Forging community through feijoas
On why there's no such thing as too many feijoas, the rise of a new kind of celebrity chef and a pillow-like snack.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter produced in partnership with Boring Oat Milk. Written by me, Charlotte Muru-Lanning. It’s lovely to have you here!
As I write this from my dining room table, I can hear their ominous thuds. Every sentence typed is punctuated by another green ovoid crashing onto the roof above the kitchen or the concrete down the side of the house or the tiles in the garden as they lob themselves off our neighbour’s tree that hangs over the fence line.
A group of three bask at a corner of the garden so impossibly far from where they came from, it’s as if they grew legs and walked there.
Autumn has barely begun and despite divvying up plenty to friends and colleagues my fruit bowl remains stubbornly crammed with feijoas. Most of the year I wait eagerly for feijoa season to start, and yet when that time actually comes my excitement usually gives way to dread and then eventually, defeat.
Once we’ve made as many puddings, syrups and jams as we can manage, our beloved feijoa tends to become associated with words like “surplus”, “overabundance”, “glut” or worse, “onslaught”.
But too many feijoas isn’t a problem that everyone shares, explains Michelle Blau, the general manager of Fair Food, a West Auckland-based food rescue charity that shares fresh ingredients for 5,000 meals each day. “Seven percent of New Zealanders run out of food before the week is up and in our communities, that number is way higher, so we know very acutely just how much hunger is real,” Blau told me. They’re encouraging people to donate surplus feijoas to local food rescue organisations or popp them in local pātaka rather than letting them rot in fruit bowls.
While the vast majority of food charities focus on non-perishables, which are easier to store and cheaper to buy, Fair Food collects and distributes fresh food to charities, community groups, domestic violence shelters and transitional housing.
“We know that a mature feijoa can produce 30kg of fruit – that's a lot of chutney,” says Blau. “You constantly see them lying on the ground, and for us as food people and as zero-food-waste people it hurts our eyes to see great kai just sitting on the ground.”
For those who deal with the autumnal overabundance, it can be easy to forget that not everyone has easy access to a source of feijoas. And while they’re available at the supermarket – and some people even try to hawk them off in community Facebook groups – I think we can all agree that no one should be paying anything, let alone $10 per kilogram, for feijoas in Aotearoa. For that, Blau suggests searching Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance’s list of food rescue organisations around the country – or, if you’re in Auckland, dropping them at Fair Food’s Avondale hub.
“Within our community, people are having to put so much resource, time and energy into getting enough for lunch every day and getting enough diversity of food and meanwhile, fruit is just literally rotting outside someone's front yard,” she says. “So if we can help balance the two then that’s a big win for us.”
Food is a physiological necessity, so an outcome of food insecurity that is often overlooked is the social and cultural loss of not being able to access kai. “With shared food being such a big part of how we come together as a culture, when you don't have any kai you feel whakamā about going to an event or about sending your kids to something,” says Blau.
I talk a lot about the culture surrounding food in this newsletter, but I’m acutely aware that the cultural significance attached to food isn’t something afforded to everyone. Like all foods, feijoas have a kind of cultural resonance – in their case it’s one that is especially bound up with national identity and community belonging. Being priced out of a kai like that also means being priced out of culture.
Blau sees another untapped potential for the feijoa, or in fact any fruit tree: to become a vessel for community. “People are so shy about knocking on the door and saying, ‘hey, can I pick your tree?’,” she says. All food has the potential to be a connector, but the feijoa offers this in an effortlessly egalitarian and uncommercial type of way. “If people have a tree with kilos and kilos of fruit, and you walk by it every day, and it's not getting picked, go meet your neighbour.”
The Boil Up is brought to you in partnership with Boring Oat Milk.
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Weekly bites
In a city where the vast majority of the eateries shut shop before midnight, the handful that do stay open into the small hours around Tāmaki Makaurau hold a kind of heroic status –especially if you’ve been operating for as long as burger institution The White Lady. This week marks the food truck’s 75th birthday – it’s been dishing out white paper bags filled with burgers, fries and toasties to late-night crowds since 1948 when it was opened by Bryan “Pop” Washer. Back then, it was designed to sell milkshakes, coffee and kai after the 6 o’clock swill. Today, the business remains in the Washer family with the addition of a brick-and-mortar outlet on Karangahape Road, and now, the truck parks up on the corner of Fort Street in central Auckland. The concept for feeding hungry revellers has gone unchanged – although it's more of a 4am swill these days.
