More unaffordable food

Remember when Luxon promised a "laser focus on the cost of living"? Mince - the most basic meat you can get - has now become unaffordable:

Beef mince long seen as the most affordable red-meat option for households is losing that status as prices continue to surge.

RaboResearch senior animal protein analyst Jen Corkran said food prices had risen across the board, but beef mince had jumped far faster than most staples.

New Stats NZ figures showed in the year to October, overall food prices rose 4.7 percent, but the average price of a one-kilogram pack of beef mince climbed 18 percent.

Corkran said mince was now averaging $23.17 per kilo, meaning it was actually slightly more expensive than lamb chops, which sat at $22.27.

As with butter earlier in the year, the cause is exports driving up prices. 80% of NZ beef is exported, and domestic prices are set by international markers - meaning the people where the food is produced (and who pay the environmental costs of that production in the form of polluted water and higher greenhouse gas emissions) can no longer afford to eat it. The dominance of exports also makes farmers immune to local consumer pressure, meaning the normal "market" solution - reducing demand - has no effect.

Which means that if we want affordable food, we need non-market solutions: export bans, domestic quotas, price regulation. Otherwise, if farmers aren't going to feed us, we have no reason to permit their industry to exist - and certainly no reason to continue to subsidise them with free water and free pollution and free emissions.

Willis says "let them eat butter"

Butter has become a flashpoint in the cost-of-living crisis, with the price of the baking staple doubling in the last 14 months, and people queuing for cheap blocks. Its got so bad that National - the party of rich farmers - has had to pretend to care, with Nicola Willis having a meeting with Fonterra's CEO in an effort to talk down the price. The result? everything is fine, apparently:

The Finance Minister does not believe New Zealanders are getting a "raw deal" on butter, but has accepted there is no getting away from how expensive it is right now.

We’re not getting a raw deal? Bullshit. We can see it every time we go to the supermarket. But Willis is paid $304,300 a year plus slush, so she can buy all the butter she wants. Which makes the above sound a lot like "let them eat butter".

So who’s to blame? Willis is desperate to deflect attention from Fonterra, so blames the supermarkets:

The meeting had reinforced Willis' interest in increasing supermarket competition to put downward pressure on the price of butter.

"All roads lead back to supermarket competition. I continue to believe that is the most powerful lever that the government has on this issue. We will never be able to control global dairy prices. What we can influence is the amount of competition in New Zealand's grocery sector and we have a lot of work underway to address that."

While the supermarket cartel is absolutely part of the problem, National's "work programme" is basically "hope a third party joins the oligopoly and gets in on the gouging". So they have no real solutions there. And they're certainly not going to do what is necessary: legislate to forcibly break up the cartel and forbid mergers in the sector or its underlying logistics to prevent such accumulation of market power.

And none of this should be letting Fonterra off the hook. Because while there's a global price, there's no reason we, the people who bear the environmental costs of the dairy industry's profiteering and who subsidise them billions of dollars a year in water and carbon, should pay it. And we have tools we can use to ensure we get some benefit from hosting this parasitic, polluting industry. For example, we could ban or restrict dairy exports to ensure they served the domestic market first. Or just directly regulate to require them to sell domestically at a low price. Because seeing butter exported overseas while it becomes unaffordable to kiwis is simply unacceptable.

Obviously, regulating Fonterra would be bad for farmers. But it would be far better for the rest of us. And why shouldn’t those subsidised rural parasites give something back to the community they leech off for once?

Maybe there's a connection?

What is going on with the price of butter?, RNZ, 19 march 2025:

If you have bought butter recently you might have noticed something - it is a lot more expensive.

Stats NZ said last week that the price of butter was up 60 percent in February compared to the same time last year.

It recorded an average of $7.32 per 500g block, up from just under $4.50 at the start of last year and just under $5.20 four years ago.

At supermarkets this week, Woolworths' cheapest butter was $7.19, in New World's North Island stores it was also $7.19, while in its South Island stores it was $7.79 and Pak n Save's was $6.89.

Fonterra lifts first-half profit, raises dividend, New Zealand Herald, 20 March 2025:

Fonterra has reported an 8% lift in first-half net profit to $729 million, increased its interim dividend and narrowed its milk price forecast for this season.

