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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the New Zealand Junior Pastry Team negotiated the rigours of international competition at the 2013 Junior Pastry World Cup in Rimini, Italy and how what was learnt from this experience holds relevance to creative hospitality practice and business application.

This paper uses an inductive qualitative enquiry to illuminate the narratives and subjective experiences of the competition team. Structured and semi-structured interview data responses were themed using an open coding system. This data were critically evaluated against both competition data, participant experience and relevant academic literature.

This paper shows how the team’s desire to highlight its national identity through food in the competition resulted in problematic experiences that were compounded by a tyranny of distance. However, these challenges were overcome through the creative dynamic the team developed and the networking benefits which the competition provided. These experiences added value not only to the team competitors but also the culinary and pastry practitioners in New Zealand’s hospitality community.

The research offers unique insights into how a representative pastry team from the “New World” negotiated international competition set in and heavily influenced by the “Old World” of culinary tradition. The paper’s findings could be of use to other novice competition teams. The work also links the importance of international culinary competition to wider constructs of hospitality, such as business advantage in commercial hospitality.

Food—national dietary standards—is a sensitive index of socio‐economic conditions generally; there are others, reflecting different aspects, but none more sensitive. A country that eats well has healthy, robust people; the housewife who cooks hearty, nourishing meals has a lusty, virile family. It is not surprising, therefore, that all governments of the world have a food policy, ranking high in its priorities and are usually prepared to sacrifice other national policies to preserve it. Before the last war, when food was much less of an instrument of government policy than now—there were not the shortages or the price vagaries—in France, any government, whatever its colour, which could not keep down the price of food so that the poor man ate his fill, never survived long; it was—to make use of the call sign of those untidy, shambling columns from our streets which seem to monopolize the television news screens—“out!” Lovers of the Old France would say that the country had been without stable government since 1870, but the explanation for the many changes in power in France in those pre‐war days could be expressed in one word—food!

For many years now food and drugs authorities (and the public) have been complaining about the low meat content of meat pies on sale and the need of a standard is self‐evident. The pie filling is not visible to the purchaser and often consists of a mixture of meat and cereal from the appearance of which it is impossible to assess the amount of meat present. The sale of made up cooked foods has increased among all such products in recent years, but for meat pies the increase has been phenomenal.

After great Wars, the years that follow are always times of disquiet and uncertainty; the country is shabby and exhausted, but beneath it, there is hope, expectancy, nay! certainty, that better times are coming. Perhaps the golden promise of the fifties and sixties failed to mature, but we entered the seventies with most people confident that the country would turn the corner; it did but unfortunately not the right one! Not inappropriate they have been dubbed the “striking seventies”. The process was not one of recovery but of slow, relentless deterioration. One way of knowing how your country is going is to visit others. At first, prices were cheaper that at home; the £ went farther and was readily acceptabble, but year by year, it seemed that prices were rising, but it was in truth the £ falling in value; no longer so easily changed. Most thinking Continentals had only a sneer for “decadent England”. Kinsmen from overseas wanted to think well of us but simply could not understand what was happening.

SO indefinite has been the activity in the political and military spheres of the war that the realization of the tremendous nature of the event has not yet been felt generally, although before these lines appear in print things may have changed. The normal life of libraries has been conditioned in some by the loss of a few rooms which have been “seconded,” to quote the favourite word of the moment, for other purposes and by the black‐out. Certainly there have been cases where the local Caesars have commandeered rooms without any regard for their suitability or for the value of the work they normally do, but this has not been at all general. On the contrary, the libraries have been more used than ever, and closing at blacking‐out has been so much resented that a large number of libraries, we hope all, have determined to keep libraries open as fully as possible. This does not mean that it is for the moment necessary to keep lending departments open until 9 p.m. or later, as was the case in some towns. The one habit the British people learn from war is to retire earlier, but libraries should remain open until 7 o'clock or a little later. Many of the suggestions we made last month had been anticipated or have since been carried out, such as doubling the number of books the reader may borrow, going easy with the charging of fines, and so on. We repeat that to keep our methods flexible and adaptable is the great need of the moment.

In the Court of Appeal last summer, when Van Den Berghs and Jurgens Limited (belonging to the Unilever giant organization) sought a reversal of the decision of the trial judge that their television advertisements of Stork margarine did not contravene Reg. 9, Margarine Regulations, 1967—an action which their Lordships described as fierce but friendly—there were some piercing criticisms by the Court on the phrasing of the Regulations, which was described as “ridiculous”, “illogical” and as “absurdities”. They also remarked upon the fact that from 1971 to 1975, after the Regulations became operative, and seven years from the date they were made, no complaint from enforcement authorities and officers or the organizations normally consulted during the making of such regulations were made, until the Butter Information Council, protecting the interests of the dairy trade and dairy producers, suggested the long‐standing advertisements of Reg. 9. An example of how the interests of descriptions and uses of the word “butter” infringements of Reg. 9. An example af how the interests of enforcement, consumer protection, &c, are not identical with trade interests, who see in legislation, accepted by the first, as injuring sections of the trade. (There is no evidence that the Butter Information Council was one of the organizations consulted by the MAFF before making the Regulations.) The Independant Broadcasting Authority on receiving the Council's complaint and obtaining legal advice, banned plaintiffs' advertisements and suggested they seek a declaration that the said advertisements did not infringe the Regulations. This they did and were refused such a declaration by the trial judge in the Chancery Division, whereupon they went to the Court of Appeal, and it was here, in the course of a very thorough and searching examination of the question and, in particular, the Margarine Regulations, that His Appellate Lordship made use of the critical phrases we have quoted.

The next month or two behind us and this decade will have passed, to merge in the drab background of the post‐war years, part of the pattern of frustration, failure and fear. The ‘swinging sixties’ some called it, but to an older and perhaps slightly jaundiced eye, the only swinging seemed to be from one crisis to another, like the monkey swinging from bough to bough in his home among the trees; the ‘swingers’ among men also have their heads in the clouds! In the seemingly endless struggle against inflation since the end of the War, it would be futile to fail to see that the country is in retreat all the time. One can almost hear that shaft of MacLeodian wit christening the approaching decade as the ‘sinking seventies’, but it may not be as bad as all that, and certainly not if the innate good sense and political soundness of the British gives them insight into their perilous plight.

The long‐awaited regulations to provide statutory compositional requirements for the ever‐increasing range of meat products have at last arrived; presented in the form of a triology—The Canned Meat Product Regulations, The Meat Pie and Sausage Roll Regulations and The Sausage and Other Meat Product Regulations—all of which apply to England and Wales only; presumably the Scottish counterparts, modified for the geographical variations in commodities, will appear in due course. The Meat Pie and Sausage Roll Regulations come into operation on May 31 1968; the other two on May 31 1969.

The new Fair Trading measure aims at the establishment of a strong, bioadly‐based central direction of consumer protection; a new Director‐General of Fair Trading with wide responsibilities “for protecting consumers” with authority to “make proposals for the exercise of order‐making powers in relation to trading practices which adversely affect consumer interests”, and “to act against those who persistently follow a course of conduct unfair to consumers”. This supremo is to work closely with the Monopolies and Mergers Commission and the Restrictive Practices Board, and no less than five junior Ministers are to be given special responsibilities for protecting consumer interests, handling these aspects of the new system in their own departments.