Food for Thought

“This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten!”

I cannot count how many times I uttered this sentence while I was in New Zealand. I think the first time I said it was on my second day, when Robin and I stopped for lunch in a small cafe near MacLaren Falls. The culprit? A tasty focaccia sandwich with either turkey or chicken, lettuce and sprouts, and what I assumed must be sweet potato. At least, it looked like sweet potato. However, it didn’t taste like a sweet potato. It was actually sweeter, but balanced with the other savory ingredients, it created a magnificent blend of flavors. I learned that this orange spread was kumara, a local ingredient that looks a bit like the sweet potato. Here’s my advice. Find some kumara. Eat it. Enjoy.

Day 4 in New Zealand, we encountered another utterance of “This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten!” . . . this time for vegetable broth. I’m not certain that this broth was in fact any better than any other I’ve had in my life. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was fairly average. However, when you’re chilled through and through from sitting in cold cave water (which I will adamantly declare was delightfully fun despite the fact that my hands were a waxy shade of white by the time we were done), the comfort of vegetable broth in a tin cup goes a long way. Flavors that ordinarily may not seem remotely engaging suddenly seem like the best thing in the world.

Extreme circumstances do have a way of enhancing things we mistake for mundane. I’m pretty sure I married, and then proceeded to consume, a peanut butter sandwich at the highest point of the Tongariro Crossing. I will admit that the bread of the sandwich was outstanding--it was seedy and full of whole grains; it didn’t have nearly as many preservatives as American store-bought breads do and was all the better for it. Aside from the bread, though, this sandwich was quite frankly plain. Plain old creamy Jif on bread. That’s it. But I swear I could taste every seed in the bread, every little peanut that was creamed to perfection for this tasty spread. It was as though the cold wind, which minutes before had forced me to wear mittens on my hands, helped this sandwich transcend its ordinariness.

I couldn’t help but realize that everything in New Zealand tasted, frankly, a little bit better than food at home. Flavors were brighter, even in scrambled eggs or a plain little peanut butter sandwich. Yet, it didn’t seem that the foods were truly anything particularly different from what I can find here at home. Don’t get me wrong--I ate plenty of good foods in New Zealand. (Kumara, for example, is something that is not a staple here at home.) But when people say, “I’m going to New Zealand” it doesn’t usually conjure the same thoughts of food that “I’m going to Italy!” would bring.

For me, I think the enjoyment in eating came from taking time to enjoy the whole experience. Instead of gulping down lunch in a 26-minute time constraint dogged by incoming students, I ate in beautiful surroundings with a good friend and could take as much or as little time as I liked. Breakfast could be savored with tea as we checked the news, or mapped a route, not shoveling it in before rushing off to work. Dinner was enjoyed after a day of activity outside. Were there star foods among my choices? Absolutely! The seafood chowder I had in Rotorua, the vegetable, egg, pesto, and beet spread wrap (it sounds bizarre, but the flavors were insanely good!)--those were standout foods I normally wouldn’t have put together on my own. But at the end of the day, it was time--simple minutes and seconds--that was the magic ingredient.