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Colin Hunter’s son Elijah enjoying spaghetti and meatballs (Photo: Supplied; image design by Archi Banal)
Colin Hunter’s son Elijah enjoying spaghetti and meatballs (Photo: Supplied; image design by Archi Banal)

KaiApril 10, 2022

As food prices soar, how are Aucklanders adapting in the kitchen?

Colin Hunter’s son Elijah enjoying spaghetti and meatballs (Photo: Supplied; image design by Archi Banal)
Colin Hunter’s son Elijah enjoying spaghetti and meatballs (Photo: Supplied; image design by Archi Banal)

Faced with the highest annual increase in food prices in a decade, many New Zealanders are rethinking the way they feed themselves and their families.

Tze Ming Mok stands stirring a saucepan of simmering dal in her bright orange kitchen.

We sit outside to eat it on the small verandah of the apartment she shares with her husband and 10-year-old son, and their fluffy but temperamental chinchilla, in the central Auckland suburb of Freemans Bay.

The dal – a recipe she learned from “an aunty” who was part of her parents’ expat Auckland community – costs just $9.17 to make, with most of the cost coming from the bag of fresh spinach.

For Mok, who works as a data and insights lead for Auckland City Council, the traditional cuisines her family loves are still cost-effective.

But many New Zealanders are struggling with burgeoning food costs – in January, Stats NZ reported the highest annual increase in food prices (5.9%) in a decade, after the 6.6% rise to January 2011 – are rethinking the way they’re feeding themselves and their families.

Tze Ming Mok cooking her cost-effective dal (Photo: Tulia Thompson)

Many recipes that make regular appearances in Mok’s home are easy on the budget, using staples such as red lentils, mince, rice and tinned fish that feature in multiple meals. Her husband cooks Indian Muslim food from his own culture. Mok cooks a range of dishes from southern India, Malaysia (both Malay and Malaysian Chinese) and mainland China.

But recent price rises mean Mok has moved away from buying her preferred brand of cheese. “It’s New Zealand – why is cheese so expensive?”

Like a lot of people, a lack of time means she often shops at her expensive local supermarket. “It’s very tragic – because it’s close.”  

Tze Ming Mok (Photo: Tulia Thompson)

Across town in Blockhouse Bay, Caroline Scott Fanamanu-Matamua, co-owner and carver at Vava’u Carving House, is weighing a similar dilemma – to spend more on petrol to go to a cheaper supermarket further away, or buy locally?

“I could go up the road, which takes two minutes and costs $1 extra, or spend $5 in petrol to get something cheaper at Pak ‘n Save.”

She leads a busy life, coaching a women’s rugby team while raising the three of her five children who are still living at home – boys aged eight, 14 and 17 – and says at times she’s too busy to cook dinner after she’s driven them to after-school sports.

 “Sometimes you just can’t physically do it.”

Fanamanu-Matamua is grateful that her children love easy, quick food. “They don’t have any high expectations,” she says, partly because they grew up as “sideline babies”. Two or three times a week Fanamanu-Matamua cooks a lasagna, using spiral pasta, ready-made pasta sauce and cheese. It costs $25 to feed the family of six, including the three boys, her partner and another relative who lives with them. Fanamanu-Matamua says her teenagers eat as much as adults. 

She has been finding recently that cheaper stock is missing from supermarket shelves, so she’s forced to buy more expensive brands.   

Fanamanu-Matamua has responded to high food prices by shopping around and choosing cheaper cuts of meat. Even mince was recently up $15 per kilo, but she nabbed a Pak ‘n Save special for $10.

One regular meal is kia’isipi, lamb’s neck. She boils kia’isipi with potatoes or rice and it makes enough leftovers for sandwiches.

“Money basically gets sucked up by rent, groceries and electricity and that’s pretty much it.”

Rajneel Singh’s stir-fry (Photo: Supplied)

For Rajneel Singh, a freelancer in the film and television industry who lives with four flatmates in Mt Roskill, high prices and irregular work means he can’t afford to cook delicious food to share with friends. 

When Singh had more money, he would cook steak, roast chicken or salmon and veges. But when times are tough, he will swap beef for chicken and eat more potatoes, noodles and rice. He’ll travel further to go to a butcher offering specials. In the last couple of years of Covid lockdowns, there were weeks when he couldn’t afford meat at all. Instead, he would make vegetable stir-fries and curries, and “fill up on potatoes”.