You could liken an umu to a hāngī in many ways. It’s often described as an “earth oven”, it’s a process that’s thousands of years old, hot stones are involved and the whole process imparts whatever you’re cooking with a distinctive smokiness. But unlike hāngī, which sees kai cooked within a pit, an umu requires no digging, explains Sela Jane Hopgood in this guide to preparing umu. Instead, coconut cream-steeped meat encased in parcels, fish, octopus and taro are cooked atop a bed of corrugated iron, firewood, coconut husks and halved coconut shells and under a pile of banana leaves. It would be an excellent way to fill the time and feed a bunch of people over the upcoming long weekend.
When it comes to vegetable peels, egg shells, coffee grinds and browning fruit, most of us turn to our rubbish bin. All that food waste ends up in landfills and as it decomposes, it’s responsible for a massive amount of avoidable methane emissions. A new government waste strategy announced yesterday, which will include a food scraps collection by 2030, is hoping to change that. "New Zealand is one of the highest generators of waste per person in the world, every year producing about 750kg per person. At home, we only recycle and compost about one-third of household waste," environment minister David Parker said in a statement. The new strategy, called Getting Rid of Waste for a Circular Aotearoa New Zealand, would see households in urban areas provided with standardised recycling services and a household food scraps collection by 2030. The government plans to introduce the legislation to the House before this year's election.
Until reading this Eater piece earlier in the week, I was largely oblivious to the rise of celebrity cooking shows. I’d watched (and honestly, mostly loved) Cooking with Paris, but I didn’t realise that Amy Schumer, Selena Gomes, Florence Pugh and soon Pamela Anderson too have their own cooking shows. While in the past, celebrity chefs were chefs – or at least really great cooks – transformed into celebrities (see: Rachel Ray, Delia Smith and David Chang), these days that definition has transformed into meaning an existing celebrity playing chef. The article argues that “the focus has shifted away from the food and on to the people who are making it, an inevitable consequence of our cultural obsession with fame and famous people”. The problem is, “cooking shows are harder than they look”. Watch Nigella Lawson (see above!), Maangchi, Julia Child or Sohla El-Waylly: cooking on camera is an art. And while celebrities dabbling in cooking is not an entirely new phenomenon – I own cookbooks by both Paul Newman and Sophia Loren – the coinciding rise of interest in food culture and celebrity worship means this version of “celebrity chef” is likely to become even more ubiquitous. The perfume bottle was once the vessel of choice for celebrity monetising and marketing; soon it could be the cooking show.
A message from Spinoff editor Madeleine Chapman. You're reading this because you value the work The Spinoff does in telling the stories of our people in our voices. As we head further into an already eventful 2023, we have a big job ahead of us. Covering the stories that matter to you is no small job. We’re a fiercely independent media company in Aotearoa but that also means we’re small and I think sometimes people forget how small our team is. I'm asking you to consider deepening your commitment to The Spinoff and the work we do by becoming a Spinoff Member. If you’re already a member, thank you for your support and advocacy - it's what keeps us going.
The weekly snack
Bourbon Sharimoni Gummy yoghurt flavour, $3.99 from Fruit World Epsom: It was with great trepidation that I, along with the (only) two colleagues who took up my offer to try yoghurt gummies, ventured into this cutesy bag of dairy-flavoured sweets. Texturally, the gummy is a delight, with an extraordinarily fluffy chew. A celestial squishiness in fact. Whether the gut-health benefits of yoghurt made their way into these pillowy lollies is unlikely, but the source material’s delicate sweet and sour certainly did – even if the imitation is more in the realm of Yakult than the punchier Greek or Icelandic types. All of that makes for an experience that’s pleasant enough, but also likely one where just one lolly is enough. Strangely, it’s not the yoghurt element here that’s most questionable but the hefty crystals of sugar and what must have been citric acid that were dusted on each sweet: a mix so potent that the crunch had an audible quality and the astringency made me wince. An experience I can only describe as compelling. 7/10
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
