Revisiting an old food foe
An attempt to rehabilitate Chesdale cheese slices, the ongoing honey industry tussle, plus I taste test a citrus-laced chip.
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!
Firstly, apologies for the late newsletter! Something went wrong with publishing and I’ve only just realised. Eek.
For most of my childhood, Chesdale Cheese Slices were a mainstay in the fridge. Much to my disappointment. And they – alongside luncheon sausage and jam – became part of an internalised trio of lunchbox foods that kids were meant to like but that I, unfortunately, didn’t. It wasn’t even joyfully plastic in a vibrant orange American cheese kind of way. Instead, it was a pale, silken flop of a substance that seemed to only ever play the worst notes of tangy.
But yesterday, as I drove myself to an interview for the first time since passing my driver’s license, I found my mind drifting to the individually wrapped “cheese” slices. Perhaps it was the loose parallels between the cheese and industrialised car convenience as I sat in after school traffic while an air-conditioned train rattled past. Or it was one of the persistent nostalgic cravings that we all seem to be infected by lately. Maybe I was just hungry because I’d skipped lunch.
I wondered if Chesdale might be one of those foods that have an unjustly negative reputation among food snobs. Perhaps it could be the next happening cheese trend? I secured a packet, took them back to the car and ate a slice.
I want to say that it was some kind of profoundly romantic food moment where I realised this cheese was actually worth us all revisiting. But peeling back the plastic revealed something as bad as I remembered.
It’s deeply unpopular to come to a negative conclusion on a mainstream food item, and the taste value of all food is of course subjective, but I couldn’t help but wonder, with the wide range of cheeses available these days, why is there still a market for this stuff?
I’ve not encountered a packet in our family fridge for at least a decade but a good place to start I thought, would be once loyal customers – my parents. When I ask my mum why they bought them in the first place, she responds with a list. “I had them when I was a kid”, “cheapish”, “cool advertising”, “easy to put in a lunch” and “didn’t really need to be refrigerated”. My dad however questioned their categorisation, saying, “this stuff is not really ‘cheese’. It’s a reconstituted cheese-like substance”, but, he added with enthusiasm “more-ish!”.
As it happens, the iconic cheese is almost a century old. Jack Butland, a businessman who founded NZ Cheese Ltd in 1926, discovered (on the backs of discoveries of earlier food scientists from overseas) that adding sodium or potassium phosphate would give the cheese a smoother texture than the extraordinarily dry and sweaty cheeses that were ubiquitous in Aotearoa, and it went on sale as Chesdale Cheese the same year. It marked an industrialised swing in the building of New Zealand’s important cheese identity. Since, my mum recalled that it’s had iterations that have included foil wrapped triangular segments rather than slices and a pineapple flavour. In 1969 its packets began featuring the beaming Ches and Dale characters. Like most processed cheeses, it contains a minimum of 55% cheese, cut with water, milk solids, emulsifiers, acidity regulator, salt, preservatives and colour.
When it comes to the topic of price, according to my survey of the cheese aisle, they’re cheaper than most other cheeses. Though, at $16.80 per kilogram compared to around $20 for 1kg of Tasty – it’s not by much. In fact, I thought that at $4.20, the 12 plastic sheathed singles were surprisingly pricy. Clearly, there are benefits too in that they’re relatively long lasting and convenient for parents, aged people and for people with disabilities.
Really, all of this leaves me with a conundrum. Food media, myself included, has a growing and I think, well-intentioned tendency to celebrate “low-brow” food culture – culinary, preferences, practices and habits that saw “experts” stick up their noses. But in the time of a cost of living and inequality crisis and a looming recession it’s hard to know whether that has positive or negative consequences. On the one hand, it’s a democratising opportunity to flip the script on who gets to define taste, and to celebrate the food that more of us have access to. At the same time I’m mindful that it runs the risk of forging acceptance of lower quality foods at exactly the same time we should be collectively demanding that everyone has access to good quality kai. I guess the point is, in a country with this many cows, we should all be able to eat our favourite cheese – no matter what that happens to be.
Iced coffee season is here. Admittedly we’ve been chugging oat iced lattes all year long, but for those of you still leaning into Mother Nature, this is the PSA you’ve been waiting for. It’s officially iced coffee season. Head to boringmilk.com for your summer supply of New Zealand-made oat milk, straight from the source.
