Have you ever looked down at your breakfast, lunch or dinner and considered where the various ingredients travelled from to reach your plate? A basic sandwich in New Zealand can easily represent five countries: an Australian wheat and Indian sesame seed roll, Danish...
Opinion
Every week The Feed interviews the movers, the shakers and the makers in the New Zealand food industry. Check out the interviews on The Feed Weekly podcast or in a Q&A format below. And if you’ve got a story to tell or an opinion to share, drop us a line at editor@thefeed.co.nz
Un oeuf is enough: the media hold The Warehouse to account while giving the supermarkets a free ride
You may or may not have noticed but we here at The Feed took a few weeks off over the Christmas period to spend quality time with our families, deep-fry some turkeys, gorge ourselves on expired tins of ham, drink litres and litres of off-brand Spanish brandy, and...
NZ has the energy resources to adopt alternative food technologies – it just needs a plan
The potential for alternative foods to displace and disrupt conventional agricultural production has been discussed and debated for some time. While it may still be too early to make firm predictions, the trends are clear. In 2021, Catherine Tubb and Tony Seba...
A bottle of scotch recently sold for $2.7 million – what’s behind such outrageous prices?
When a rare bottle of Scotch whisky sold for US$2.7 million in November 2023, I was stunned, but I wasn’t surprised.The whiskey market has been booming for some time.Bourbon brands like Pappy Van Winkle from Buffalo Trace distillery are selling for astronomical prices...
Why more food, toiletry and beauty companies are switching to minimalist package designs
For decades, marketers of consumer goods designed highly adorned packages, deploying bold colors, snazzy text, cartoons and illustrations to seize the attention of shoppers. Conventional wisdom held that with thousands of products competing against one another in the...
TikTok, 2024 is here – will it be offal or one where women rise?
As 2023 recedes into the distance many people reflect on what has that year brought. I on the other hand spend a chunk of time wadding through reports and reading expert opinions on what the hot food trends of the new year will be. Last year we were told Potato milk...
How the Christmas pudding, with ingredients taken from the colonies, became an iconic British food
As an American living in Britain in the 1990s, my first exposure to Christmas pudding was something of a shock. I had expected figs or plums, as in the “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” carol, but there were none. Neither did it resemble the cold custard-style...
Sicilia – Amuninni
Amuninni (aa-moo-nin-nee) is the Sicilian way of saying ‘let’s go’, much like the often used Italian word ‘andiamo’. It’s midafternoon on another cloudless day in Sicily and I’m taking a moment. It is day seven on our first Taste of Sicily tour and after another busy...
The anxiety of authenticity vs appropriation
Authentic. It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023 but for chefs, foodwriters, marketers and foodlovers it’s a loaded term. Ever since Christopher Columbus journeyed from Spain to America beginning culinary and cultural trade between Europe and The Americas...
Eat Up New Zealand – The Bach Edition
Peter Gordon describes Al Brown’s book Eat Up New Zealand – The Bach Edition as “a gem of a cookbook, full of childhood memories and insights into our culinary future”. I have to agree with Peter that it is a cookbook full of nostalgic recipes. It is, in fact, these...
Opito Bay Salt: from the Coromandel to the world
Salt has been a vital part of human civilization throughout history, valued as a means of preserving food and enhancing flavour. Like wine it has long been associated with a sense of place. Solnitsata, the oldest known town in Europe, was built around a salt producing...
Growing NZ cities eat up fertile land – but housing and food production can co-exist
Donald Royds, CC BY-SA Shannon Davis, Lincoln University, New Zealand Auckland Council recently voted to decrease the amount of city fringe land available for development, citing flood risks and infrastructure costs. Meanwhile in Christchurch, plans for an 850-home...
Wahlburgers is set to open in Queenstown. What celebrity restaurant might be next for Aotearoa?
News drops this week that the 112th branch of Wahlburgers will soon be opening in Queenstown. For those of you not fully up to date with the latest in celebrity owned calorie peddlers, Wahlburgers is the fast food chain owned by A-list celeb Mark Wahlberg, his...
What the papers had to say about the Supie collapse
News emerged this week of the failure of online supermarket Supie. The virtual retailer went into adminstration after a major investor refused to finance the company any further in light of slower than expected growth. The business is carrying about $3 million in...
Know your Texas brisket from your Memphis ribs: a short guide to American barbeque
Meatstock, surely New Zealand's most self-consciously butch food and music festival, is set to return in February to its old Hamilton stomping grounds after a three year hiatus. Great news for all you BBQ bogans. With The Feed's editor-at-large preparing to cross the...
Future diets will be short of micronutrients like iron — it’s time to consider how we feed people
Iron deficiency is one of the most common forms of nutrient deficiency around the world. Severe iron deficiency, also known as anaemia, affects nearly 50% of women of reproductive age in regions like South Asia, Central Africa and West Africa (in contrast to 16% of...
My bag of political carrots
I bought a 3kg bag of carrots at Costco at $4.99. That's a lot of carrots considering I live alone. But the deal seemed good - but would it turn into 24 carrot gold? I knew I could save precious pennies over the next two to three weeks - just eat more carrots. After...
Spicy food might burn in the moment, but it likely won’t harm your health in the long term
Many cultures integrate hot peppers into traditional dishes. AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File Paul D. Terry, University of Tennessee Everyone has a different tolerance for spicy food — some love the burn, while others can’t take the heat. But the scientific...
What the papers had to say about the Weet-Bix saga
As the wheat dust settles at the bottom of the box in Aotearoa’s latest breakfast-based battle for the soul of the nation, we here at The Feed have cast our eyes over the media landscape and asked ourselves and our friends on news desks across the country: “what was...
Fish tales: Kai Ika bringing fish heads to those that need (and want) them most
With Aotearoa's fish stocks under pressure from over-fishing, the way we consume fish becomes a vitally important issue. Many New Zealanders, particularly Pākehā, eat only the fillets of the fish and tend to discard those delicious and nutritious parts that the late...
Final call: Clipper’s final destination
New Zealand’s most internationally successful bar is coming in for a final landing, four years after opening its doors on Ponsonby Road, Auckland. A brief but sparkling jewel in the crown of Auckland hospitality – loved by its regulars, 22 of them at a time and...