Have you eaten?

On feeding grief, food labelling and a healthy snack.

Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter presented in partnership with Farro.

When someone I love is hurting, the only thing I can think to do is feed them. An oily round of focaccia flecked with black sesame and red flakes of chilli. A leaking Tupperware filled with ratatouille made from the last of my summer vegetable reserves. A ceramic dish of Anna Jones’ creamy chard, lentil and bay gratin, the top studded with hunks of cheddar and a thick dusting of fresh grated nutmeg – just pop it in the oven for 25 minutes until the cheese is golden and bubbling.

I have recently been cooking for a friend who is grieving, and it has made me think deeply about need and comfort. We always need to eat, calories in so we have the energy to move and speak and cry and remember. But grief is a physical beast, one that can twist our insides, turning flavour to ash, returning nutrients as bile, or opening up a cavernous pit of aching hunger. There is a word in German, “Kummerspeck”, which literally means “grief bacon.” Figuratively, it describes the weight gained after tragedy, acknowledging the way grief often combines with physical hunger, food becoming not just a comfort but a crutch.

When I was about 19, a friend of mine died. After it happened, we gathered at someone’s parent’s house – we were so young, hardly anyone flatted yet – and tried to figure out what grieving looked like for us. Someone went and picked up Chinese takeout, big plastic containers of chop suey and sticky sweet and sour pork that smelled like stadium donuts, greasy white paper bags filled with jagged wontons, boxes of beer – so much beer. I had brought over logs of cookie dough that I slipped out to slice and bake later in the evening, when we were all feeling drunk and strange, unsure what to do at this hour and level of inebriation when we would usually go out dancing. My boyfriend had thought the cookies were a weird call when I’d insisted on making dough amidst the unreality and swirling sadness, but he and everyone else was grateful when I returned to the lounge with a sweet-scented tray of warm chocolate chip cookies. We devoured them hot, licking molten chocolate from our fingers, caramelised sugar chasing the sour taste of beer from our mouths.

A few years later, I stayed with my Nan for a couple of weeks after my grandad died. Each morning I would emerge to find evidence of some fresh pastime – perhaps the contents of my suitcase strung around the kitchen on hangers, every garment having been washed and meticulously ironed, including my knickers. On the counter, a glistening bowl of cut, peeled fruit waited for me – she’d even peeled the grapes. Nan would come in from the garden where I suspected she went whenever she heard me coming downstairs, not sure how to cope with being found amidst the fruit of her insomniac labours. We would take a French press and my skinless breakfast to the garden where we would sit and chat about the day as I ate and Nan didn’t. I was in England for the first time, surprised to find myself delighted by the food but not so distracted I didn’t notice how little Nan was eating. Determined to show me a good time despite the circumstances, she would drive us to historic houses around the countryside and, after a stroll through the gardens, I would order two cream teas at the café. “My treat,” I’d tell Nan, a generosity she couldn’t turn down from the 21-year-old granddaughter who had come halfway round the world to see her.

In her gorgeous book Home Cooking, Laurie Colwin describes a time when she was mourning her father and a friend sat her in a chair with a copy of Vogue while she busied herself in the kitchen. “When I got to the table, I realised that this angelic pal had made shepherds pie. My eyes swam with tears of gratitude. I did not know that shepherds pie was just what I wanted, but it was just what I wanted.”

Mandarins, electrolytes and yellow Squiggles tucked into a repurposed shoebox. A stack of fancy frozen meals from Ripe Deli. Showing up with a cake box full of ostentatious donuts that we ended up cutting into messy quarters to share in the sun, “no you have it, I’ve had plenty.” In times of sadness, we show love in the ways we can.

I know food doesn’t quell the pain, but it gives us the strength to bear it. After my uncle’s funeral, my boyfriend went to Shefco to buy dinner for my family: a rotisserie chicken wrapped in pita, savoury mujadara, a large size babaganoush and tub of salty Greek salad. I hadn’t even realised how hungry I was until I peeled a piece of schmaltz-soaked bread from the warm bird, saliva flooding my mouth as soon as it detected food, at last. At best, food can be healing, warming, a return to pleasure, a distraction. Even when it’s none of those things, food brought to us out of love is sustenance, filling us up in more ways than one.

