Don’t feed the natives

On Sundays, my friend Karen generally comes out from Wellington. We go to the beach to talk and hang out and boogy board, and then she tends to come home for dinner. Karen is one of my Kiwi friends, a category I expected to be a higher proportion than it turns out to be. Of the people who eat regularly at my house, fewer than half were actually born here in New Zealand; most have come here in the last ten years. Karen, though, serves as a cultural attaché to the Kiwiberger home. We have pronunciation practice (“wah-tah—not warterrrr,” she tells us), we tell stories of our youth, we talk about love and 80s music, and we eat food.

Last night we talked about foods that don’t qualify as food outside your own cultural orientation. Root beer seems to be a key example of this. I don’t drink sodas under nearly any circumstances. But if I were going to drink one, root beer would be one of the key sodas of choice. I love the tangy start with a creamy finish. In our early days, Michael and I used to drive far and wide in search of the perfect root beer float. Kiwis do NOT like root beer. I discovered this in the US with a visiting Keith. He didn’t just find himself not particularly fond of root beer—he hated it. I asked Karen about that. Her face crumpled in total disgust. “Root beer is one of the few things that my body hasn’t even recognized as a food item,” she explained. She told us stories about the two times she tried to like it on visits to the US. “My body gave a big tremor as if to say that this was not an edible object, and I just needed to get it out of my mouth,” she explained to peals of laughter from Aidan and Naomi. Thus began a category of foods-that-aren’t-foods.

I told the obligatory vegemite story of my first encounter with that non-food which is my most clear recognition of the notion that there might be a food that some love that others absolutely don’t recognize as edible. Karen told us about two trampers (=hikers) who were sitting with her around the fire one evening swatting mosquitoes. She told them that vegemite (or marmite) was great for keeping the bugs away; it turns out to be filled with all those B vitamins that make your blood taste bad to the mozzies. What she neglected to tell them was that the brown gloop in the jar was meant to be ingested and not applied topically. She heard from them again several days later with stories of their deep humiliation when they rubbed the slimy spread over their arms and legs, to the great mirth of their fellow trampers (alas, Karen doesn’t know whether vegemite applied topically also works to keep mozzies away although it’s clear it keeps other trampers away).

And then it was time for the true test of our friendship. After conversations about other American combinations that are just wrongwrongwrong to the kiwi palette, the kids and I sprang into action to make chocolate and peanut butter cookies for dessert. Karen was horrified—why would you ruin chocolate by putting it near peanut butter? I had made these cookies—unknowingly breaking the cultural divide—for my friend Robyn once, and Robyn had gamely managed to get one down. It was clear then that it was her first and last attempt at that oh-so-yummy combination. (Note that Keith, with decades of living with an American, happily eats these cookies and that my dad, who has been an American all his life, doesn’t like them much.) What would Karen—who doesn’t much like sweet things anyway—make of this?

The kids tried to tempt her with dough-covered spoons to lick (chocolate yes, peanut butter a horrified no) and laughed as she collected herself quietly a few minutes before The Eating of the Cookies. Aidan, who has some experience eating things he doesn’t feel good about eating, coached her from the side. “You have to believe you’re going to like it or else you don’t have a chance at liking it,” he told her knowledgably. His careful coaching disintegrated, however, when he popped the cookie into her not-quite-ready mouth. And…she liked it! Enough to have two more and happily take a stash home for the rest of the week. Now this is the real reason I have come to New Zealand. Sure the work is excellent, the scenery spectacular, but it’s the conversion of some of the natives to the chocolate and peanut butter combination which will prove the bulk of my work here. Look out New Zealanders—there are bottles of root beer coming to a fancy import store near you.

(Pictures today are obviously of Karen and the cookie--and of Aidan standing in front of his new window this evening, on a night when there should have been much more to photograph than a single new window, but there wasn't. Argh!)