Norman Miller/ BBC:

As food obsessions go, how about the American who allegedly tried to buy New Zealand in order to gain exclusive rights to a special soup? To be fair, this soup was made from a unique shellfish called toheroa, which had also dazzled royalty and even inspired a jaunty 1980s children’s song called Toheroa Twist.
“Everyone in the 1950s lived on toheroa,” recalled Dargaville Museum committee member Ron Halliday in a 2019 YouTube documentary. “They were lovely, sweet food – and it gives you a lot of energy.” He spoke of manual workers taking toheroa soup in a thermos to their jobs. “You could work all day on that.”
Toheroa are a clam that grow as large as a human hand and burrow in intertidal sands on just a handful of epic surf-swept beaches – mainly on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island, but also in isolated colonies at places like Oreti, a beach at the nation’s southern tip.
Succulent and sustaining, toheroa were a legendary delicacy for Māori coastal communities for centuries. “The toheroa was considered a taonga (treasure),” said Victoria University (Wellington) researcher Dr Ocean Mercier when she fronted a Science Learning Hub series made for New Zealand schools.
“[The taste of] raw toheroa is like a really creamy sweetcorn chowder,” said University of Waikato marine ecologist Phil Ross, when I asked if he had combined his years of scientific study of toheroa numbers and how to bring them back with actually eating them when opportunity arose. Others talk of a gamey taste to a meat that combines pale green body flesh with a long, creamy-white muscly “tongue” the animal uses to burrow – and which inspired its name (toheroa means “long tongue” in Māori).
As well as eating them raw on the beach, Māori also traditionally cooked toheroa in a hāngī (an underground oven) or preserved them on strings of flax to dry in the sun. Dried toheroa were used for trade and as prestige food to serve guests visiting a Māori marae (community meeting house).As the passion for toheroa spread into New Zealand’s pakeha (white settler) community, other ways to eat them became popular, with devotees arguing over whether they were best minced up into fritters for frying – with additions like cinnamon or parsley – or turned into a soup celebrating what legendary 1960s TV chef Graham Kerr called “the rarest food item in the world” in a recipe.
Māori Robyn Boulter shared her toheroa memories in an evocative 2015 film. “My first recollection was going down the beach and seeing all these thousands of holes! We used to go down on our horses, jump off, dig them up and eat them just like that. Raw is beautiful.” She was happy to cook toheroa fritters too. “I have only one recipe. Just toheroa, onion, egg, flour – that’s it.”
Ross reveals the impact of his own debut tasting. “The first one I ate was when I went to the beach with a Māori expert who was showing me how to find them. He cracked one open then and there, and we ate it raw. I was a bit nervous but couldn’t appear squeamish!” he said. “But it was so delicious. And that was first time I really understood why these were so special and so popular.”
Though Māori tribes were known to battle each other for access to particularly abundant toheroa beds – the term for sections of beach where large numbers of toheroa gather together in the sand – the key event in toheroa’s culinary history came when the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) had his first taste of luscious green toheroa broth on a 1921 visit to New Zealand. So smitten was he by its distinctive taste that he shattered royal protocol to ask, Oliver Twist-style, if he could have some more.This hearty expression of royal approval sparked media coverage across the British Empire, and the dish “fit for a king” quickly became a key fixture on New Zealand menus, before spreading across Britain’s globe-spanning dominions. Toheroa soup – exported in gaudily labelled cans – was served at both high-end restaurants and humble diners in Britain, considered a favourite comfort food to combat the winter chill. The first toheroa cannery was established in the 1890s at Mahuta Gap by Ripiro Beach – New Zealand’s longest stretch of sand – and the 1920s royal thumbs up saw others spring up across the country. From the 1920s to the 1960s, an average of 20 tonnes of toheroa was canned a year. There were dramatic spikes, though – 77 tonnes were put into tins in 1940, for example, partly to supply New Zealand troops heading abroad to fight in World War Two.There was also an explosion in the number of people heading for New Zealand beaches to dig toheroa for themselves. In the 1920s, the daily limit on toheroa was 50 per person, and the shellfish could be taken for 10 months of the year. From the 1950s, as toheroa numbers dwindled, authorities still allowed an open season of two months, but reduced the individual limit to 20 per day. On one weekend in 1966, an estimated 50,000 people poured onto Ripiro Beach like a hungry whirlwind, pulling an estimated one million toheroa from its sands. Toheroa stocks began to collapse – something that still angers Māori rights activists like Paturiri Toautu. “For us Māori this kai (food) was very precious. They were an integral part of our food source,” he said. “But then the pakeha realised that serious money could be made from canning the toheroa and selling it overseas. So they built canneries, and within 20 years, our precious taonga was nearly extinct.”