Put Farro on dinner duty!

From scrumptious soups to fantastic frozen pizzas, ready-to-cook meals and delicious desserts, Farro Kitchen’s freshly made meals take the drama out of dinner. With family faves like lasagne and enchiladas, as well as fancier feeds like a mushroom ragu with gnocchi or coq au vin, and a stunning sticky date pud, Farro Kitchen is here to help you eat easier.

Weekly bites

We all know the cost of living has risen drastically in the last few years, what about in the last 30? This week a Redditor posted a picture of a faded Pak’nSave receipt from 1994 found in their parent’s garage. Eggs are, unsurprisingly, among the most significant price hikes, the cost of a dozen eggs having risen from $2.69 in 1994 to $7.49 today at cheapest. A pack of crumpets has risen by a whopping 325% from just 68 cents to $2.89 while a pack of Edmonds vanilla custard powder has essentially doubled in price from $1.39 to $3.59.

“What are best-before dates? What are use-by dates?” What indeed! The Spinoff’s new commercial editor, Liv Sisson, dives into a topic after my own heart, unpacking the ethics of such food labelling when New Zealanders are wasting approximately $3.2 billion worth of kai a year – enough feed 688,000 people for an entire year. 

Speaking of labels, the Stroke Foundation have weighed in on our current lack of mandatory labelling standards with a specific plea for clear labelling of the amount of salt in food products. Under the current regulations, salt does not need to be signalled explicitly – what consumers see is the amount of sodium, which they then have to convert into salt, a pointless exercise if they have no idea how much salt they should be eating on a daily basis anyway (FYI: it’s 5 grams). It seems we in Aotearoa are not alone in our lax labelling standards, although this could be set to change in the US as the Food and Drug Administration looks to develop front-of-package labels that it could require corporations to begin printing as early as 2027.

More-ish:

And in lighter news, I am pleased to announce that cottage cheese is back in fashion! Given how obsessed the internet is with protein, it was only a matter of time before this 1970s superstar was back on the scene and I for one am not mad at all. For my fellow curd nerds, I recommend this recent Carla Lalli Music video for not one, not two, but three cottage cheese recipes. Enjoy!

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Snack of the week

Health Lab Cookies'n'Creme Custard Filled Balls 3 x 40g for $9.99 on sale at New World

Are bliss balls still a thing? Do people still like them? Did we ever? I know there are a million different brands and flavours now (Tom and Luke, I’m looking at you), but don’t they all just kind of taste like dates and coconut? It was with these vague notions in mind that I perused the “healthy” section of the snack aisle recently, picking up a white cardboard box with the kind of brand design I associate with adaptogenic mushroom and collagen products. Health Lab Balls come in a few fun flavours (cookie dough, Aussie lamington), all of which boast their health credentials: healthy, plant-based, gluten free, palm oil free, no artificial colours or flavours, etcetera. I plumped for the cookies’n’creme (not cream – creme) variety because I liked the idea of a slightly bitter, cocoa ball smothered in white chocolate – sorry, whyte chocolate. I was also intrigued by the advertised “custard” centre – “custard” in inverted commas, lest we forget that these balls are plant-based.

My cynicism went out the window as soon as I actually sampled a ball, because it was delicious – and not just delicious for a “healthy” treat. The ball itself was made up of desiccated coconut and (gluten free) chocolate cookie pieces covered in said whyte chocolate, which may be dairy-free but was smooth and creamy with a rich mouthfeel, thanks to the cocoa butter. However, the much-hyped plant-based “custard” centre – advertised as delivering “100% nostalgic-custard-comfort-vibes” – might be the best part. Made from roasted cashew butter, coconut milk and a few other choice ingredients (including “Natural Custard Flavour”, which I wish I could buy a vat of), I’m not sure I would have thought of this as “custardy” had it not been advertised as such, but it was rich and unctuous with caramel and vanilla notes, a bit like a ganache in texture.

I had thought $9.99 was a bit steep for three balls (they are $11.99 when not on sale), but the balls themselves are quite substantially sized and they are made from high quality ingredients – the whyte chocolate is actually chocolate, containing a minimum 33% cocoa solids. 8.5/10

Mā te wā, 

Lucinda