Talk:New Zealand cuisine

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[edit] Proposed name change

I propose to move this article, Cuisine of New Zealand, to a new page named New Zealand cuisine

[edit] Historicisation

This article reads more like tourist fluff than an encyclopaedia entry. ('We have wonderful fresh ingredients and a vibrant Pacific rim cuisine!' really?) This i that are written about NZ food. I'm going to go through and lay out the history of NZ food/cuisine - and searches for 'new zealand food' really should end up here - and make it all a bit factual, while retaining the list of NZ dishes and nice stuff about how our food doesn't suck any more. --Helenalex 01:54, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Take a plate

Nothing is mentioned in this article about the take a plate tradition. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.154.161.174 (talk) 07:01, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Published Literatures on trends of New Zealand foods

I have read cookbooks written by Mark McDonough, Laurine Jacobs, Julie Le Clerc, Peter Gordon, and Alison Holst. In my opinion, Holst is probably closer to the old traditional Kiwi fares typified in the Edmonds cookbook, and probably represent the best the non-foodie cooking on the innovative end and rural cooking the others. More serious Auckland foodies may find the books by others more representative of what they eat. Each author's works outline what they believe NZ eats today. We may be able to add in McDonough and Le Clerc etc's takes for the Pacific Rim cooking, and Holst's comments as the "traditional" fares. Anyone wanting to volunteer this? --JNZ (talk) 11:29, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Can't Remember First Hand Sources

There were a few articles on the cosmopolitanisation of urban NZ dining scene and how Rogernomics and economic liberalisation gave birth to the growth of NZ wine industry and gourmet, specialty food productions. Unfortunately I don't have any of them immediately at my desk when I made the changes. Could anyone add in the sources as they see? --JNZ (talk) 19:53, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The great antipasto edit war and its consequences

Having got into a lengthy argument with JNZ about whether antipasto is an important part of New Zealand cuisine or just something which New Zealanders eat, is has occurred to me that we need to properly think about what New Zealand cuisine actually is. The present day sections at the moment are badly sourced and seem to be mostly 'what and how I and people I know eat' (I'm as guilty to this as anyone, incidentally) rather than being based on any actual research. So several things need to be done:

1) Come up with a good working definition of 'New Zealand cuisine'. This will probably be quite difficult since most models of national cuisines are generally based on traditions which built up at a time when people were generally dependent on local produce and weren't much influenced by the rest of the world. So we can't take models of European or Asian cuisines and apply them to NZ, because our cuisine has grown up in a different way.

2) Find proper (or any) sources. The best ones would be proper studies of NZ food, such as Tony Simpson's A Distant Feast and David Burton's 200 Years of NZ Food and Cookery. Autobiographies, old cookbooks and so forth can also be useful, but we need to remember that just because someone ate a particular food as a child or its in a cookbook, that doesn't mean that that food was popular or commonly eaten, just that it was available. Also be wary of food writers who go on about how 'everyone' now eats such and such and similar statements when backed up by no evidence, and of anything that reads like a tourist promotion. Our job is not to promote New Zealand food.

3) Find some more photos.

4) Once some work has been done of the above, cull most sections down so that they're not a mass of unsubstantiated assertion. And remember that what people you know eat/do doesn't really count for much - they are only a few people in a country of 4 million and for all you know they might not be typical. If we can all agree on 'NZers commonly eat x' it can probably stay, though. --Helenalex (talk) 05:28, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

In a sense, the likes of foodies like Peta Mathias, Lauraine Jacobs, or Julie Le Clerc are just as reputable in this field because they are first person accounts. I understand there is an aversion to treat writings by people in the industry as trustworthy by the academically-minded here by virtue of a) the fact of absence of detailed studies on anthropology; b) foodies' perception bias (that what they witnessed and recorded are the tastes of adventurous few and not representative of mainstream folks); and c) self-serving motives on the part of authors, but anthropological studies on popular culture accept insiders' takes as legitimate historical sources. For example, in studies of food in Hong Kong accounts written by the owner of the Yung Kee restaurant and foodies like Willie Mak are deemed legitimate sources. Similarly, in the study of American cuisine first hand accounts like Julia Child and Jeremiah Tower are often trusted among studies done by the likes of anthropoplogy professors. --JNZ (talk) 10:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm not saying we should ignore these writers, just that we should treat them with caution. If they say 'I noticed my restaurant customers becoming more adventurous in the 1980s', for example, this is decent evidence of broadening tastes in the 1980s. But if they make some sweeping statement like 'New Zealanders have moved on from meat and three veg', I would be more skeptical. All New Zealanders? How do they know? Basically, non scholarly sources are good at telling us what SOME New Zealanders are/were eating, but not so good on generalisations. I've read a lot of food writing, and some of them have a tendency to make sweeping, unsubstantiated generalisations. In summary, think critically about sources - all of them, including the academic - rather than just accepting anything they say. --Helenalex (talk) 11:16, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
While I'm at it, I've been thinking about definitions of 'New Zealand cuisine'. In the strict sense, NZ arguably doesn't have a cuisine, since 'cuisine' generally means a food style distinct to that area and usually one developed there. I would argue that very little in NZ food is distinct to or developed here. This is basically the result of NZ being very connected to the world since the 18th century - travel, trade etc means we have been very influenced by the outside world, as well as having access to its foods. So, since I'm sure none of us want to give up on this page, this doesn't help the question of what should be covered here. I suppose the best answer is to carry on with the mixture of history and anthropology we've got here, and abandon the idea of 'iconic' foods - it's way too subjective and really doesn't mean anything. This would mean getting rid of the 2nd part of the NZ foods section, which was always pretty arbitrary. --Helenalex (talk) 11:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
To be perfectly frank, it would probably scratch people's heads if you ask specifically the difference between restaurant food in Auckland and, say, San Francisco, or even Vancouver for that matter. There is no doubt we now have a generic international cuisine of the Pacific Rim variety where there has been a marriage between Mediterranean and Southeast Asian and Chinese cooking techniques. Dare I say Auckland's food today, at least those served at restaurants, bistros, delis, and cafes, is probably far more similar to Seattle than Invercargill. You can probably pick difference between Southern US cuisine and New Zealand cuisine, but I'm at a loss to explain how different urban NZ is from Pacific Northwest cuisine and Western Canadian cuisine. You don't even make an attempt to do it - it is futile.--JNZ (talk) 13:49, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Interestingly, similar thing has been happening at the Cuisine of Canada comments page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cuisine_of_Canada#West_Coast_fusion . Maybe we should learn from their lesson as well. do we really need to know Canadians eat this or that; what's cuisine, and what's food, is the point. Foodstuffs are not cuisine; and uniquely Canadian dishes, or cuisines that have developed in Canada, seem more to be the point... --JNZ (talk) 13:57, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, the idea of national cuisine is dead, really. --Helenalex (talk) 04:28, 2 June 2008 (UTC)