Personal
For ten years the number of small breweries in New Zealand barely moved. Then it doubled in four. I think organic food is sitting in the flat bit right now, and the big players have started to notice.
gardening
A grower's best customers were the ones who'd tried to grow a cauliflower themselves. New Zealand dug for victory in 1943, gave it up for the greengrocer, and is quietly digging again. A packet of seed costs about $4. The time is the real price.
Celebrity
In the Bullock house, Oreos and Coca-Cola were off limits. Their German mother drank wheatgrass, made tofu sandwiches and baked tortes for every holiday. One daughter became a professional baker. The other bought a 91-acre ranch and converted its avocado groves to organic.
Thirty-one pieces, and the month we turned the pack over. October ran on two things. Five MPs sat down with the organic sector, one at a time, and answered the same seven questions. And a run of pieces went looking for what is actually on the food, and what
A Massey study found NZ children carried more of one pesticide marker than American kids, mostly from food. Studies that switched people to organic saw urine levels fall within days. What that does and doesn't prove, including the finding an organic site might skip.
A new baby, a bad news story, a weird ingredient. Twelve real reasons people start buying organic, and how much of the evidence actually holds up.
Fair question. Before you trust anything I write about food, you should know who's writing it. Thirty years of brewing, blind hop selection in the Yakima Valley, judging at the World Beer Cup, and a lifetime of asking where things come from. Here's my answer.
A curated map of 128 places across New Zealand where you can buy food you can actually trust — organic shops, farmers' markets, growers, refilleries, and suppliers worth knowing about. Not crowdsourced. Hand-checked.
Macro looks like a single organic brand. It's actually an umbrella covering certified-organic, free-range, "wholefoods," and "no artificial" products — only some of which are organic. Here's how to read the difference at the shelf.
A new piece most days. Daily investigations into where NZ's food really comes from — sent direct to your inbox.
Five MPs had their say in October. On the last Vote Organic webinar, OANZ handed the questions to a market gardener, a dairy farmer, a garden educator and a business owner. One wanted an organic prescription scheme. Another wanted no money spent on organics at all.
Bill Gates says AI could do almost all our work, and some of us may choose to live more like the Amish. Their farms are mostly conventional. Their thinking about technology is the useful part.
A report claiming fruit and veg are half as nutritious as in the 1960s went around the world. The real picture is smaller, and the biggest cause doesn't care what label is on the bag. The reasons to eat organic hold up anyway.
Three posts, a lot of names and a lot of numbers. Here's the Franken-Cow series boiled down to the ten things that surprised us most, from a capsule that does nothing for the cow to the charity in London that wrote the rules.
When food giants meet New Zealand's meat and dairy processors, the talk isn't about the planet's temperature. It's about their own emissions targets. Follow those targets back and you reach a charity in London, a think tank in Washington and a billionaire's fund. You don't reach Parliament.
The first methane tool for New Zealand cattle is made by a company owned partly by former bank chief executives, a former stock exchange boss, a carbon credit broker and the taxpayer, twice. Here's who owns the bolus, and who stands to be paid if it works.
AgriZeroNZ just raised another $117 million. Its first product is a capsule of synthetic bromoform for finishing beef cattle. It does nothing for the animal, farmers say they don't want it, and its effect on the climate is too small to measure. So why is it coming?
Thirty-one pieces, and the month we turned the pack over. October ran on two things. Five MPs sat down with the organic sector, one at a time, and answered the same seven questions. And a run of pieces went looking for what is actually on the food, and what
A lettuce offered at 60 cents in the paddock and sold for $2 on the shelf. Five pieces into his eight-part election series, Fenton Hazelwood keeps finding the same gap: the supermarket's numbers are public, and the grower's aren't.
In December 1994, more than 800 organic delegates came to Lincoln and Christchurch's mayor said she hoped it could become the world's first organic Garden City. Here's how close it got, and where it grew instead.
People keep telling me their dried beans won't soften. Most assume they've done something wrong. The more likely reason is a biosecurity rule from 2004, a 15-hour heat treatment, and a label that says nothing about it.
Ben Bayly finds chefs talking about themselves boring. On the From the Soil Up podcast he talks about lamb, wallaby, wild deer, a Westland cranberry farm and one certified organic asparagus grower near Cambridge. Here's who's talking, and why it's worth an hour.
