What is it about quiche? Photo / Babiche Martens
We need to talk about class, and we need a better language for it. By Anna Knox.
What is it about quiche?
I visited a friend for lunch recently and encountered her homemade one on the bench. It was prepped for the oven in a frilled ceramic pie dish of generous depth, the kind from a boutique homewares store. Small pieces of broccoli and red capsicum nestled cosily in the egg and cream. The pastry trim was neat, but not too neat. Black pepper on top. Classy. One look and you knew where that quiche came from. Rural, monied, it remembered the heirloom furniture, lavender hedges and big country kitchens of its past lives. It looked confident, sure of itself; it was a quiche with excellent posture. It looked entitled to be there.
Coincidentally, I had also brought along a quiche for lunch that day – an altogether different beast. Shallow and squat, with somehow less elegantly chopped vegetables, slimy tinned corn, pallid egg, a patched-together trim. I’d forgotten the pepper. It looked embarrassed to be there.
I’m clearly not just talking about shortcrust here, but in Too Much Money, Max Rashbrooke’s book about wealth in contemporary New Zealand, he explains that “in contrast to the idea that everyone mixes easily here, upper middle-class New Zealanders can manifest certain tastes and dispositions – especially around food – that make others feel inferior”. I’ve found this to be true, for quiche at least.
Too Much Money should be compulsory reading for all New Zealanders. Rashbrooke is an actual quiche expert and his bonafide data shows, irrefutably, how we’re in the throes of a class crisis in Aotearoa, one with dangerously violent potential – if the isolating divide in the United States and in history in general is anything to go by. But while we’re getting better at talking about race and gender in Aotearoa, especially in relation to identity, privilege and opportunity, we don’t talk about class much, or perhaps even think about it. We’re getting better at checking our racism and sexism, but who ever checks their classism?
This isn’t unique to New Zealand. Using the Disney cultural litmus test, Frozen and Moana score high for busting traditional gender and racial stereotypes, but the framework of extreme class privilege, from royalty down to peasants, holds fast: there’s no power to the people in these films. Though in the US, some change might be afoot. Last month, in response to the Supreme Court’s vote against affirmative action, the Education Department opened a civil rights investigation into Harvard University’s systematically classist admissions process.
I think one reason we don’t talk about class is that it’s difficult to define – class is not a quiche, much as I’d like it to be. Unlike ethnicity or gender, you won’t find it on a birth record or a census form. Barring chiefly descent, it’s not a part of your whakapapa or family tree. I can’t think of any organisations or activities that explore or celebrate class identity, unless a Working Men’s Club still counts? Or maybe a union? How do you even know what class you’re in?
We lack the right language to talk about class in Aotearoa. In Māori society at the time of colonisation, there was an existing social hierarchy, from slaves through to chiefly families, but the class terms that came with the English – upper, middle, working – like so many things, never mapped well on to Māori or colonial social structures, and neither did the Marxist terms that followed, which is perhaps partly why the “classless society” has been such a big part of the national story – one that collectively we’re reluctant to let go of and, therefore, avoid mentioning. The idea is not entirely mythological. There was no idle aristocracy in Pākehā colonial Aotearoa – the white rich were largely bourgeois business owners and farmers, some of whom became extremely wealthy, primarily through the disenfranchisement of Māori. It was also true that there were less barriers to mixing between “stations” and that immigrants, in general, had better opportunities to improve their situations than in the countries they had come from, though again at a devastating cost to Māori. But in 1890 1 per cent of the population owned 65 per cent of the country’s assets – a figure we’re shooting for again. Social hierarchy existed and still does, we’re just not sure how to describe it.
The existing language around class is dated, steeped in Anglo values, and is also, itself, kind of classist. There’s an assumption, for example, that being further “up” the class ladder is “better” and that being “lower class” is problematic. But it’s not class that’s the problem, it’s the discrimination that comes with it; being disadvantaged because of a classist system, or being unfairly impoverished while others benefit from your poverty.
Critically, while they’re often lumped together, wealth, income and class are not the same things, and I think this confusion also gets in the way. In conflating them, there’s also a danger of misunderstanding more subtle aspects of class as a deeply generational social and political force.
For example, in my anecdotal experience, friends who “come from money” but are now firmly in a middle-income bracket still retain a healthy sense of self-worth, entitlement and belonging in comparison with those who come predominantly from working-class or middle-class backgrounds. This impacts their assertiveness and ability to access opportunities, politically and otherwise. A successful business owner, on the other hand, might have more in common class-wise with a teacher than with a third-generation banker, even if financially they’re now in the same bracket as the banker. And, while wealth can often be accompanied by an aggressive sense of entitlement, a person who grows up poor and becomes wealthier can remain deeply insecure about their place in society, as well as their political entitlement and agency.
Of course, most of us are mongrels when it comes to class, which makes identifying yourself in a social hierarchy pretty messy. In my own whakapapa, dirt floors and potato famines sit alongside landed merchants and houses with maids. For more recent immigrants, class can be further complicated by dramatic shifts in income and status as a result of immigration, as well as ideas about class that stem from their own experiences and that are also now part of New Zealand’s. Class, race, wealth and gender intersect in such complex ways they can’t really be considered apart from each other.
As a blunt tool, however, wealth and income provide a pragmatic way to at least start talking about class, particularly in relation to economic and political power, and to privilege.
Although here, the language fails once more. Because in the broader conversation about privilege that class needs to be part of, the term “minority” usually refers to the disenfranchised and discriminated against: with class, the privileged group are the minority.
Which makes me wonder if one of the reasons we don’t talk about class is because it wouldn’t do that privileged minority any favours. To start talking about class, to become class conscious and identify along class lines, risks a class consciousness that might lead to a shift in wealth and opportunity – away from a privileged minority, and into the mongrel majority.
Going by wealth alone, New Zealand is an undeniably classist country. Currently, we are ranked 16th in the OECD for income inequality, between Greece and Portugal. In 2018, 20 per cent of New Zealand’s wealth sat with 1 per cent of the people, almost 45 per cent with 5 per cent of people, and 60 per cent with 10 per cent. Between 1985 and 2008, the gap between rich and poor widened by 22 per cent.
No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, you can’t argue that society is better off when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, or that it’s better for the population if a handful of people have most of the money and the rest are systematically denied it. That’s not a platform for anyone. And yet, we are a democracy, which means that 90 per cent of us should be demanding better distribution of the country’s wealth, privilege and opportunity. So why don’t we?
While my quiche will always be basic, I’m still proud of it. My comfortable, warm, healthy, solidly middle-class life today and the opportunities it affords are a direct result of, yes, my ancestors’ hard work and sacrifice, but equally of their being some of the tens of thousands of New Zealanders lifted out of poverty through the taxation, labour laws, and egalitarian government policies of the post-war boom.
We can’t return to this story – the world has changed. But there are other answers. Perhaps in finding a language to talk about class, we might find them.
The new free open-air saltwater pool is already proving popular.