8 LISTENER AUGUST 24 2019
A
s 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 require-
ment to have calories on menus,
because they all do, it was nice to
simply concentrate on the descrip-
tions of the offerings, especially
everything with cheese. Cheese is
why farm animals were invented.
Also, as I considered the item
“Loaded Fries”, with the descrip-
tion “bacon, cheese, sour
cream”, I wondered who
would really need numeri-
cal 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 – noth-
ing 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 under-
stand why America’s
generally so much poorer.There’s nothing
like a spell out
of town to bring
local peculiarities
into focus.
The new normal
Unless there is a
hidden agendato abandon
our capital,the insurance
situation
needs fixing.A
N
TH
O
N
Y^
EL
LI
SO
N
“I’m starting to think that he’s part of a
liberal plot to make racists look bad.”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 com-
position 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 enrich-
ing Amazon multibillionaire Jeff Bezos by eating
one of his filled rolls somehow made Whole Foods’
groceries less appetising.M
y 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 itseems the Unit Titles Act, requiring
bodies corporate to have full-replace-
ment 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 apart-
ment 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 shock-
ingly high.
The situation has the feel of threat-
ened 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 maintain-
ing and improving them.
Gradually, they become less
valuable, the air of decay
makes them less attrac-
tive and there is a retreat,
resulting as much from
fiscal prudence as environ-
mental 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 insur-
ance situation needs fixing.
As New Zealanders are fond
of saying, somebody needs
to do something. lBACK TO BLACK
JOANNE
BLACK
IN WELLINGTON