The week in review: what it cost

I was surprised to find that (with a few exceptions) the foods I sourced locally were no more expensive than comparable foods from other regions. While it's true that my choices were severely restricted, what was available was priced competitively. Those overseas are happy to pay a premium for a New Zealand product, but it seems that locally the market will not bear that burden.

I spent $131.93 on food over the week. It breaks down almost into quarters:

$31.87 spent on meat
$33.19 spent on wine
$36.10 spent on fruits and vegetables
$30.77 spent on dairy, eggs, and honey

This is not a typical shopping week for me, or for most people. Cheap calories aren't found in the climate-controlled areas of the supermarket where foods expire quickly. The best bang for your buck is rice, bread, and pasta, none of which could be considered local. I would be surprised if the average shopper spent half as much per person in any of the four sections I've listed my spending in -- it doesn't make financial sense. It's as though I have left the sandwiches and only eaten the filling.

I could never continue to live on a diet of local food. The first thing I did when the week was over was order a pizza, followed closely by the construction of a sandwich. Certainly I enjoyed the filling, but it was the breadiness that made it satisfying. The pizza was the same; we order pizzas by topping just as we divide painters by style, but without a canvas neither would be possible. The substrate is as important as the finish.

Has this week changed my thoughts on local food? Well, I had never looked at a chart of seasonal produce before this challenge, or the Wikipedia page on cheese production, or investigated the beer-brewing process. Creativity requires restrictions like ivy requires a wall, and the week has channelled my natural curiosity in very specific directions.
When you peer under rocks and pull back curtains it makes you engage with the world in a way that you hadn't been conscious of before. If I travel through Northland and see nothing but dairy farms, I may wonder if I was misinformed about the plurality of beef cattle there. If I see a bottle of Malbec, I may turn it around to check the region. I will be awake to these things and more aware of the vast food-making world, and my tiny consuming role in it.

Day 7: Meat

For every New Zealander, the country has 1 dairy cow, 1.1 beef cattle, and 9.5 sheep (down from 23 in 1982). Lamb alone is a $2b industry. There is a lot of meat in New Zealand, and plenty of it is from the greater Auckland area.

The farms in the hotter, drier and hillier area north of Auckland are mostly for beef cattle, while the soggier Waikato prefers dairy. Although there are sheep farms in both these areas, most sheep are in the South Island.

The butchers I spoke to assured me that all their beef came from the local area, and the lamb too. They weren't nearly so certain of chicken or pork, so I stayed away from those during the week.

I have never eaten so much meat in my life. I spent a few months on an Atkins Diet years ago without eating this much meat. It creates a strange wolflike sensation to eat meat without carbohydrates; there is satiety, but also a kind of hollowness. Meat cannot fill you up in the same way because you reach the point where you can't eat any more meat before the point where you can't eat any more food. It takes longer to convert into usable energy, and so the body waits for the effect of eating to kick in, and while it waits you sit there with a ball of ground meat in your stomach.

Tomorrow my week ends and I will, without a shadow of a doubt, eat a pizza.

Day 4: forbidden fruit

Having missed most of the weekend's farmers' markets, I went to the local supermarkets in the hope that their produce departments would, by virtue of their size, offer at least some locally-grown goods.

Countdown was almost entirely hopeless. The only item that I could confirm was local was a punnet of coriander. Now that I have coriander, I'm not sure what to do with coriander.
New World was of much more use. I was able to pick up locally-grown celery, potatoes and carrots. I also -- finally -- got a bag of gold kiwifruit, a variety I have seen many times but have never tried. Later I bought some lettuce and onions from a deli.

These fruits and vegetables, along with my small mountain of apples, are now my breakfast and a significant part of my lunch. The potatoes sometimes feature at dinnertime, but they take a long time to cook so unless I've planned ahead I just slice them very thin and fry them.

I imagined before I started that vegetables would be the easiest thing to find locally. Knowing what is in and out of season makes a big difference, though. We're between seasons for oranges, with most kinds of citrus available at the beginning of autumn. My potatoes would have been stored, as new potatoes don't become available until spring. Melons and berries are out, and I sadly missed the feijoa season -- the brief period where an absolute lack of feijoas is replaced by far, far too many -- by a few weeks.

