The Dietary Requirements team drag Lucy and Matt out of the office and into the studio to discuss some of The Spinoff’s most controversial food topics from the past week.

Exciting news – Dietary Requirements is moving from monthly to fortnightly episodes! We’ll still have a special guest from the food world once a month, while the other episode will usually involve roping in some friends from the office for a food yarn. This is one of the latter. With regular co-host Sophie Gilmour away, Simon Day and Alice Neville have grabbed office manager MVP Lucy Reymer and partnerships manager Matt McAuley to discuss some of the topics dividing the office this week.

Why are New Zealand fridges suddenly heaving with seltzers? What even is seltzer? Is the new Whittaker’s x Supreme flat white chocolate good or bad – or both? What about fennel? Is a layer of butter necessary on peanut butter toast? And how did Simon manage to revive a Nando’s burger that had been in the office fridge all weekend for his lunch on Monday? All this and more on this fortnight’s Dietary Requirements.

ALSO: We’re very pleased to announce that the winner of Monique Fiso’s glorious Hiakai cookbook is Hannah Neville for her delicious dish of marinated and seared kingfish with crispy zucchini chips and homegrown mesclun with avo and feta, sent from the paradise of Aotea/Great Barrier Island. (She’s no relation to food editor Alice Neville, we swear!)

If you missed our kōrero with Monique earlier in the month, check it out here.

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider. Please share Dietary Requirements with your friends and get in touch if you have any questions or requests: aliceneville@thespinoff.co.nz

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Lisa King from AF Drinks.

As a society, we don’t have a particularly healthy relationship with alcohol. We work hard to ignore the fact alcohol is a serious carcinogen, and even harder to ignore the social and health costs of drinking. If we thought about that when people say they’re not drinking, we’d recognise that’s probably the better idea – but it’s not like that yet.

This week’s guest, Lisa King, should be well known to regular listeners of the podcast, having been on before as the founder of Eat My Lunch. Earlier this year, King decided to take a break from drinking and the weird reactions that prompted from people led her to reevaluate her and our general relationship with drinking.

Now she’s helping amplify the conversation around changing our relationship to drinking, and making it easier to take control of our choices, with her new venture AF Drinks. The first products are alcohol-free gin and tonics that actually taste good, and they’re hitting supermarkets everywhere shortly.

To talk about saving non-drinkers from horrible warm orange juice, starting an alcohol-free drinks company and the reaction and reception so far, Lisa King joined Business is Boring for a chat.

Download now, subscribe through Apple Podcasts, or visit Business is Boring on Acast or Spotify.