The co-op’s operating profit rose by 16% to $1.1 billion.

Fonterra announced a 22 cents per share dividend, compared with 15c in the previous comparable period.

Hmmm. Maybe there's a connection there?

And this once again shows what a shit deal Aotearoa is getting from farmers. They're allowed to steal our water, shit in our rivers, destroy our climate, and poison our drinking water, and we don't even get cheap food out of it. Which should make you wonder why we let any of that happen.

The good news is that we can regulate all of those things. And its really looking like we should. Because there seems to be no reason to let this parasitic, anti-social industry get away with its crimes and give nothing back to society.

Exporting their social licence

One of the slogans of Friday's ugly farmer protests was "no farms, no food". But the truth is that most of what farmers grow is exported, and kiwis are increasingly being priced out of eating it at all:

If you feel like red meat is more expensive than it used to be, you're right.

Around 95 percent of New Zealand's sheep meat and 87 percent of beef is exported, and what's left behind for locals is being sold at a premium.

[...]

Beef + Lamb NZ chief executive Rod Slater said the cost of meat in New Zealand reflected what markets overseas were willing to pay.

"If a housewife in the middle of Oxford in the UK is prepared to pay a certain price for a cut of meat, we have to match that in New Zealand," he said. "We are price takers, not price makers in this country."

I guess you could say that what they're really exporting is their social licence to operate.

So, we get 10% of the food and pay 100% of the environmental costs (which effectively end up as a subsidy to foreign consumers) - and get higher prices into the bargain. Meanwhile, farmers laugh all the way to the bank, having ripped us off at both ends. What, exactly, is in this for us again? And why should we listen to their whining about having to obey basic environmental standards, or pay for their emissions like the rest of us, when the primary benefit of their operations goes straight overseas?

At the moment we give the farming sector an effective $2 billion a year carbon subsidy, plus Cthulhu knows how much in water (both of which pale in comparison to the effective subsidy of past land theft), so we can pay more for food. And that seems like a pretty shit deal. We should end those subsidies immediately, make those "self-reliant" farmers stand on their own two feet for once. And if this means that half of them go out of business, I honestly don't see that as a negative. Again, its not like they provide any social benefit to justify their carve outs and subsidies.

MPI fails again

Yesterday a dairy company was fined $483,000 for repeatedly failing to report listeria in its facility. Its a serious fine for a serious crime: listeria is a serious disease, and they were effectively trying to kill people with it. But there's another story hidden in there, and its not a good one:

MPI's Director of Compliance Gary Orr said that from 2012 to 2016, the company deliberately and repeatedly failed to report positive listeria results that were taken from a floor at the company's factory in Avondale. During this period, the company also falsified official related records.

Orr said a total of 190 positive listeria results went unreported during this time.

"This was serious, systematic and sustained deception – there's no other way to describe it," he said.

"The company was regularly audited to ensure its manufacturing environment was in accordance with regulatory requirements but it lied about what the true situation was.

[Emphasis added]

So what were those "audits" doing again? Because clearly, it wasn't any sort of actual checks; MPI only found out about this from a whistleblower.

If a company can be "audited" for food quality for five years and this sort of thing not be noticed, then our "audit" system is broken, and does nothing at all to keep the public safe. Instead, all it does is deceive us. We need real audits, real safety checks, so we can be confident our food is safe. unfortunately, given its demonstrated incompetence and captive internal culture, I doubt we'll be able to get them from MPI.

This will get people to care about climate change

Danyl Mclauchlan thinks that people will never care about climate change, because its all so abstract. Here's something that will make them care: its goign to fuck up the global beer supply:

Trouble is brewing for the world’s beer drinkers, with climate change set to cause “dramatic” price spikes and supply shortages, according to new research.

Extreme heatwaves and droughts will increasingly damage the global barley crop, meaning a common ingredient of the world’s favourite alcoholic beverage will become scarcer. Key brewing nations are forecast to be among the worst hit, including Belgium, the Czech Republic and Ireland.

The researchers said that compared with life-threatening impacts of global warming such as the floods and storms faced by millions, a beer shortage may seem relatively unimportant. But they said it would affect the quality of life of many people.

