From the Food Files

The Arts Centre Market in Christchurch is one of the city's best known tourist attractions. I'm in two minds about the quality of some of the goods on sale in the market - there are some very nice wares but they are often so swamped in what I very generously call 'crap' that it's hard to take the place seriously. I often wander through of a weekend. For one thing, as a travel guide writer, I consider it my duty to be informed about as much as possible and that includes the quality of assorted marketplaces; for another thing, quite apart from the goods on sale, there's always a lively atmosphere with buskers and visitors that excites my camera. Just around the corner from the main market are the food caravans - a narrow alley that runs behind Court Theatre, which is crowded with food vendors and hungry punters. All nationalities converge - predominantly Asian - but among them all, I spied this stall selling delicious European pastries. From memory the guy was Czech but don't take my word for it. My camera gets so filled with stuff that I often forget names and places.

Well Done Motueka!

For standing up to the might of McDonalds. It's not that I have anything personal against McDonalds, it's fast food chains in general and the insidious globalised approach they have to 'taking over the world.'. The first time I went to Beijing in 2001 I was appalled by the impact of McDonalds. My interpreter, thinking I might not like Chinese food, took me to lunch at McDonalds. The place was packed beyond belief. I found that a little unnerving but what really unhinged me, was the fact that I could not understand a thing. Never in my worst nightmares had I expected to be defeated by a McDonalds’ menu; but there it all was, written in Chinese and totally incomprehensible. I wouldn’t have cared if I had been anywhere else but somehow, being linguistically beaten by greasy fries and hamburgers felt like a very real and unnecessary punishment. When a table became available, a very young mother with her baby boy joined us. The baby, she told us, was just sixty-two days old and she was feeding him McDonald’s hot chocolate, cooled by her caring breath as she siphoned it from her cardboard cup into his baby bottle. He suckled contentedly with a frightening vigour. The first McDonalds opened in Beijing in 1992 and people lined up for hours to try the new ‘American-style’ restaurant. The company has never looked back. They’re virtually a part of Chinese urban life now, along with KFC, Pizza Hut, Subway and all the others. In 2003 there were 560 McDonalds restaurants throughout China and the company was aiming for another 100 in 2004. (KFC had 900 Chinese outlets). In China, Ronald McDonald is known by the cute-sounding name, Mai Dang Lao Shushu. And just for the record, when I visited Beijing in 2001 there were 19 Starbucks outlets. When I returned two years later, there were 40. The Chinese have undergone a major transformation in the way they eat and you don’t have to go far to find articles attesting to new, worrying levels of obesity and the chronic diseases often associated with it. It would be unfair to blame western takeaways entirely. The Chinese diet had also been significantly changed by the introduction of many more meat and dairy products, soft drinks and flavoured milk drinks – despite the fact that China has one of the world’s largest known national prevalences for lactose intolerance.