I keep hearing about the Gene Technology Bill. Most people don't fully understand it. The documents are heavy. The language is technical. That's part of how this works — when something is hard to read, people zone out. So I tried to read it anyway. Here's what I found.
chicken
Bostock organic chicken costs around $200 more per person per year than the standard supermarket brands. That's about $3.85 a week — a takeaway coffee. Here's a side-by-side comparison of what your money is actually buying you, brand by brand and process by process.
chicken
A chicken raised for meat passes through a sequence of inputs and processes between hatching and packaging. Coccidiostats in feed. A chlorine bath at slaughter. Chlorinated water absorbed into the meat and sold by weight. Here's what I found when I mapped the whole journey.
chicken
New Zealanders eat 40 kilos of chicken a year. Every supermarket bird has spent its life on Argentine GM soy sprayed with glyphosate, which the WHO calls a probable carcinogen. Bayer has paid US$11bn settling cancer cases while insisting the chemical is safe. Here's what's actually in your chicken.
tea
This Saturday, the only commercial tea plantation in NZ turns thirty. Zealong is BioGro-certified, sold at Harrods, and family-owned. So why can't you find it at Commonsense Organics? A discovery piece on NZ's only home-grown organic tea, and what's about to change for the word organic.
places
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.
food security
The counterargument to everything this series has argued is real — NZ is a high-cost producer and imports reflect that. But it assumes stable shipping, stable trade, and stable geopolitics. None of those assumptions are performing well right now.
Food Culture
Food culture isn't transmitted through information. It's transmitted through practice — through being in a kitchen while someone cooks. When that stopped happening, the food system moved into the gap. And the generation growing up inside it doesn't know what it missed.
supermarkets
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.
Food System
Pams claims 68% local sourcing. It's a portfolio average. The categories where it falls short are the exact categories where NZ food manufacturing was built — and is now closing.
Food System
Three New Zealand food institutions. Three founding acts of resistance. A century later, each one now serves the opposite of its founding purpose. This is how a long drift looks — like nothing, for a very long time.
Food System
Soylent Green is famous for its twist. The part that should worry us is the world the twist sits inside — a city fed by one corporation with no alternative. Watched from New Zealand in 2026, where two chains run most of the groceries, it stops feeling like science fiction.
