberries and dragonflies. A sparkling, viscous pink liquid is depicted flowing into the wand-shaped biscuit “like when you refill your liquid soap container,” my boyfriend remarks. Writing this now, I realise that this was actually an extremely accurate representation of what I was about to eat. Reader, do not buy these biscuits. They look like soap and they taste like soap. This is a textbook example of “does what it says on the box”. I had hoped that the promised “rose raspberry” flavour would remind me of floral French macarons, flower extracts added with a gentle hand so you don’t so much taste as smell the delicate scent as your teeth crack through the enriched meringue shell. This is not to say I was expecting Pierre Hermé for $5.99, but I didn’t want the taste of cheap gift store bar soap lingering in my mouth, either. 1/10.
Mā te wā,
Lucinda
"Line drawings inspired by the likes of Matisse and Jean Cocteau appear all over menus..."
I wonder if it was at all influenced by "The Bear" where one of the chefs was drawing out dish ideas in their notebook to see how they might look plated up, but not simple sketches, more like mini-paintings.