Kiwi Food

Not that easy being veggie in NZ, because lots of meat and lots of fish on menus but also lots of dairy and lots of eggs so OK up to a point but surprisingly few vegetables – even though there are numerous road-side stalls selling fruit and veg, where we stock up, especially on apricots and plums (both very much in season at the moment – some red-fleshed plums, variety Doris, we had yesterday were so succulent), also avocados, peaches, nectarines – so we are not going hungry but kiwi fruits are not in season again until April. We have also bought some Tim Tams (see Phil, we do as you advise) and some New Zealand Marmite – very different from both Vegemite and UK Marmite(softer, sweeter taste) but Chris still HATES it! One item that we find over and over again on menus is fish and chips – they are ubiquitous and range from ‘greasies’ (the colloquial name) to ‘catch of the day, lightly dipped in our own beer batter and fried to perfection with thrice-cooked hand-cut chips made from specially selected potatoes and served with our home made tartare sauce’ but NEVER any mushy peas. Ice cream is something of a Kiwi institution especially a variety called Hokey Pokey* and very good it is too – almost equal to Italian standards, which is very high praise from us indeed.
One thing that doesn’t appear on any menu though is possum – must be because it doesn’t taste good otherwise we are sure it would be eaten as New Zealanders have an almost pathological hatred of the creature – so much so that even the most dedicated Green will have a pair of possum fur slippers! All the souvenir shops have possum fur scarves/hats/blankets usually with labels exhorting one to purchase because in so doing one would be helping to rid the country of its most reviled creature. Possums were introduced (familiar story) from Australia in the mid-19th century and it is now thought that they number in excess of seventy million and cause untold damage – eating their way through 21,000 tonnes of vegetation every night and carrying bovine TB. There are now so many possums that hunting (a bounty is paid for each possum skin) barely has any effect so the government is forced to spend NZ$100million a year on possum control (usually by using a poison called 1080 – a substance banned in almost every other country in the world).
Perhaps we could start a similar campaign in the UK to get rid of that vile creature the grey squirrel? Grey squirrel-fur slippers to ward off that cold winter anyone?