Joanne Black
There’s nothing like a spell out of town to bring local peculiarities into focus.
As I was meeting a friend for lunch in Wellington’s Caffe L’affare, my eye was caught by something about the menu – no mention of calories. After the US, where I assume it is a legal requirement to have calories on menus, because they all do, it was nice to simply concentrate on the descriptions of the offerings, especially everything with cheese. Cheese is why farm animals were invented.
Also, as I considered the item “Loaded Fries”, with the description “bacon, cheese, sour cream”, I wondered who would really need numerical precision about the percentage of average daily fat that this dish contained. Nothing called Loaded Fries will ever be a dieter’s friend.
Tempting as it was, my peculiar paranoia about choking on bacon – nothing else, just bacon as the pig takes its revenge – won the day and I instead ordered Eggs Florentine. Very good it was, too.
Until moving to the US, and living there for three years, I did not appreciate how good New Zealand’s food was. Nor do I understand why America’s generally so much poorer.
Washington DC is a wealthy city (depending on where you look), yet I never found an equivalent of Moore Wilson’s foodie heaven. However, I lived near a good weekend farmers’ market where the produce was both high quality and expensive.
The nearest US equivalent to Moore Wilson’s is Whole Foods, known pejoratively as Whole Paycheck because of the cost. It is now owned by Amazon, and although that does not alter the composition and taste of a tomato, my preference is to support local, independent and small businesses, when the quality and price of their goods are not markedly different. The thought of further enriching Amazon multibillionaire Jeff Bezos by eating one of his filled rolls somehow made Whole Foods’ groceries less appetising.
My new topic of conversation as I begin looking for a house to buy in Wellington is home insurance. Over the past few years, some friends’ properties seem to have had only steady increases in their insurance bills, whereas many others have grown exponentially. I wrote about this for the Listener a few years ago and it
seems the Unit Titles Act, requiring bodies corporate to have full-replacement insurance, remains a sticking point. Living on an active faultline is another.
I wouldn’t pretend to be an expert, but more flexibility in the law would appear to be called for so that, for instance, if your waterfront apartment collapsed in an earthquake, you had the option to scarper rather than rebuild. Earthquake or not, the choice of not having to pay so much in full-replacement insurance that you can no longer afford to own your apartment would seem handy, too. Naturally, these insurance costs flow through to rents, which are shockingly high.
The situation has the feel of threatened coastlines, and perhaps in some respects is not dissimilar. Properties at high risk become uninsurable, and because their owners can’t get cover, they give up maintaining and improving them. Gradually, they become less valuable, the air of decay makes them less attractive and there is a retreat, resulting as much from fiscal prudence as environmental threat. No ratepayer subsidy via futile seawalls is required.
The difference is that this is our capital city. Unless there is a hidden agenda to abandon it – I’ve always personally favoured Nelson as an alternative, though it seems to have its own share of catastrophes – the insurance situation needs fixing. As New Zealanders are fond of saying, somebody needs to do something.
Unless there is a hidden agenda to abandon our capital, the insurance situation needs fixing.