And if you're not a beer fan, it will also do the same to coffee. And probably other types of food as well. Which is the real threat here: famine, and the consequent mass-migration and war it causes. And all because arseholes in America want to keep profiting by burning coal.

The real threat

While John Key is scaremongering about terrorists in an effort to ram through intrusive and over-reaching spy legislation, the real threat to New Zealand seems to have passed completely unnoticed. I'm talking of course about Fonterra's poor sanitation, which has resulted in New Zealand dairy products being banned in at least two countries, falling share prices and a collapsing dollar - and that's just the start. In the long-term we could be looking at a decline in overall exports. The effects have been far more devastating than any terrorist attack. But I guess basic food safety just isn't as sexy as people thinking they're James Bond.

And as with last time, Fonterra's natural inclination seems to have been to try and launch a cover-up:

The dairying giant knew something was wrong as long as ago as March, but only informed the Government of the issue on Friday after realising last week the scale of the problem, which has been traced back to a dirty pipe at a plant in Hautapu, Waikato.

And this remember is for botulism, which is potentially fatal. But rather than worrying about people's lives, they worried about the effects full disclosure would have on their share price and exports. And the result is that when it inevitably came out, all those effects were compounded by a crisis of trust. Dicks.

Meanwhile, the undetected manufacture and export of contaminated food is a fundamental failure of our food safety system. How can detecting a potentially lethal bacteria take ten months? How can not immediately responding to such detection with a recall not be a crime? There are serious gaps here, almost certainly the result of cost-cutting and deregulation, and they need to be remedied. Quite apart from the basic issue of public safety, as a food exporter we live and die by our reputation for clean food. Fonterra's lack of basic hygiene has destroyed that reputation. We need to make sure that it is not allowed to happen in the future.

Interesting

Parliament resumes tomorrow, and first on the Order Paper [PDF] is something interesting: Member's Notice of Motion No. 1, a motion to disallow the New Zealand (Mandatory Fortification of Bread with Folic Acid) Amendment Food Standard 2009 [PDF]. This has been brought by Moana Mackey, a member of the Regulations Review Committee, in response to a complaint against the food standard. The majority of the RRC rejected the complaint [PDF], but the Labour minority on the committee supported it. So they lodged a motion, which under the Regulations (Disallowance) Act 1989 would result in the standard being disallowed if not voted on within 21 sitting days. The fact that the government is debating it probably signifies they want to vote the motion down and defend the regulations.

This has all been done very quietly, and Mackey hasn't issued any press statement on it; given the lack of attention paid to Member's Notices of Motion (which are usually used to formally congratulate people MPs want to suck up to in their electorates), I'm wondering whether she was hoping to have the regulations disallowed by stealth. While this would show up the Minister, its democratically dubious. Debating the motion forces both government and opposition to make their case, and lets the public judge which is the stronger. Unlike politicians, I happen to think that is a Good Thing.

McDonalds are evil

OK, so its a truism that McDonalds are evil. They have poor labour standards, their "food" is crap, but at least they're cheap. Unless you happen to be poor. Over in Australia they've just introduced a "demand-based pricing" scheme. In English, that means charging higher prices in poorer areas:

Corporate documents obtained by The Advertiser reveal McDonald's Australia has identified an "opportunity to introduce more aggressive price increases" at 13 of South Australia's 47 outlets.

[...]

A McDonald's franchisee, who asked to remain anonymous, said the biggest price rises were concentrated in low-income areas.

"In general, the poorer suburbs will pay more," the franchisee said.

"In essence, areas that the franchisor thinks will pay more for our products, will have to."

The document says the new system's objective is for individual stores "to maximise the potential for a price rise" while minimising the risk consumers will go elsewhere or choose a cheaper meal.

So, if you're poor, not only does this mean having junk food marketed more aggressively at you (McDonalds deliberately locates its outlets in poorer areas) - it also means paying more for the privilege. It's a perfect example of socio-economic discrimination. And they wonder why everybody hates them...

This isn't just South Australia, but Australia-wide. Which raises the question: is it also happening here? Does some enterprising journalist want to check?

