Trifle, perhaps the most ubiquitous of the all the Anglo-Saxon festive fare to be transplanted into our antipodean midsummer holiday season, defines something of a watershed fortnight in my year, an annual ritual spanning lifetimes. More than New Year and encompassing the proper Twelve Days of Christmas, it provokes thought and rumination about provenance and stability and family wellbeing and community resilience and connections.
This year, having located and secured a supply of Wattie’s Hawke’s Bay sliced peaches, dusted off the Pedro Ximenez sherry (dubbed ‘Christmas in a bottle’ by Casita Miro’s Cat Vosper) and checked the longevity of my custard powder, the only missing piece was trifle sponge, usually in copious supply in December. For whatever reason, I couldn’t find it and resorted to making sponge cake from scratch anyway (four eggs, a cup of self-rising flour, a lot of beating and a knob of butter in three tablespoons of hot water) and was surprisingly pleased with myself.
And dismayed to see that, late last year, Wattie’s Hawke’s Bay growers had been told their luscious and time-honoured Golden Queen peach crops will be cut back because they are no longer be needed to feed their country of origin, the company alleging a “declining demand” for canned peaches in New Zealand and shoppers choosing ‘cheaper’ imported tinned fruit instead.
The usual, specious mendacity attended the announcement by the US-based Kraft Heinz’s New Zealand company but our unenviable role as an unhappy hunting ground for offshore corporations was all too obvious.
Justine Powell, head of marketing at Wattie’s New Zealand, said the reduction was a “necessary response” and they had to adjust the volumes they could sustainably take from local orchards.
In the same breath, she said the company was still committed to offering a range of New Zealand-grown canned fruit, including peaches. “There are no plans at this stage to discontinue Wattie’s canned peaches products, or to import peaches. Wattie’s focus remains on sourcing locally grown fruit wherever possible.
“We would like nothing more than to see Kiwis choosing to buy New Zealand-grown canned fruit, particularly peaches, and encourage everyone to back our local producers,” she said, skimming past the salient issue of relative price-points.
It’s specious at best. A manufactured scarcity and, since many of us want to shop and choose ethically whenever possible, I idly considered starting a campaign to save the growers by shopping locally, boycotting parent company Heinz and publicly raising the issue of price of the Hawkes Bay fruit on the shelf.
Significant media attention since has highlighted the importance of buying local, while public concern shows that Kiwis care about New Zealand producers and are open to buying locally grown summer fruit, whether it’s processed or fresh.
The rub is all in the tradeoff between price and volume of sales, of course, but it’s hard to see why a can of well-grown fruit harvested in a long-established, time-honed industry and delivered to a local cannery on an enormous scale could possibly be more expensive than something that has come from the other side of the world with heaven knows what provenance. A 400gm tin of Wattie’s Hawkes Bay peaches in clear fruit juice is $3.50.
Woolworth’s home brand is $1.80 and comes from South Africa and I speak from experience when I say nobody who has attempted to make anything, let alone a fresh, jewel-bright Christmas trifle, with the amorphous slime that was the Chinese offering in plastic jars a couple of years ago would ever do so again, while the South African tins on the supermarket home brand shelves were little better.
It’s a heritage issue. Founded in 1934 in Hawke’s Bay by Sir James Wattie and Harold Carr under the name J. Wattie Canneries, the company started with jams and expanded to fruits and vegetables. Heinz purchased the company in the infamous early 1990s.
The speed with which we are losing the will – and even ability –to live in our own country is shocking and not helped when supermarkets and big corporations are able to engineer and arbitrate local tastes and statistics and to price their products to the point of social engineering. Pricing themselves out of small markets with impunity if it suits the cashflow of its parent conglomerate overseas.
We are in the grip of a monstrously greedy global corporate and financial hegemony and seemingly insurmountable problems are obvious around us but the answers won’t come from miraculous technologies or vast amounts of capital.
These musings got me through mountains of dishes, and the crystal trifle bowls, after an adventurous summer including a festive Christmas Day picnic ashore on Te Wharau beach, are back in their cupboard. Only a mountain of tea towels remain.
So what for 2026?
I remind myself that in such seasons on the edge of chaos, even one seemingly insignificant act of generosity can tip the balance for evolutionary change as a species, community or family.
As American poet, essayist and environmental activist Gary Snyder said decades ago: “It is best to think of this as a revolution, not of guns but of consciousness, which will be won by seizing the key myths, archetypes, eschatologies and ecstasies so that life won’t seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy’s side.”
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
