Putting extinction on the menu
On the dish shining a light on the grim state of the country’s scallops, savoury cocktails and an ice cream-shaped 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!
The third course on much-accoladed Pōneke restaurant Hiakai’s current menu is an optical illusion of a dish. If it were delivered to your table without explanation, you’d be forgiven for thinking a pair of seared tipa (scallops) were resting upon your shiny plate. But looks can be deceiving.
Tipa are entirely absent from the dish; in fact, in its seven years of operating, Hiakai has never served them. Instead, the dish, called kina tipa, features cylindrical fondant potatoes finished with kina butter, hot garlic, fennel puree, kina sauce, harakeke seed slaw, crispy tempura and sea celery. The idea behind the dish is weighty: highlighting the devastating state of our country’s population of tipa, once a pillar of our local cuisine, now dredged to near extinction.
“It’s playful but political at the same time,” says executive chef and co-owner Monique Fiso (Ngā Rauru, Ngāti Ruanui, Samoan). The dish was inspired by their current menu theme, which is whānau. Hiakai general manager and co-owner Katie Monteith is from Whangārei, and while contemplating ways to pay tribute to her home and family in the far north, scallops made their way onto the drawing board. Monteith remembers “basically an abundance of scallops, but not in a glut way”, and “a lot of freediving and obviously, scallop mornay, because this was the late 80s and early 90s”.
Despite the mollusc being central to her memories of growing up, it’s been aeons since she's eaten them – owing to the species’ depletion. And so the resulting dish evolved from that absence, explains Monteith. "We've known about the dire state of tipa for a long time, we've wanted to have them on the menu for ever and we simply can't – but we still wanted to pay tribute to them somehow.”
Fiso, too, has her own memories of scallops – in the professional kitchens she worked at more than a decade ago, both locally and overseas. “When it was scallop season I would be given kilos of them – you wouldn't see that now,” she says. “We wanted to combine those memories to create something that really looks like tipa but isn't, something really interesting and unique and thought provoking, that can be enjoyed but also discussed at the table.”
The demise of local scallop populations echoes the heartbreaking story of toheroa – an impressive bivalve species and taonga for Māori – which from the 1920s was commercially harvested to near-extinction, all in the name of soup. Once plentiful on restaurant menus and in tinned form, toheroa numbers have still not recovered since a ban on harvesting was put in place in 1979. One would think that would be a cautionary tale.
But history often repeats. Before the 1960s, much of the scallop consumption in Aotearoa was by way of frozen imports or free-diving. That all changed around 1960, when exploratory dredging of the Tasman Bay Te Tai-o-Aorere scallop beds (near Nelson) began and gradually spread into Golden Bay and the Marlborough Sounds. It opened the floodgates for a scallop frenzy and recorded production increased steadily from 40 tonnes in 1962 to a peak of 9,500 tonnes in 1975.
Menus of the past often hold information about the changing demands for and availability of particular ingredients. Scallops, as it happens, were a regular sight on restaurant menus throughout the later half of the 20th century. As an example, a 1975 menu from Auckland restaurant El Trovador features an entree of Nelson scallops, and almost a decade earlier, a 1966 menu for Logan Park Hotel in Auckland (clearly right at the confluence of both scallop and toheroa’s popularity) features both a Nelson scallop starter and a cream of toheroa soup. I remember bountiful New Zealand scallops for sale at our local Foodtown in the early 2000s. These days you’d struggle to find scallops on the menu at most places, and where you do find them – often in fish and chip shops, and perhaps the odd eatery – they’re likely imported.
Concerns around scallop numbers aren’t a new thing. Less than a decade into the commercial catch, in 1966, and then again in the 1970s, worries around the plight of the scallop were already making headlines. Many have pointed to 2012 as the year when the situation for scallops turned from bad to totally dire. David Carter, then minister for primary industries, approved a controversial in-season total allowable catch increase from 48 tonnes to 370 tonnes of scallop meat weight – a 670% increase. In the years since, alarm bells around the state of scallops have been blaring. We’ve seen iwi and hapū lay rāhui across scallop beds around the country; in 2018 the Nelson scallop fishery closed as surveys confirmed it had been depleted; in the Hauraki Gulf alone, scallop mass has dropped from an estimated 776 tonnes in 2012 to just 53 tonnes in 2022; and last year the entire Coromandel scallop fishery was closed.
