Eating Our Way Through The Country

To continue our theme of questions that everyone is definitely interested in, we thought we’d tackle just what your average unemployed hobo eats in New Zealand. Fair warning: backpacking through the country on the cheap precludes eating in most restaurants, so we can’t really knowledgeably comment on the overall quality of NZ restaurants. Like that’ll stop us! We’ve had the occasional takeaways meal, but for the most part we’ve been self-catering, which is by far the more nutritious and cost-effective choice.

What have we been eating? It varies. Whether we’re traveling or staying in one place for a while most of our breakfasts consist of muesli, which is pretty close to granola, but not quite, as it’s perhaps more grain-heavy. Since we’re not European we don’t eat half a loaf of bread each morning for breakfast. We’ve seen it many times on this trip, but it still amazes us every time to see how much bread Euro-backpackers will put away in one sitting with a variety of jams, Nutella (basically chocolate icing), and other spreads. Anyway, muesli travels well, provides heaps of energy, and is much more filling than any other cereal, making it perfect for on-the-go food. We’ve eaten boxes and boxes of the stuff since we’ve gotten here, and I’ll probably have had enough by the end of 2007, but it certainly does the job. When we’re on the road, PB&J makes up a LOT of our lunches, probably 75% of the time. It has been pointed out to us countless times that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are so American, but that doesn’t make them any less delicious! Again it’s high in energy, tasty, and the ingredients will basically never go bad. Bread doesn’t have a chance to go bad on us, as a loaf lasts about 3 days maximum. After much trial and error we found Freya’s, a bread that can put up with a lot of beating, humidity, and other abuse and still keep its fitness. You can’t go cheap on bread. Along with PB&J for lunch, we’re digging the chicken-flavored potato chips here, as well as the chocolate-apricot granola bars. Odd-sounding flavors yes, but they’re more than alright.

For dinner, we’ve tried to eat relatively balanced meals with meat, vege, and a starch, and have been largely successful, I’d say. Since we’re in the land of the lamb, we’ve eaten a fair amount of it so far, but in our experience it’s not like people eat it everyday or anything like that. Seafood is pretty plentiful here, so we’ve had our share of that as well. One thing we’ve missed here is the almost-total absence of turkey, especially in the lunchmeat counter. There’s heaps of ham and other deli meats, but no turkey, which as an American is shocking since we're used to turkey-everything.

Traveling as much as we have, we’ve become much less picky about what we eat. That's not to say we were tremendously picky before, but hunger has a way of working on any reservations you may have previously had. Leeks, parsnips, silverbeet, hummus, and couscous have all made their way into our dinner rotations, and wwoofing and Couchsurfing have been good for introducing new foods to us.

We don’t want to give the impression that we’re starving, though, or that we’re eating a monastic diet of muesli, PB&J, and vegetables everyday, because that’s just way off. On the contrary, we’ve tried just about every type of biscuits (cookies) available in NZ, and there are a lot of types. By far the best biscuit is Krispies, a coconut-flavored shortbread-like biscuit that is seriously addictive. But don’t take our word for it, ask our traveling companions Alex and Marie. We introduced them to Krispies in the beginning of their visit, and we scarcely went a day without having some on hand for the next two weeks. We’ll miss them when we leave here. Also, ice cream is ridiculously plentiful here, with Kiwis being the number two country in the world for per capita ice cream consumption. After seeing their ‘single scoop’ cones, you’ll know why. Less than NZ$2 buys you a cone with at least 3 good scoops, and you don’t even want to know what a large serving buys, it’s insane.

Lest you think that we never eat out, we do occasionally splash out and get food from a takeaways joint, which is basically what it sounds like, a place that serves food for you to take away and get the hell off the premises as soon as possible. From our experience, takeaways places adhere to the same rules everywhere here:

1) They have a small storefront, standing area, kitchen, and order counter, absolutely reeking of frying oil. Your heart will begin to palpitate if you breathe in the fumes too long.

2) They sell fish and chips, hamburgers, other deep-fried fare, and some places double as a Chinese food takeout as well.

3) They are uniformly staffed by surly older Asian women.

4) Fish and chips always comes in old newspaper, hamburgers are usually accompanied by an egg and slice of beetroot – that’s a Kiwi burger, mate!

5) You will pay extra for any accompanying sauces. No free ketchup packets here!

6) There will not usually be any tables, and even if there is one you will not be encouraged to eat there.

7) You will immediately regret eating takeaways food, and the gut-bomb will be intense.

These rules seem to be non-negotiable. Even with the associated complications, you can’t help but make the occasional visit to the takeaways. I love how they refer to these places just as ‘takeaways’, it’s totally confusing in the same way that calling hostels ‘backpackers’ is. We’ve found that we can handle a takeaways place maybe once a month, just long enough to forget how we felt immediately after eating there the last time. Morgan Spurlock wouldn’t have made it a month eating only at takeaways, I shudder to think of such an experiment.

Fish and chips really can be quite excellent, especially if the fish is fresh, the batter is good, and the chips are homemade. NZ has quite a few really nice fish and chips places, but these are still too far and few between, with mediocre grease-laden experiences being the norm as opposed to the exception. Still, great fish and chips is a transcendent meal.

In no way does this look like a gut-bomb waiting to happen.

Along with fish and chips, the other food in the running for national dish has to be the meat pie. They’re little pies the size of a small dish, filled with various meat and meat-like substances, and served nuclear hot at seemingly every store in the country. Pies here are ubiquitous in NZ, way cheap (you can get one at the corner dairy for NZ$1, but I wouldn't recommend it), and must be tremendously bad for you. If you eat more than one a week you’re probably almost certainly setting yourself up for a pie-related complications later in life. But they’re good food after a night drinking, can be really tasty (especially the gourmet ones), and are part of the culture here, so we’ve had quite a few. When we return to the States Becky will probably be happy to never eat another one again. I'll miss them.

I believe this is a beef mince and trans-fat flavored pie, mmm...

Another discovery here for us has been the kebab or souvlaki, whatever you want to call it. This is probably our favorite way to spend money on food, as lamb, veges, chili sauce, and yogurt wrapped in a pita makes an awesome lunch. We’re hoping there are some good kebab places in the next place we live, there’s just gotta be. Well, writing this has gotten me hungry, time for lunch!