supermarkets
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.
Christchurch
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.
Pantry
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.
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.
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.
Nearly seven in ten Gen Z Americans say organic food matters. As young parents rethink what they feed their families, could New Zealand's organic farmers be facing a new opportunity?
In August I couldn't find out who made my Alter Eco bar. Then I bought a Bennetto, a brand I thought was from here, because it said Swiss-made. Both lead to the same company, a chocolate maker owned by a Swiss retailer.
Long before organic was a supermarket staple, Woody Harrelson was growing cacao in Hawaii and getting arrested over four hemp seeds. Thirty years on he's still talking about soil, and the films he narrates deserve a closer look.
An acclaimed documentary narrated by Woody Harrelson explores how industrial agriculture has damaged the world's soils, and how changing the way we farm could help restore them. Watch the trailer, find out where to see the film, or read our complete summary.
In 2007, 62% of New Zealanders told a government survey they were concerned about pesticides on food. Most of us still walk past the organic shelf. Researchers call it the attitude-behaviour gap. Here's what sits between the worry and the checkout, and the one thing that might close it.
Harry Mowbray helped his son build the hot-air balloon that started Zuru, and saved the factory where Glaxo began. But the thing he calls the most extraordinary journey of his life is his certified organic dairy farm near Tokoroa, and why organic farmers should be paid more.
In 2022 Europe stopped accepting four organic certifiers for Indian products. New Zealand's 2023 law gives MPI the same power. It just doesn't switch on until 31 March 2028.
Fifty thousand hectares of South Island hill country, three years of training and monitoring, and the farmer pays nothing. The money traces back to Gucci's owner. I went looking for the organic version of that offer.
MPI says washing takes about a quarter of the residue off silverbeet. Its newest tests found pesticides on nearly half the food samples, after normal preparation. Some wash off, some are inside the plant, and some are baked into the bread. Here's which is which, and what to do about it.
When Sting and Trudie Styler moved into their Tuscan estate, there were no birds. What they did next turned it into an organic farm whose olive oil won a top Italian award, in a year it made just 100 litres.
Twice, MPI's pesticide survey found an organophosphate on New Zealand silverbeet. Both times the exposure went over the safe daily limit. The first time, the public report said so. The second time, it said there were no risks, and the internal file said otherwise.