“I feel very sad that people are cut off from their ancestral food sources and their way of life,” says Monteith. “And a lot of kids don't even get to try things that should really be a right.” To Monteith, the sad story of our scallops is intimately linked to issues that plague our food system, whether it be our country exporting some of our best kai overseas or exploitation of the environment. There needs to be change, say Monteith and Fiso. In the most immediate sense, this would be an end to trawling and dredging. In a broader sense, this would look like a shift away from commercial harvesting and a return to indigenous knowledge and practices.
In a space that is meant to provide comfort and hospitality, delivering such a metaphorically weighty dish to customers likely trying to have a nice night out seems like a rather intimidating and perhaps risky decision for a restaurant to make. “The restaurant is an escape from reality for a lot of people and we definitely want to be that, so it’s a hard line to walk, like, ‘hey, look at this environmental degradation, there’s a species that's gone extinct, enjoy your kai’,” says Fiso. But so far, it's been well received by customers who had no idea about the state of scallops in Aotearoa as well as by those who are aware of the problem.
Both Fiso and Monteith see themselves as having a responsibility when it comes to issues like this that are as uncomfortable as they are pressing. “We want to be agents of change and be a part of something that's positive and proactive,” says Fiso. “If what we're doing doesn't have some depth and some meaning behind it, then why do it at all?”
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Weekly bites
Countdown’s “Great Price for Winter” promotion was announced in May this year, and saw the prices of 300 “essential” products locked down across the winter months. With food prices rising more than 12% on the year before, the price freeze was marketed as a measure against the cost of living crisis. But The Spinoff’s Stewart Sowman-Lund reports that Countdown incorrectly froze the prices of two of the items at a higher rate. This has now been corrected, but it came as no surprise to Consumer NZ, which has been collating hundreds of examples of “dodgy” supermarket specials.
The food we eat might often come neatly packaged, but that doesn’t reflect the messy and tangled system from which much of it emerges. A new book, Re-food, which was released last week, takes a look at our country’s “broken” food networks and unpacks the challenges Aotearoa faces when it comes to soils, waterways, climate change, food waste, packaging, unhealthy diets and a lack of access to food. Written by Emily King, who has worked in food systems change nationally and internationally for over a decade, the book advocates for a new approach to our food system, one that cultivates a more fair, sustainable and delicious future for everyone in this country. For a taste, here’s an excerpt on traceability and transparency.
Just months after 35 hummus and tahini products were recalled for the possible presence of salmonella, consumers are once again being warned to take care with particular tahini brands. Products from Durra brand – including tahini and three flavours of halawa – have been recalled due to potential salmonella contamination. RNZ reports that New Zealand Food Safety is taking steps to trace the product and has encouraged tahini buyers to check the date marked on containers if they had bought the Durra brand – affected products were dated between EXP: 18/12/2024 up to and including EXP: 12/02/2025, and should be returned to the place of purchase for a full refund.
The future is savoury – in the world of cocktails at least. I’ve found it hard to ignore the numerous articles proclaiming the rise of the savoury cocktail, and I honestly couldn’t be more excited. Ta ta, sugar syrups and strawberry daiquiris. Kia ora, parmesan, salsa, olive oil and, um, salmon. All of which makes me feel the need to give thanks to my most regular cocktail, which happens to be in the savoury camp too: the guindilla martini (gin, guindilla pepper brine and vermouth) from Karangahape Road restaurant Candela. It’s a concoction less unorthodox than the ingredients I mentioned earlier, more like an elegant, elongated glass of petrol in the best, most briny, most sippable kind of way.
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The weekly snack
Glico Giant Caplico Strawberry Chocolate Cone, $3.10 from Japan Mart Sylvia Park: These charming imitation ice cream cones were launched in the 1970s (please watch these excellent adverts for the product featuring legendary Japanese wrestler Giant Baba) by Japanese company Ezaki Glico – probably most famous for Pocky. That is to say, they know what they’re doing when it comes to sweet, biscuit-like things. They also produce actual ice cream, so are well informed in that space as well. So I don’t quite know why my hopes (based on no information whatsoever) were so low for this product, which I anticipated would be too dry and perhaps even a bit powdery. I guess there’s a reason people warn against assumptions, because instead this to-scale cone was filled with a melt-in-the-mouth Aero-like foamed chocolate. A pinkish layer of aerated strawberry-flavoured chocolate on the outside gave way to a core of milk chocolate in a matching texture, all encased in a miraculously crispy cone. You simply couldn’t eat one of these without feeling a little cheer. For some, the strawberry flavour will be too far down the artificial flavour line, but I’d argue there are times when only artificial strawberry will do – a dinky replica ice cream cone is certainly one of those times. 9/10
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
