Who Ate All the Pies?

Television (Full Length) – 2002

Well, it was called the Horny Cow, which was a wonderful name, but my daughters said that, no, they wouldn't come and help me unless I changed the name. They weren't prepared to have that written across their chest, no.

– Connelly Cottage Cafe owner Maryanne Elliott

The humble New Zealand pie contributes over 140 million dollars a year to the economy.

– Presenter Jon Bridges, early in this documentary

I've been eating two pies a day, everyday, for the eight years I've been here, and I love Big Ben pies! Well, you can see, my stomach's a bit of a big old roly-poly.

– Big Ben Pies packer Jason Jones

Well it probably started one day when I bought this pie at this small shop in the middle of the North Island somewhere . . . 10 k's on down the road, and I bit into this thing. It was like a biscuit — dry, hard! So anyway, that was it. So I threw it back on the seat, turned the car around, went back to this guy in the shop. I chased him around the counter with it until I got him with it. And I threw it at him. And from then on I thought one day I'm gonna stop and I'm gonna make myself a decent pie.

– Barry Buckrell, founder of BJ's Bakery, describes the origins of his Hastings pie shop

People who excavated Pompeii and Herculaneum excavated bakers shops that had pies in them.

– Food historian Tony Simpson on the pie's origins nearly 2000 years ago

...pies are really a sometimes food. It's about once a month I'd say is what you should be aiming to eat your pies . . . Not one a day. It's not a snack food.

– Andrea Lloyd from the Heart Foundation is not a fan of pies

Kiwis are all about pies. We wolf down more pies per head of population than almost any other country on earth.

– Presenter Jon Bridges introduces the topic of this documentary

... at various junctures throughout his trip he felt sufficiently moved to break into verse about the virtues of the humble pie and there were some cracking stanzas about all the diverse manner of beasts which had turned their hooves up and paid the ultimate sacrifice in order that we might wrap our laughing gear around the icon.

– Reviewer Jane Bowron in The Dominion Post, 1 October 2002, page B7