Why would you pay for water when you can drink it straight from the tap? Why indeed?

Recently I joined a throng of thirsty wine drinkers at the annual ‘NZ in a Glass’ wine tasting evening in Sydney.  Squeezing through the crowd was worth it to find fantastic wines like Te Pa Sauvignon Blanc and Grasshopper Rock Pinot Noir. But at around 500 kilojoules per 150ml glass (that’s roughly the same as eating five squares of milk chocolate) it was a relief to stumble, not literally, upon Antipodes Water. It was the elegant shape of the bottle that caught my eye and discovering that it was sourced not far from where I grew up that made me stop and taste.

“Can you taste the smoothness? It’s the silica that gives it that smooth mouth feel,”  Simon enthusiastically explained to us. I had never thought of water as smooth but, yes, I had to agree that it did taste smooth on my tongue. Very nice. He reeled off the names of some top restaurateurs who refused to serve any water except Antipodes. And then he answered my unspoken question: why pay for something you can get from the tap?

“I can’t drink alcohol and whenever I would ask the waiter if they had something non-alcoholic they would

I have spent the past month in New Zealand at the beach, cycling, rafting over the world’s highest commercially rafted waterfall at Rotorua, walking on the beach, seeing friends and family – and eating some great food, not necessarily all healthy. We discovered arguably the best croissants in New Zealand at Oliver’s bakery in Whangamata. Each morning we cycled down to buy these buttery treats, eating them at the nearby wharf with a take-out coffee or carrying them home for a leisurely breakfast. Not exactly healthy but oh so delicious! And our weight didn’t sky-rocket because the rest of our meals included lots of fish, vegetables and fruit.

We had fresh silver beet, kamokamo (a type of marrow), tomatoes, corn and basil which I layered in a dish with canned tuna, then grated a little cheese on top and baked. We had freshly dug new potatoes boiled and served with mint from the garden, or par-boiled and then crisped on the BBQ. A few times I used the silver beet in lasagna. This low fat version has extra vegetables

Which food pops into your mind when you read each of the following words?

Omega-3
Zinc
Vitamin C
Iron

My guess is the answers to the first three would have been in order: fish, oysters and oranges (or kiwifruit). What about iron? Did you say beef or lamb? I would have too until recently when I did some work for Aquaculture NZ and discovered that New Zealand’s Greenshell Mussels have three times more iron than beef.

Just five Greenshell mussels provide as much iron as eating a man-sized 300 grams of rump steak. This is fantastic news for the less carnivorous of us. Five Greenshell Mussels provides

Why does New Zealand King (or Chinook) salmon have twice the omega-3‘s of Atlantic salmon? It’s all because of the rivers.

If you have to swim a long way up an icy river you need plenty of fat to fuel your journey. If the trip is short, you don’t need so much fat. It’s the fat where you find all the omega-3′s. NZ King (Chinook) salmon is not native to New Zealand. It’s native home is the Pacific north-west coast of America and far north-eastern Russia. Here, the rivers are long compared to the relatively shorter rivers on the east coast of America where Atlantic salmon originates.

In the 1900′s both Atlantic and Chinook salmon were brought into New Zealand but only the Chinook survived. As Grant Rosewarne, CEO of Regal Salmon said, “If we could have farmed Atlantic salmon we would have. It’s much easier.”

It’s called the no. 8 wire trait – the Kiwi knack for ingenuity.