Organic farming
A Herald column used Sri Lanka's 2021 fertiliser ban to warn New Zealand off organic farming. The Sri Lanka facts hold up. The comparison doesn't, and the column's author sits on the boards of a fertiliser co-operative and DairyNZ, which pays for content on the same platform.
dairy
New Zealand's state farmer just made a record profit. Most people don't know it exists, or that it runs the country's largest organic dairy operation. The reason goes back to a century of land ballots, and ends with cull cows certified for the American market.
dairy
A tube of antibiotic into each quarter of the udder, every cow, every year. Most of them had no serious infection. Here's why it happened, and why it's getting much harder to do.
the month in food
Seventeen days, seventeen pieces, then a plane. July was the month the cheese question finally cracked open, the month bacon and milk kept pointing at the same gap between how an animal lived and what it ate, and the month I wrote down who I am before telling anyone else what to buy.
milk
A vending machine on a farm road near Orewa sells something no supermarket in the country can. Certified organic raw milk sits where two rule books barely overlap. Here's what I found when I went looking for who still sells it, what it costs to comply, and the raid that reshaped the market.
milk
A cow gives milk only after she's had a calf. That one fact runs the dairy industry. The yearly pregnancies, the calf taken within a day, the bobby calves killed at four days old, the cow culled young, all of it happens out of sight. Not hidden. Just never said.
cheese
Most vegetarians eat cheese without a second thought. Most cheese, the traditional kind, is set with an enzyme from a slaughtered calf. So is cheese vegetarian or not? A genuinely funny mess that ends with two vegetarians at the same shelf reaching for opposite blocks, both right.
cheese
A viral panic says Pfizer secretly makes the enzyme in 90% of your cheese. Pfizer invented it, true, but cashed out thirty years ago, and the patent died not long after. So who owns it now? Follow the trail and it lands somewhere quieter: the global funds, and the foundation behind Ozempic.
cheese
I went looking for cheese set the old way, with calf rennet, and walked into a trap. At the supermarket the traditional enzyme comes with conventional milk, and the clean organic milk comes with the lab one. Which sent me past the rennet entirely, to what's in the milk.
cheese
New Zealand calls itself GE-free. But the enzyme that sets the cheese in nearly every fridge is made by genetically modified microbes, and has been for 25 years, with nothing on the label to say so. It arrived before the GM crops we actually argued about. Here's how, and why.
dairy
I bought a block of Mainland Organic Cheese this week. Then I turned it over and actually read the back. Non-animal rennet, in a certified organic cheese. Is that legit? The answer turned out to be more interesting than I expected.
cheese
Most non-animal rennet in cheese now comes from a handful of global biotech firms, chiefly Novonesis and dsm-firmenich. Here's what fermentation-produced chymosin actually is, how Pfizer first got it approved, and why a process this industrial stays nearly invisible on the label.
