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Over the last few decades, gluten intolerance has gone from obscure medical diagnosis to everyday experience. Bread causes bloating. Pasta feels heavy. Wheat takes the blame. But there’s a quieter question worth asking: What if gluten isn’t the real problem, or at least not the only one? A
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This started as a practical problem. Flour I wanted was often out of stock. When it was available, some of it felt old. Flat loaves, muted flavour, inconsistent fermentation. Likely oxidised, likely sitting around longer than ideal. Once wheat is milled, the clock starts ticking. So I asked a simple
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If you’re baking at home or milling your own flour, it’s worth understanding how folic acid fortification works in New Zealand, as the rules differ between commercial bread and flour sold to consumers. Is folic acid added to bread in New Zealand? Yes, in most cases. In New
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(and why it feels harder than it should be) When you start looking for wheat grain to mill at home, you quickly discover a naming circus. Same wheat, different costumes. Here’s how it actually breaks down. The many names for the same thing 🌾 In most retail and wholefood contexts,
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How to choose drinking water that suits your body, home, and values Once you understand what’s in town water and why, the next question is simple: What’s the most sensible way for me to drink water at home? There is no perfect answer — only trade-offs. This page outlines
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What’s in our water, why it’s there, and what “safe” actually means Water is one of the most fundamental inputs into the human body. It’s also one of the least examined. Municipal drinking water is designed to be safe, consistent, and scalable. It is not designed to
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Why this note exists Fluoride has been added to drinking water in parts of New Zealand for decades. It is one of the longest-running population-wide public health interventions — and one of the most contested. This note aims to explain: * what fluoride does in the body when ingested * whether ingestion actually
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Why this note exists In August 2023, New Zealand began requiring folic acid to be added to most non-organic wheat flour used for breadmaking. This means that most people who eat conventional bread are now exposed to a small, ongoing amount of synthetic folic acid. This note isn’t arguing
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As I’ve been working through organic staples, butter felt like a good one to understand properly. It’s simple, widely used, and surprisingly opaque once you start asking basic questions about where it comes from. One brand I see consistently in New Zealand is Organic Times butter. I buy
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I didn’t set out to become obsessed with organic flour. I just wanted to know what was actually in my bread. When New Zealand moved toward mandatory folic acid fortification in bread, I went down a rabbit hole. What I learned surprised me: organic bread doesn’t have to
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This started as a practical problem, not a political one. I wasn’t trying to make a statement about food or health. I was simply trying to work out how to avoid something I hadn’t consciously chosen to consume — and discovered that it wasn’t easy. That led me
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I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to “go organic”. There wasn’t a plan. There wasn’t a belief system. There were just a series of small irritations that kept stacking up until I couldn’t ignore them anymore. At certain times of the year, I really