A Barometer to (Community) Life and Egalitarianism across the Tasman? A Review Article

In this present year, 2008, Hachette Livre NZ Ltd., have published a sumptuously illustrated volume of regional and subtle but genuinely anecdotal and zestful essays concerned with the style and social history-and the two cannot be separated-of the longtime mobile "cheap eatery" of that country, the "pie cart". The author-compilers of 'The Great New Zealand Pie Cart' - all from Auckland - are three: 1) Lindsay Neill, who lectures in hospitality management at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), and is both a chef and a prize-winning food writer; 2) Claudia Bell, a sociologist at the University of Auckland, whose main research is on everyday life in New Zealand, she having already published on kiwiana (i.e. quirkish and distinctive items redolent of New Zealand life and culture), small towns and their character, local festivals, roadside landmarks, local landscapes, and folk art, as well as her earlier and informative and significant book, 'Inventing New Zealand' (Penguin, 1996); and 3) Ted Bryant, a champion of an old-fashioned field of the preparation and presentation of food, one now designated "hospitality education" with a vast experience in the United Kingdom, in Bermuda and in New Zealand, and for thirty years the Head of the AUT's School of Hospitality, a presenter of the popular educational programmes entitled 'Ethnic Cookery', and a peculiarly distinctive commentator/ interpreter of New Zealand's foodways. These, it must be stressed are much different from Australia's, due to cooler climate, the customs and traditional tastes of the native people, the Maori, and the richness of the fish stocks, as well as the still surprisingly "British" core to the population, something peculiarly intriguing to visitors from other countries.