There is a Greek legend of a tormented soul named Tantalus whose punishment for (among other misdeeds) stealing the gods' ambrosia was to spend eternity being denied food; when he reached for some fruit, the bough would incline away, and when he tried to drink, the waters would recede. It is where we get the word tantalise.
I feel a little like Tantalus this week. Everywhere I go I smell coffee, and bread, and ham, and beer, and all sorts of good things. But my reach only extends 100 miles; all these worldly goods are denied me.

Day 3: wine and cheese

The North and Central parts of the North Island aren't very good for growing wine grapes. They get a lot of rainfall during the growing season and lack the loose, easily-draining soil of traditional wine areas -- these factors also make them more attractive as farmland. Most domestic wine is grown in Hawke's Bay and Marlborough.

Two wine regions near Auckland are Waiheke Island and Matakana. I went to three stores before I found anything under $25, and ended up with two Malbecs from Matakana of 2006 and 2008 vintage. The 2006 is good enough to keep all to myself, while the 2008 I may share with others (especially if I run out of cheese).

Now cheese, as an extended process, can be tricky to pinpoint. It is processed from milk solids which are typically collected in centralized depots before being distributed to specialized plants around the country. Puhoi Valley cheese is curdled, processed and ripened entirely  in a rural area north of Auckland and comes in a variety of types. I chose Brie because it is soft without being watery, and it is one of my favourite foods to have with wine.

Sitting comfortably in my apartment with cheese at one hand and wine in the other, I have all the equipment one needs to feel smug. It's hard to believe that just two days ago I was dashing around local stores desperately trying to bolster my pantry beyond what would probably have been an LD50 dose of apples.
I have fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy, wine and honey. This may just be the wine talking, but I feel like the Tutankhamun of a local Food Pyramid.

Day 2: a land of milk and honey

Most milk, in fact 95%, in New Zealand is processed by Fonterra, in a nation that contributes more than 2% of all milk worldwide. New Zealand creates 30 times more milk per capita than the average country. Fonterra's North Island milk, as far as I was able to find out, passes through a distribution depot in Palmerston North. This includes Anchor, Anlene and Meadow Fresh. The second-largest milk producer, Synlait, is based in the South Island.

All this means that most milk available to the public, whether is it locally-squeezed or not, travels a long way before it is ready for consumption. An exception, however, is found with Green Valley, an independent company based in Mangatawhiri, east of Pukekohe. I found it at a health food store, but only because it was organic (the store appeared to have no local goods of any kind, but stocked organic-branded goods from the four corners of the Earth). And at $4.80 for two litres, it was the most reasonably-priced indie purchase I had ever made.

At the other end of the Reasonable/Ludicrous Scale lay a honeycomb from Mossop's, an apiary just outside Tauranga in Tauriko. I have driven past the location probably hundreds of times without having the slightest twinge of temptation to purchase their combs. This is because honeycomb is one of the most annoying foods in the world. Let me describe the process of eating honeycomb:

1. Cut open part of the protective plastic layer.

2. Try to peel it all off. Now cut open another part and try to peel that off.

3. Slice gingerly along an entire side. Try to peel that off.

4. Get the plastic stuck to your fingers.

5. Wipe the leaking honey off the bench.

6. Wipe the leaking honey out of the lid.

7. Get a teaspoon and lever out some honeycomb.

8. Drizzle all you can on your target.

9. Put the rest in your mouth.

10. Chew until you're sure that all the honey is gone.

11. Spit out what looks like a shredded candle.

12. Spend an hour picking wax out of your teeth, trying to forget that everything you just put in your mouth was, at one time, bee vomit.

And all this for just $8.60 for 340 grams. It's fun for the whole family (in the event that your whole family are sadists). Sadly most commerical honey in New Zealand is processed in Nelson or Canterbury, so this is the only product approaching sugar I can eat this week.

