More Food Related Wonderings

I wrote this post a while ago and am just now posting it cause it's not great, but I'm going away tomorrow for two weeks (to the South Island), so I wanted to leave something. Enjoy!

What I always find really interesting when I’m travelling is how tastes in one country got to be the way they are, and why they’re so different from tastes in another country. This is exemplified to me by the fast food options in Australia and New Zealand. (Can I say before I go any further that this isn’t exactly a well-researched blog post, though I did Google a few key facts and took the top search result to be accurate. Because if I can’t trust Google, who can I trust?)

Now, one could say, Australia and New Zealand weren’t formed all that differently from the United States. Especially Australia… colonized by the British, settlers then pushed back and murdered the native people, brought in their own lot (who happened to be convicts), and decided to form a new country. Except they never quite got there, and so their head of state is still technically the Queen. Ouch. And, ok, Australia did all of this founding business quite a few years after America and, yes, they never had a falling out with the mother country in the form of a bloody war, but still. Australia is THOUSANDS OF MILES further away from the UK than America is. I feel like the tastes of the two countries should be ENTIRELY different. And so I get back to the topic of fast food.

So let’s start off with pizza, because hopefully you’ve already read the epic pizza-related post below. Now, I know why pizza’s good in New York. We have a lot of Italian immigrants, or people of Italian descent. This is not a big secret. I’m not going to speculate on why Italians didn’t go to Australia in the 1800s or whenever they came over (see, well researched. Quality journalism.) because, well, Australia is really far away. So ok, I know that intellectually it makes sense to have better pizza in America. But that doesn’t excuse the excuse for pizza they serve here.

Now don’t even get me started on fast deli sandwiches or bagels. Just… don’t. I might cry. Deli sandwiches, as in sandwiches made to order, don’t seem to exist, and bagels are… I can’t even explain. I cry inside when I think of a New Zealand bagel. Why don't they have delis and bagels here? I guess some of it could have to do with a lack of Jewish immigrants, but it's weird. So let’s move on to the positives!

And here is where I get confused. Because one of the biggest fast food options in Australia and New Zealand is Indian food, or, basically, curries. You can go into a shop and order a curry with naan and rice for about ten NZ dollars (US$5. This place is cheap), and have it to take away in about ten minutes. This I enjoy, because I love Indian food and can never get enough of it at home. The thing is, though, that Indian curries are also very popular in England. I know why that is, once again… lots of Indian immigrants in the UK! So, the question is… did the tastes of the UK move Down Under and bring with it a love of curry, or did people from India also immigrate over this way and bring the curry with them, thus developing SEPERATELY a desire for fast and delicious Indian food. I could probably find this out with a little googling, but as I said… it’s a research-light day. Basically I can’t explain why, but I can tell you that there is a wide availability of delicious curry in Australia and New Zealand, and this is a good thing (and possibly makes up for the pizza).

The second delicious fast food phenomenon in this here region is that of PIES. Now mentioning a pie over here does not imply delicious fruit filling, it means MEAT. Lots and lots of meaty filling. There are tiny shops all over New Zealand which seem to deal exclusively in pre-made meat pies, all ready in a warming device/oven type thing to take out and consume with your hands and possibly some tomato sauce (not ketchup. See earlier post). Some of them have the addition of cheese. Apparently there is a “butter chicken pie” (butter chicken is a type of curry) that combines these two fast food phenomena, but as much as I like the two separately, the idea of a combination is revolting to me (and my arteries). I know steak pies are big in English pubs, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen little shops like they have here full of pies over in the UK. I could be wrong, but there you go. Perhaps this one just evolved on its own in this little corner of the world. Good onya, mate!

Now I shouldn’t finish my post without saying that, yes, the garangutan American fast food chains are of course present here as well. It’s not all curries and pies. They of course of McDonalds and KFC and Burger King. (Interestingly, though, in Australia BK is called Hungry Jack’s: same logo, different name. In NZ it’s Burger King.) Alas, it seems nowhere is safe from the desire for burgers, fries, and deep frying things, and I don’t think I have to ponder how that trend made it over the seas.