Talking food in times of crisis
Reflecting on pandemic food writing, down the TikTok sauce rabbit hole and director Nahyeon Lee's favourite spot for late-night chai.
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!
There’s history to the knotty relationship between food writing and times of crisis. In a 1942 piece in the Partisan Review George Orwell criticised conspicuous consumption of gourmet food and dining during wartime rationing, calling it “luxury feeding”. It’s just one instance that reflects the dissonance between times of societal difficulty (wars, disasters, recessions, pandemics) and the celebration of gastronomy.
Fast forward 80 years and dining out has again become a point of contention, this time throughout the pandemic. Among lockdowns and fluctuating alert levels, being able to dine out or not very quickly morphed into a fiery symbol for having or not having “freedom”. Now, in Aotearoa we can eat at restaurants, cafes and bars, with masks worn by staff the only visual reminder that the pandemic persists.
In fact, – and I apologise for being a killjoy – the pandemic does more than just persist. Cases, hospitalisations and deaths have been rising here and almost everywhere else. Almost 2,000 people have died in New Zealand with the virus – on a per-capita basis that’s more than the 100,000 death milestone in the United States that the New York Times described as an incalculable loss in May 2020.
With that situation in mind, it can feel clunky and awkward to write about food at the moment.
While talking about food encompasses something far more comprehensive than dining out, often it’s the taken-for-granted first thing we think about when it comes to our food culture. Part of that is because dining out is a vital part of how we experience, share and think about kai. Increasingly, I find it difficult to reconcile the fact that the freedom to dine out has come at the expense of other people’s freedoms. That unease probably finds its way out into the open each time I write about food at the moment.
In saying that, I don’t think we need to feel in any way hopeless about the situation. I spoke to experts last week about how we can continue to enjoy meals out while keeping ourselves and those around us safe and it gave me a sense of much-needed agency.
While we’re in this current wave, we can all do our bit. I’ve found middle ground by pivoting to takeaways and spots with outdoor seating, and keeping my mask on whenever I can. I’m still able to enjoy old favourites and new finds, even if I miss the loud clatter of cutlery, and the humm of being in a packed new opening. I remind myself, it’s just for now.
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Weekly bites
I’ve fallen down the TikTok pink sauce rabbit hole this week. If that sentence meant absolutely nothing to you, here’s a summary: an American TikTok creator called Chef Pii has been selling a rose-coloured sauce aptly named “Pink Sauce” for $20 a bottle in the US. The sauce went viral for all the wrong reasons this week, with people questioning the accuracy of its ingredients list (it looks very much like ranch sauce but contains no egg or emulsifier) and nutritional information (according to the label there are 444 servings in a bottle), and raising concerns around food safety (it contains milk but was being shipped unrefrigerated from the creator’s kitchen and apparently made a bunch of people sick). Glaringly overlooked within this conversation is the fact that coloured condiments aren’t a new thing. Heinz EZ Squirt ketchup – which came in purple, green, orange and, perhaps most questionably, blue – was a big deal in the early 2000s in my household, despite apparently being a flop everywhere else.
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One of my favourite pieces of Auckland trivia is that Onehunga, just south of the city centre, and Huia, on the west coast, are the only Auckland metropolitan areas without fluoridated drinking water. But that might be about to change. Legislation was amended last year to ensure a national approach to fluoridating water instead of leaving it up to local councils. And an order made yesterday by director general of health Ashley Bloomfield means 14 local councils will have to add fluoride to all or some of their water supply. Councils will have between six months and three years to follow through on the health order and an $11.3 million fund will be available to help with any work required. This will increase the number of New Zealanders receiving fluoridated water from 51% to around 60%, Bloomfield said. There’s good reason for this too – a New Zealand health survey from 2009 showed young people living in areas with fluoridated water had a 40% lower lifetime incidence of tooth decay than those living in areas without.
The record will surely show that I’m a certified fan of The Spinoff Cheese Index which runs like ticker tape across our homepage tracking the price of 1kg blocks of cheese. In an era of supermarket duopolies and record inflation, it’s both extremely useful and cute. Since its launch in June, our cheese analysts have assessed the data and noticed that most of the blocks of cheese are discounted on a week-on/ week-off basis, while Mainland Tasty seems to buck the trend entirely by never ever being discounted.
New Zealand full-cream cheese. Delicious! [Display card. 1930-1950s?]. Ref: Eph-F-CHEESE-1930s-01. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/32231636 Unlike the murky origins of many things we eat and drink, common cocktails often have well-documented provenance. I often think of how intriguing it is that drinks like the Mai Tai or espresso martini can be attributed to a specific bar, a particular bartender or even an individual event. In that way, cocktails always feel fervently linked to their past. The role of global world fairs in the proliferation of cocktails is another important part of the story. Here, online drink magazine Punch explores how those fairs showcased American cocktail innovations and introduced them to a global audience. Essentially, if you wanted your recipe to go viral pre-internet – world fairs were the place to be.
Five places with director Nahyeon Lee
Nahyeon Lee is a writer, director and theatre producer. Raised in Tāmaki Makaurau with Korean heritage, Lee is one of eight pan-Asian female filmmakers to direct vignettes in the anthology film Kāinga which premieres this Friday. Following the 2017 film Waru and 2019 film Vai, Kāinga is the third film in the trilogy and illuminates the immigrant experience in Aotearoa through the lives of eight Asian women. Her black comedy Prime-Time premieres this November at Q Theatre too, and as a person who attended a reading of this, I wholeheartedly recommend getting tickets. Here are Lee's five favourite places to eat.
Swings, Kitchener St, CBD: A newly opened sandwich spot in CBD serving delicious sandwiches in plush bread and filter coffee with a range of Korean canned beverages. The sandwiches are delightfully savoury and sweet, adding Korean flavours like bulgogi. My go-to is the Bully sandwich with the additional hash brown.
iMart/Wang Mart/Bok Mart/ a love letter to Korean supermarkets everywhere: The local Korean supermarket is my go-to when I need a quick snack, canned beverage or a meal to go. My local when I'm at work is iMart, on Wakefield Street in the CBD, where I'll hum and ha in front of the drinks fridge. My recommendation would be Bong Bong, a sweet drink with floating Korean green grapes inside for a textural surprise.
Chai Wala Bhai, Calgary St, Sandringham: My late-night secret spot in Auckland, the Chai Wala Bhai is a truck slapped on a slab of concrete serving the best chai, Indian coffee and street foods such as vada pav. It’s open till 12.30am every night except Sunday, and the buttery, sweet and savoury vada pav is a perfect late night treat stuffed with potato, fresh onion and oozing with chutney.
Hey! I Am Yogost, Queen St, Auckland Central: The purple rice yoghurt is an absolute classic: a yoghurt drink with bits of chewy purple rice at the bottom. It’s perfection.
Blue Rose Cafe, Sandringham Rd, Sandringham: The food from Blue Rose Cafe was the last thing I had before the big lockdown in August, but I had such cravings I kept making the 40-minute round trip in lockdown for their takeaway koko Sāmoa cupcakes and hāngī pie!
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