Weekly bites
A sticky stoush between New Zealand and Australian honey producers has taken another surprising turn. New Zealand’s Mānuka Honey Appellation Society has been seeking action in the United Kingdom's High Court over the trademark of the word “manuka” (yes, that’s manuka, not mānuka). The group wanted Australian producers to stop using the term when selling overseas and argued it was a word exclusive to New Zealand. In 2021, the UK Intellectual Property Office rejected the application to trademark the phrase, on the basis that despite being a Mãori word, it was in common use, meaning Australian producers were free to sell their honey under the name. At the time the Mānuka Charitable Trust, a group representing industry bodies, iwi and government, said the decision was out of step with existing Indigenous IP frameworks. The society initially appealed that decision but withdrew late last month, along with a bid to secure a registered certification mark for “mānuka honey” in the European Union. While the Australian Manuka Honey Association said the decision represented sweet victory for Australian producers, New Zealand society spokesperson John Rawcliffe said the move was strategic and that the local honey industry wouldn’t be backing down.
According to Statistics New Zealand’s food price report released last week, the cost of a kilogram of sausages has climbed 21% since the start of the pandemic – from $10.72 to $12.97. Those rising costs make it seem even more curious that someone has been sneaking bread wrapped snags into the letterboxes of multiple residents of Waiheke Island suburb Surfdale. With the assailant dubbed the Surfdale Sausager, the real life whodunnit mystery has managed to catch the attention of multiple media outlets: 1 News, Stuff, Newstalk ZB, NZ Herald and for some reason, RNZ.
I go the majority of the year without a single fresh tomato in my orbit, but when summer hits it’s on. Sliced rounds are divvied up onto generously buttered Vogels, cubes are folded into sesame oil-laced scrambled eggs, quarters are doused in olive oil and a cracking of salt and pepper, and handfuls blitzed to make gazpacho suppers. Out of season they’re mealy, watery and far too astringent but when the weather is right they’re suddenly tangy, sweet and juicy. By any measure, I should be eating a heck of a lot more at the moment – but my homegrown tomato crop has so far been abysmal. Olivia Sisson writes on how the severe weather has impacted our toms, along with some practical tips to make the best of the rest of the season for home growers – there is still hope!
When we hear the phrase “endangered species” our minds likely turn to rhinos, tigers and Māui dolphins rather than kai. But, as this Guardian article explains, it turns out that there’s a great deal of food and drink varieties that are on the verge of dying out. “Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly grows and consumes only nine,” writes Clare Finney. Despite the supermarket seeming a cornucopia of choice and diversity – most of what’s available is the result of a monoculture, and oftentimes also a monopoly, on seeds, cheese cultures, starters, recipes and so on. And as it turns out, that has repercussions that go far beyond the plate.
Eggs have dominated conversations around food prices locally and beyond over the last few months. The blame for price hikes in the US – according to the US Bureau of Labor the cost of a dozen jumped from $1.78 to $4.25 over 2022 – has been pinned to inflation and Avian flu by the industry. However, American advocacy group Farm Action allege the industry is instead turning those conditions “into an opportunity to extract egregious profits” and say egg producers in the US saw a 40% increase in profits last year.
The weekly snack
Orion grapefruit flavour potato chips, $3.99 from NJK supermarket in Auckland: When it comes to selecting from the shelves for these weekly reviews, I always strive for something that sits outside New Zealand’s mainstream snack transmission. With these, as I crunched into my first taste in the car, I was mostly taken aback by the fact that they weren’t completely awful: Delisio chip-like in texture, with a brightly bitter grapefruit smack. Upon sharing with my flatmates, who surmised that they’d pair better with a margarita or Marlborough sav than the chilled red they had in hand, “something with a bit of ‘pah’ to it”. Chip by chip, responses devolved from “I would smash all of these” and “they’re mean but they’re also kinda nasty” to “it’s like you're spraying your mouth with spray and wipe” and finally, “you should eat no more than two”. To sum up, they’re surprisingly not bad, but when it comes to finishing a bag, it’s a burden best shared. 5.5/10
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
