We are told so often how lucky we are to be living in New Zealand, where we have such wonderful produce and spectacular food. I thought about that as I wandered round my local supermarket last week, trying to get enthusiastic about buying something for dinner.
Are the bulk fruit and vegetables…custom-grown to the supermarket’s specifications with uniformity, shelf-life and eye-appeal all important…real examples of the vegetarian wonders in this country’s cornucopia? The tomatoes are red. The apples are crisp. The lettuces are green. That’s all right as far as it goes but what about the taste? And in this country burdened with garbage why must so much be sealed in plastic?
Where did the meat come from? Have the animals from which it comes been properly raised and cared for? Has the meat been aged and why can’t I buy meat cut to my requirements rather than in portions that serve the supermarket sales plan, wrapped in yet more plastic. It’s true that at one of my suburban supermarkets there is a butcher but for a multiplicity of reasons, from “It comes in already cut and wrapped” to “He’s at lunch/smoko/afternoon tea”, I rarely get any satisfaction there. Chicken…well…I’m afraid I won’t buy the tasteless, flaccid flesh of the hideously reared birds that are displayed for sale wrapped in…you got it…plastic.
Only one of my four local supermarkets can offer me whole, fresh fish; the others just display uninspiring fillets in shades of white, caught who knows when and only rescued from anonymity by the price label.
We are a dairy nation, known throughout the world as one of the best; why then do the chill cabinets abound with yellow bricks of Mild, Colby, “Edam” and dubiously named Tasty, creations that would have the cheese burghers of old Cheddar howling with derision?
With the apparent avidity and venality of the supermarkets and the large food companies that supply them, it is hardly surprising that people are casting their minds back to the “good old days” when you bought meat from a butcher, vegetables from a greengrocer; fish from a fishmonger etc., times when you were more likely to know what you were getting, where it had come from and who was selling it to you. It was into this renaissance of artisanal food, boutique producers and farmer’s markets that Rick Stein introduced his television series and books of “Food Heroes”, people who love, respect and understand good honest food and its origins.
This week I was delighted to receive a review copy of our own New Zealand “Food Heroes” by Simon Farrell-Green; it arrives in bookshops at the end of this month. Unlike Stein’s take on the subject this is not so much a cookbook as a celebration of 22 of the growing number of producers and growers who are returning to the artisan methods to create fine food and quality ingredients for New Zealand. The author and photographer Duncan Innes travel the length of the country to meet these food heroes and to take the reader to the source of each heroic food. There are some recipes, which I would enjoy making and the photographs are lovely, taking a large part of the book. It’s not a wordy tome…I read it in about two hours…but I found it so celebrating and uplifting that the ideal of New Zealand as a culinary paradise has not been industrialised out of existence.
Sadly there is a bit of a downside, as the author mentions a few times, this excellent food is quite a bit more expensive but even given that I think a farmer’s market, local specialist shop or farm-gate stall beats a soulless supermarket every day. If only we could afford them every day…
Food Heroes by Simon Farrell-Green Photography by Duncan Innes
Published by Penguin RRP $50.00 softback Available end of October