The joy of splurging on lollies
On an obsession with buying sweets, the place of food in Budget 2023 and the remarkable cookbook which won an Ockham New Zealand Book Award last night.
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!
Out of necessity, the last month or so of this newsletter has been relatively heavy. There have been stories on national identity, history, class, colonisation, poverty and all the ways those strands are linked together and underpinned by the food we eat. Food is enduringly political, of course, but it’s important we remind ourselves it can also just be about plain and simple enjoyment. It can be entirely stupid – irrational even. Enter: my love affair with lollies.
Reflecting on the extensive number of times I’ve written about puddings, cakes, pancakes, chocolate bars and ice cream, you’d be forgiven for assuming I had a sweet tooth. The thing is, I absolutely don’t. In fact, after dinner you’re more likely to find me with what is essentially a second dinner of some combination of cheese or olives, leftover rice, salt and vinegar chips or instant noodles.
But ever so occasionally I find myself splurging on a selection of lollies. Most regularly, this takes place at one of the two lolly shops in St Lukes mall, where I select the most unfamiliar, outlandish or aesthetically pleasing sweets I can find. Other times I’ll branch out and indulge in a selection only to be found on the World Wide Web. Over the weekend I ordered a package filled mostly with Mexican candy, known for its uniquely flavour profiles: heavy on the salty, spicy, sour and light on sweetness. In amongst this haul was a lollipop dusted with lemon and salt powder, watermelon and chilli hard candy, a pineapple and chilli lollipop in the shape of (for some reason) a roast chicken and more. I’m not the only one who’s obsessed with curious candy either, apparently; intriguing candy has taken off on TikTok – and it’s led me down a spellbinding rabbit hole of people trying lollies from far-flung location and even some videos showing lollies before and after they’re freeze-dried.
I’ve accumulated a fairly sizeable collection of lollies at this point and yet why that is exactly remains a mystery to me. Sure, I always try one or even two, but thanks to my preference for the savoury, they mostly end up shared with someone else straight from the packet or added to the ever-evolving lolly jar for sweet-toothed guests – sweetness shared. Perhaps the ability to share an edible novelty with those I care about is the real thrill. If I’m cynical about it, the allure of plonking a pile of lollies on the counter at a shop and swiping my Eftpos card could very well just be me giving into that well-conditioned impulse to consume.
Part of me wonders whether my own physiological disinterest is what enhances my fascination for sweet things though. We don’t technically need to eat sweet things and yet I’d argue that more than most other foods, people are especially dedicated to making them beautiful, fanciful or cute, whether it be delicately iced cakes or, in the case of lollies, novel concepts like that of Melody Pops (which make a haunting whistling sound as you suck) or Love Hearts candy lipstick (self-explanatory). Their very nature of being unnecessary and silly makes them a delight. In the land of sweets, it’s all about fun.
If there’s any depth behind why I’m so into lollies it could be that they are a fairly accessible window into various cultures, and an especially easy starting point when it comes to understanding the flavours that make certain food cultures so distinctive. Take Japanese candy, for example. The form might be familiar enough globally – gummies, boiled sweets or chocolate bars – but their flavours – matcha, cherry blossom, peach, yuzu and beyond – are revealing of preferences much more specific to place.
I might not be working as a stylist at Vogue and prancing around New York City in knee-high Chanel boots as a school-aged me once envisaged I would be at this stage of my life, but I am on occasion buying $15 worth of popping candy, chilli-flavoured gummies and sour straps from the mall lolly shop I’d longingly walk straight past with my mum after school, all in the name of work. When you look at it like that, I’m living my wildest dreams.
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Weekly bites
It’s budget day today, and that means cheese rolls. Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins have continued the tradition of sharing cheese rolls on budget day, this year with the addition of what Hipkins has described as “an innovation”: a cheese roll with a sausage inside. I offer no comment beyond a link to last week’s newsletter on Hipkins’ obsession with beige-food.
Among the many conversations about what the so-called “no frills” budget might include have been calls for a greater focus on food security. Auckland City Mission's chief executive Helen Robinson told RNZ that addressing food security needs to be a critical priority. “The need for food in our country is widespread and growing,” she said. Last week, Robinson told Q&A that the charity had seen the demand for food parcels grow over the last decade. "Thousands and thousands of us just don't have enough money for food,” she said. “I'm genuinely worried as to what will happen if there is not a clear response to that in this budget."
Pancakes in the 1990s and early 2000s were all about comfort: white plates with three, or maybe four, floppy pancakes, a jug of syrup and a combination of bacon rashers, a ramekin of berry coulis or a spliced grilled banana, all dusted in icing sugar. There might have been a slice or two of fresh fruit and almost always a sprig of mint on the plate too. This was, in my opinion, a perfect breakfast option, but, as I lament in a piece published on The Spinoff this week, it's one that’s near impossible to find these days. Pancakes have largely been replaced by French toast and waffles on cafe menus, and where they remain they’ve been fancied up beyond recognition into something that might look great on our Instagram feeds, but doesn’t actually taste that great.
Public concern over the lack of competition in New Zealand’s grocery sector, which is dominated by the Woolworths and Foodstuffs duopoly, prompted a Commerce Commission study into the supermarket industry. Last year, the government implemented 12 of 14 of the recommendations from the final report, including the introduction of a yet-to-be-appointed grocery commissioner, collective bargaining for suppliers and regulations around wholesale. However, a new Westpac NZ Economics report says it's unlikely the current grocery sector reforms will deliver sufficient competition or significant benefits for consumers, and that stronger measures to break up the duopoly currently dominating the sector are needed. The report was released the day after new Stats NZ figures showed food prices had increased 12.5% in April compared to the year before – the highest annual increase since 1987. The main drivers of that increase were a 14% rise in grocery prices along with a rise of more than 22% in fruit and vegetable prices.
Kai: Food Stories and Recipes from my Family Table by Christall Lowe (Ngāti Kauwhata, Tainui, Ngāti Maniapoto), which was published last year, is a taonga of a cookbook. Among the varied pages, Lowe shares detailed instructions and troubleshooting tips for creating and taking care of a rēwena bug, recipes for coconut cream-doused pani popo and an opulent-looking boil up, and a porridge recipe that conjures memories of her nana. And last night, the compendium of recipes, stories and dazzling photographs won the Judith Binney Prize for Illustrated Non-Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards – the same award Monique Fiso’s Hiakai: Modern Māori Cuisine won in 2021. Lowe’s book should be as much a staple in any New Zealand cookbook collection as the Edmonds.
And, if you’re in the market for a short but moving food read, I highly recommend Perzen Patel’s letter to her children on parenting and rice.
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Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