Why we need food country of origin labelling

Suspect sweets found in NZ:

New Zealand food safety officials are to test Chinese milk sweets on sale here but banned overseas after being found to be tainted with melamine.

Tests in Singapore found that White Rabbit Creamy Candy was contaminated with the chemical.

Forcing manufacturers and importers to label their product with where it was made would give consumers that much more information on which to base their decisions. And in cases like this, where China is shipping contaminated food to the world, its a vital proxy. The only people who have anything to gain from secrecy are those who want to sell unsafe products. And that's not something we should let them get away with.

Restaurant review: the crown creperie

Tries to murder people by serving undercooked chicken. Avoid.

I have falafel in the fridge

Apparently, this makes me a terrorist:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

Fortunately, sanity prevailed in this case, but you really have to wonder how many times it didn't, and how many people are now on terrorist watchlists because of what they ate, or what DVDs they rented, or what books they got out of the library...

(Hat tip: Paul Krugman)

Restaurant review: Malthouse

I do not drink... beer, but even I can appreciate a place that treats it as seriously as other places treat wine. And the beef and shitake mushroom skewers are to die for.

Restaurant review: Bistro Breton

Who knew crepes could be so interesting?

The cultural desert in which I dwell

A sign caught my eye while I was in town today. It proudly proclaimed that the local Fisherman's Table (a mere 30km from the sea, and 75km from the nearest source of fresh fish) had been voted the Manawatu's best restaurant. For the third year running.

These hicks wouldn't know good food if it hit them in the face.

An excursion into foodblogging

It's Easter, and as I mentioned earlier, for me Easter is about chocolate - so I tried my hand at making chocalatl. There are a number of recipes floating round on the web for variants of the original Aztec chocolate drink, both hot and cold, and with varying levels of authenticity (including one which uses cocoa and canned chicken stock. Bloody Americans), but the general components seem to be chocolate and chilli, with a dash of cinnamon and vanilla, and optional honey. In the end I went for milk (the Aztecs would have used water), stuck some honey and a cinnamon stick in it, and melted in a few rows of bittersweet. When it had melted, I sprinkled in some ground cinnamon and chilli powder, and frothed it with an egg whisk. The result was... interesting. Zingy. And probably worth doing again - though next time I won't use quite so much chilli powder.

Cafe Review: Coco

Coco is a cafe devoted to one thing: chocolate. And they're quite good at it. For a start, they know that hot chocolate is best made from... hot chocolate (diluted with milk to reach the desired consistency), and that iced chocolate is not made by pouring milk into a glass with a little fudge sauce and hoping that Brownian motion will deal with the rest. Not a touch on Koko Black in Melbourne, but definitely trying.

Knowing my luck, they'll be bankrupt in six months.

Restaurant Review: One Red Dog

It's been years since I've been to One Red Dog, and I remember it primarily for the shitty service. You would have to wait an hour for a table even when you had made a reservation, and would then be ignored by the staff for the rest of the night. Now, they've opened a second One Red Dog on Queen's Wharf. It's quieter and less crowded, particularly on a Sunday afternoon - but the grand tradition of shitty service continues. While the food is good, it's not that good; better to go to Hell instead.

Two quotes on coffee

Found while reading Harper's magazine this afternoon: the Women's Petition against Coffee, Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand INCONVENIENCIES Accruing to Their SEX from The Excessive Use of that Drying, Enfeebling LIQUOR (London, 1674) - in which we learn that coffee's

Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent, as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.

(Original emphasis. Oh, how I love the seventeenth century...)

There is also a Men's Answer, "VINDICATING Their own Performances, and the Vertues of that Liquor, from the Undeserved Aspersions lately cast upon them by their SCANDALOUS PAMPHLET", in which we learn that coffee

Collects and settles the Spirits, makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds a spiritualescency to the Sperme, and renders it more firm and suitable to the Gusto of the womb, and proportionate to the ardours and expectation too, of the female Paramour.

I don't recall either of these being mentioned in The Devil's Cup (a history of coffee drinking, from Ethiopia to the Starbucks, which pays particular attention to the scandalous and humourous bits like this) - but maybe I've just forgotten.