He cooks a Chinese-style stir-fry every week, starting with fried ginger and onion and garlic, using either chicken or beef for protein, and adding green beans or broccoli and capsicum. He makes his own Cantonese-style sauce and eats it with either egg noodles or steamed rice. It’ll cost him about $11 or $12.

In the last six months, increases in the price of meat means he uses smaller portions in each meal. “I’ll buy the same amount of meat but I can’t use it up in just one or two meals. I have to make it last four to get the same value out of it.”

He can’t cook in bulk because he has only a small freezer. “The narratives around how people could be smarter with food are always built around assumptions that they have family-size kitchens and family-size fridges,” he says.

Colin Hunter and his pasta-loving kids (Photos: Supplied)

In adjacent Mt Albert, maritime lawyer Colin Hunter is an experienced and talented cook – he learned a decade ago to impress his new wife, a keen foodie – but his options are often limited by the tastes of their two preschool children, who prefer pastas, braised chicken or hamburgers.

Cacio e pepe, an Italian pasta dish he cooks regularly, is “like carbonara without the agony”. It’s simple and costs just $4 to make, he says, relying on the magic of emulsifying butter and cheese and starchy pasta water into a creamy sauce.  

Hunter largely shops at Pak ‘n Save because it’s close and pretty good. He doesn’t buy veges at the supermarket, because he finds them expensive and low quality.  Instead, he frequents the vegetable market on Margan Ave in New Lynn, getting fish from the fishmonger’s next door, on the way to visiting his folks in Titirangi.

Hunter is sceptical about how much prices have changed in the last three to six months. For him the significant change has been before and after these two years of lockdowns. “Compared to our pre-pandemic food bills, our weekly food bill is up 50-60% easily.”

He says it’s possible he hasn’t noticed the most recent price creeps. “Maybe I’m just getting used to it.”

Nonetheless, the increases have changed how their family shops and eats. “I had a fantastic local butcher that I love, and I had a long relationship with them. But they’re just more expensive. I definitely cook less meat and more pasta now.”

Expensive cheese has been one casualty. “The chance that I might go out and get a really nice cheese from a specialty store, we would do that far less. Just because you spend so much at the supermarket.” 

For Mok, being an apartment dweller means her food shopping is also curtailed by her lack of adequate pantry space and storage. If she had more, she says, she would shop more regularly at her favourite bulk shop Bulk Food Savings in Mt Eden, run by a New Zealand Gujarati family. “It has a huge organic selection and Middle Eastern ingredients that are hard to find elsewhere.” 

Spices on the supermarket shelf seem limited and low quality, she says. “It seems ridiculously expensive for a tiny amount.” Instead, she shops for spices at A1 Spice Market on Hobson St, and for dry goods at Asian supermarkets Soung Yueen and Lim Chhour. 

For Singh, the high cost of food at the supermarket makes takeaways tempting.

Sometimes, he says, he looks at his shopping list and thinks, “Shit, if I spent two more bucks I could go get KFC.” 

Keep going!
Together we can put an end to the stress of paying the bill. (Image: Archi Banal)
Together we can put an end to the stress of paying the bill. (Image: Archi Banal)

KaiApril 9, 2022

The art of splitting the bill

Together we can put an end to the stress of paying the bill. (Image: Archi Banal)
Together we can put an end to the stress of paying the bill. (Image: Archi Banal)

It can ruin a good meal and make a bad meal worse: splitting the bill is, in many instances, the worst part of dining out. But it doesn’t need to be.

Dining out with a group of friends, and friends of friends, can be an especially merry time. With one big asterisk – before you leave the restaurant, as lovely as your night may have been, you’re doomed to the nightmare that is splitting the bill. In most cases the conundrum isn’t so much to split or not to split, rather, it’s how we split.

The whole state of affairs can create a barrage of uncomfortable emotions. There’s the ceaseless awkwardness of chasing people up for money. The lingering guilt of being the person who doesn’t pay their fair share. The bitterness of paying far more than you owed when you’re already skint. The indignity of having to pull your calculator app out at the table to do basic arithmetic. The added chaos at the till when you realise your maths was very much incorrect. And unfortunately, with the rising cost of living, anxieties around settling the bill at the end of the night are only going to be foregrounded more and more often.

