The breakdown of a foodie

bread aisle

bread aisle (by-nc-sa – capl@washjeff.edu)

New Zealand is an awesome country, plain and simple. We love it here, we love the people and we love the land. But oh boy, it is soooo hard to be a foodie in New Zealand. Today our desperate quest for good food reached critical mass. We HAD to do something. And we did.

 To define the problem a little more. For starters, all food is 30 % more expensive than in Germany. Although there is a clear race to the bottom of ever lower food quality in Germany as well, I think NZ is clearly ahead in that race. Pork flavoured sausages anyone? But, that would not necessarily trouble me. You don’t have to buy crap food, one would think?

Wrong! Where in Europe there is always the option to go for the better, tastier, healthier stuff, here we were in for a shock. It seems, the market for good food is not a mainstream market at all. Where in Germany (not withstanding France, or Italy, who are even further ahead) you could always buy the mid-to-high-quality stuff for a 50% to 100% higher price, around here it is more in the regions of 200 % – 500 %. All I am saying is Gouda, 1 kg for 60 $.

That is, if you are lucky enough to find something in the first place. It is just that good food around here still seems to be considered a luxury. Like coffee was around 1900. Good eating feels like a real “snobby” thing to do, sometimes.

Badisch Dunkel

Badisch Dunkel

Want to go higher than that? Real, top quality food – good luck with that. You are in for a hunt across town, after arming you with arcane and anecdotal knowledge of where to procure that one good cheese, that one decent slice of bread.

Today, we went on such a hunt. The Quest: Find “real bread” instead of that white fluffy hell. In all our travels around Europe, we never ever had any problems going in a local bakery and find something that we like. Not even in London. But here, you have 50 different brands of bread, all equally useless as food and 90% fluffy tastelessness. Roaming the internet, we found others who ventured on these paths before us. Armed with two names, we went to find those mystical places of yummy breads.

Sunflower bread

Sunflower & Rye

The first one, Brezelmania gave us a wonderful smelling “Badisch Dunkel”. Awwr, that great smell of sour dough! The second one was a Swiss bakery called Arobake in Te Aro. Not only are they a bakery, but a pâtisserie as well! We bought a good, crunchy-crusty sunflower and rye bread. There will definitely be a next time, if only to buy a Christstollen in December. Both breads tasted like pure heavenly goodness compared to what we ate for the last 2 month.

 

Bottom line: Not all is lost, but we know that we have to put in more effort than we are used to be to find good, organic and yummy food that we like. For that it helps to know, that we are not alone!