I have nothing to put my honey on, as the ingredients of bread and baked goods are not local and very seldom national. Grain crops from Australia and North America are our sources for flour, sugar comes from Australia and Asia, and common salt (apart from the small saltworks at Lake Grassmere near Blenheim) is likewise imported.

We are in a global economy. We are all connected, and interdependent, and competing, and trading. Without cereal or bread, what's the point of a land of milk and honey?

Day 1: an apple and an apple and an apple a day

 

My supplies this morning, on the first day of my local food week, were meagre. They consisted of one 10kg pile of apples, and I had no-one to blame but myself.

Any locavore (eater of local food, not eater of locomotives) will tell you that the best place to get locally-grown produce is at a farmers' market. In Auckland, these are held on weekend mornings, which coincide directly with the times that I am most fond of sleeping in.
Saturday morning saw me haul myself out of bed and, fortified with enough coffee to kill a horse, left the apartment. There is a farmers' market in the Britomart complex, which, I was to discover, features precisely one produce stall surrounded by twenty stalls selling things that were useless to me. The earliness of the hour--it was barely eleven--coloured my view of the market a little, and I was dismayed and annoyed and, while not actually disgrunted, I was very far from being gruntled.

This muckle of feelings lead to my acting rashly and purchasing the biggest bag of apples I have ever seen. It would be called more properly a sack of apples, were it not for the fact that it was plastic and transparent and fell to pieces a bit while I was lugging it along High Street. This would no doubt have caused fashionistas to snicker behind their fascinators, were they not at the time sleeping off their Bellini hangovers like sensible people not in the apple-hauling business.

Sunday mornings are reserved, in some corners of Parnell, for farmers' markets with all manner of foods, treats, wines and sweets. I however, reserved those hours for rolling over several times in bed. This seemed the height of wisdom at the time, but looking at my singular breakfast, lunch, and dinner option today it may have been a little shortsighted.

The apples in question were Granny Smiths from Whenuapai in the large orcharding region to the north-west of Auckland. Later in the day I was able to add a dozen other grocery items to my monogustatory supply, some of which I will write about tomorrow.

Local food week: an introduction

This is where I am. Auckland, New Zealand.

New Zealand grows things. It exports shellfish and wine and pine trees, and it farms cattle and sheep for meat and dairy. My entire domestic ancestry, going back six generations, is comprised of farmers -- dairy and sheep farmers in Northland, the Waikato, and in the South Island.

A funny thing happened to my family tree about forty years ago: people stopping being farmers. My extended family is now less than 10% horny-handed sons of the land, and instead features scientists, therapists, businessmen, retailers, travel agents and designers.

80% of New Zealanders now live in urban areas, where the production, processing and delivery of food is for the most part a mystery. Instead of the Anglo-Saxon words of the field: 'cow', 'sheep', or 'deer', we only use the French words of the table: 'beef', 'mutton' and 'venison'.

Given this divide, it doesn't seem important where food comes from. Besides, we can get food from almost anywhere in the world; an orange, an otherwordly treat in 1880's New Zealand, is easily obtainable now. Coffee, a product that is impossible to grow in our moderate climate, is one of the most popular drinks. The massive and extended process that brings foreign goods to far-flung markets like ours is almost unimaginable, yet we walk into a store and there it is, as if placed by an invisible hand.

In my cupboard right now there are coffee beans from Brazil, sugar from Indonesia, oatmeal from Australia, oil from Italy, wine from France, rice from Pakistan, and chili from China. It was all simply, miraculously, available to me.

What if I opted out of this huge machine? What if I only ate food that came from a local source with a name and a location? Is it even possible anymore?

This is my experiment for the following seven days: to only eat food that was grown and processed within 100 miles. This describes a circle reaching from the Bay of Islands in the north to Te Kuiti and Tauranga in the south. This is my local food zone, and everything I eat must have never been outside this area, as confirmed by the company I buy from, and it must have a source, a region I can find on a map.

I have absolutely no idea what we make locally. I guess I'll find out.