So how best to navigate this nightmare? These are your options.

The even split (at the till)

In the first instance, splitting evenly seems to be the most egalitarian and classy way to go about settling up without all the palaver of dissecting who ate what. 

The even split (after the fact)

This involves nominating one person to pay, who is then transferred even amounts by the group. This is far more efficient than your whole group loitering around the till. Even better, it’s far easier for the likely harried person working at said till. The only downside is that for the person who paid, it comes with the burden of following up with unreliable friends (and there’s always one).

Someone gets too drunk and shouts everyone

Always a great outcome, just say thank you and enjoy it.

The rising cost of living will only exacerbate the stress that comes with splitting the bill. (Photo: Getty Images)

So far, so good. But there are of course instances when one person at the table (we all know this person) orders two dozen Bluffies, incessant bottles of natural wine, a $32 main and a panna cotta to finish – only for the bill to be split evenly at the end of the evening. Those who ate an austere meal of olives and a pint of beer at the other end of the table has to pony up for someone else’s far more sumptuous dining experience. And you can bet they’re going home feeling swindled. 

As Ann Perkins in Parks and Recreation says, “I’m not a big fan of group dinners where everybody splits the bill no matter what they get. I ordered a Tyranna-Caesar salad, and that’s all I’m paying for.” 

Going dutch

And so, at the other end of the spectrum is going dutch – transactional pedantry – the extremities of which involve a carefully itemised breakdown of every last item eaten, perhaps assisted along the way with a set of scales to assess who really got the lion’s share of the starter plate of pani puri. This is also egalitarian, in the sense that everyone pays for what they got, but in an individualised way. It can also be a pain for the person at the till, and sometimes items ordered are missed out of calculations, leaving the last to pay a nasty surprise. 

High-school level maths didn’t prepare us for the complexities of splitting the bill.

The socialist approach

If there are big earners at the table, they pay the bulk of the bill, with everyone else splitting whatever is left over. Alternatively if it’s known that someone is a student or having a tough time financially, everyone else picks up their share. 

When you get down to the heart of how best to split a bill, you realise that in this economy equal doesn’t necessarily mean fair. And if you can afford to be generous, why not be generous? Yes, perhaps your friend who’s in between jobs may have shared that plate of spicy eggplant with you, but if you can afford to, why not cover it for them instead of dividing it to the precise percentage point – that’s something we could perhaps apply more broadly to our lives and society too. 

And despite the social norms against discussing salaries, wages and our financial situation in general with those around us, being more aware of what our buddies earn would actually help in these niggly social situations. Thankfully, times are changing and, according to The Washington Post, it’s a taboo that’s being broken increasingly often by millennials. If we want to progress beyond the unnecessary awkwardness of splitting the bill, it might pay to start being more transparent about how much we get paid, or don’t get paid.

Still not convinced? Here, let Friends explain it for you:

The point is, this final part of sharing a meal out has the potential to sap some of the joy from what should be an experience we can’t wait to repeat again soon. So whatever you do, try to resist the urge to pay in an ultra-persnickety way. Once your bill calculations start looking like a quadratic equation you’ve gone too far. In other words: paying for a third of a plate of a som tum salad, half of a serving of pad Thai, espresso martinis times two and “one glass’ worth of the bottle of white” is too far. Your equation should absolutely only have one kind of mathematical symbol in it: either plus or divide.

If you’re in charge of organising a group meal out, pick a spot that facilitates sharing: places with grazing-style dishes that suit your groups’ dietary requirements, or set-menus and importantly, affordable options. When everyone’s spent their night happily sampling delicious and reasonably priced helpings of food, there’ll be a lot less resentment when the bill shows its mean little face.

The key here, like so many things in life, is communication. How the bill will be split should be something agreed upon from the get-go. If you’re organising a dinner, there’s plenty to be gained from considering your friends’ backgrounds and financial situations. For people who belong to particular cultural and religious backgrounds, evenly splitting the bill and indirectly paying for types of food or drink that are prohibited by their beliefs might put them in an uncomfortable position. 

Anyone who has ever been in a tight spot with money knows that the buzz of eating out with friends can be drowned out by the uncertainty around whether you’ll even be able to afford the number that pops up on the Eftpos machine at the end. Nobody wants that, so be cognisant of your friends with limited budgets and don’t be afraid to be honest if you can’t afford to splurge.

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