Hawke's Bay's Daniel Freeman is one of the contestants from My Kitchen Rules New Zealand. Photo / Glenn Taylor
For breakfast it was a New York cut of home-kill liver.
Lunch consisted of green beans with duck eggs.
Dinner, a mystery portion of sheep.
As a lad, the menu for weekends at friends' farms didn't stray too far from said fare.
In about the same pre-teen '80s era, there was a similar food uniformity at adult parties. Beer was from crates or glass flagons, in draught persuasion only.
Wines were of the "smooth" varietal, liebestraum, muller thurgau and company, in room-temperature casks. Us kids would kick the empty bladders across the lawn.
The only food event close to pretentious nosh was the wine-and-cheese. But even here, highly processed "fromage" was deep orange and smoked, served on hefty crackers with the above wines.
Since then, we've seen food's gentrification.
Great things have flowed from it - variety, seasonality, seasoning, awareness and pride of provenance.
It happened swiftly. Like a Rip Van Winkle moment I fell asleep and woke to find food renamed cuisine, and farmers redubbed artisans.
While most chapters of the culinary revolution I welcome, there's, of course, an underbelly.
Witness Wednesday night's My Kitchen Rules.
Despite being an avid cook myself, these awkward, puerile TV shows give me an appetite for a fatty slab of mutton served with a side of duck eggs and warm glass of muller thurgau. Fine food in these staged contexts, is plated for the wrong reasons.
The non-affected generation before me had it sussed: simple food, good company. The quest to impress with high-brow chow is a genuine threat to the humble dinner party.
The downside of the domestic gentrification of food is that it's been matched with a type of culinary status anxiety.
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