The Month in Food: May 2026

Everything published this month, in one place — plus a quick orientation if it's your first visit.

Welcome. I'm trying something new — a monthly recap of everything published, grouped by theme, with all the links in one page. If it's useful, I'll keep doing it. Useful for catching up if you've missed a few. Useful for sharing if you've just discovered the site.

If you've just landed here, here's the short version of what this is. Organic Food Together is a personal journal investigating where New Zealand's food actually comes from. Who owns the brands. What the labels mean (and don't). Which farms are real, which certifications are real, and where you can buy the food that matches what you thought you were getting.

The word "organic" has no legal protection in New Zealand yet. Anyone can put it on a packet. That's the gap this site lives in.

A new piece goes up most days. Below is everything from May.

The Site Is a Work in Progress

Before the recap, one thing worth saying. This is being built in public. New posts most days, and a lot of work happening underneath the posts that doesn't always show up immediately — research, fact-checking, mapping, building out the Guides section, updating the Real Food Map, tracking down producers, ringing certifiers, reading registers.

Some of the posts you'll read here are the visible tip of a week's research. The eggs piece took weeks. The chicken trilogy took longer. The Guides — the hubs that pull all this research into one place by topic — are being added to constantly. If something's missing or wrong, tell me. The site improves because readers point things out.

If you only have time for one link on this page, make it the Guides. That's where the work is going.

May broke into several threads. Here they are.

The Organic Week Challenge

The first ten days of May were Organic Week in New Zealand. I wanted to mark it without lecturing — so I wrote a daily prompt instead. Ten questions, one a day, no guilt, no homework. Just things worth sitting with for five minutes before you keep scrolling.

It started with a heads-up the day before, then ran from May 1 through May 10. The questions began gently: when did you last actually choose what you ate? Then go to a farmers market, read the label on something you eat every week, and look at your supplement cupboard — those nutrients were food, once.

By midweek they got sharper. Do the taste test — buy one organic, one conventional, and be honest with yourself. You only have one body. Some facts about what New Zealanders are actually eating — 70% of packaged supermarket food is ultra-processed; imports of the stuff rose 550% in one generation. Then what does organic actually mean, because the word has no legal protection here yet and anyone can use it. Find one organic thing near you. And on day ten — what did you find? — the close.

The day after, a postscript. After Organic: What ROC Is Trying to Do. I'd been writing about Chanel's organic farm in Central Otago and kept tripping over an acronym nobody explained. So I went and found out. Regenerative Organic Certified — the standard that sits one tier above organic. It came back into the story a week later.

The Egg Investigation

The eggs piece had been building for weeks. In May it landed in three parts.

What the stamp on your egg is actually telling you opened it. There's a five-character code printed on most New Zealand eggs, and almost nobody knows what it means or who runs the programme that puts it there. So I traced it.

The next day: Good eggs exist in New Zealand. Here's where to look. New Zealand produces over a billion eggs a year. Fewer than twenty farms produce every certified-organic egg among them. The piece names them, maps them, and explains how to find the ones that match what you actually want.

Then the rabbit hole opened. What's not on your egg carton. Almost every chicken in New Zealand is fed Argentine soy that's been genetically modified to survive glyphosate spraying. The chicken eats it. The egg carries it. Nothing on the label says a word. This piece is the one that surprised me most this month. It's also the one that set up the chicken trilogy at the end.

A late addition to the egg coverage: The pohutukawa on the carton: who's behind Otaika Valley eggs?. A friend told me she buys this brand because she likes the flower on the label. She didn't know who owned it. Neither did I. So I went looking — and what I found is the start of an ongoing series profiling the people actually behind the brands on the shelf.

The Long Drift

For four days in mid-May, I ran a series. The argument across the four parts was that New Zealand's food infrastructure has been quietly dismantled across decades, and we're now starting to feel what that means.

Part 1: What They Were Built For traced three founding New Zealand food institutions and how each one now serves the opposite of its original purpose. A century is a long drift. It looks like nothing for most of it.

Part 2: The Brand That Ate Its Suppliers took apart the Pams story. The 68% local sourcing claim is a portfolio average — and the categories where it falls short are the exact categories where New Zealand food manufacturing was built and is now closing.

Part 3: Nobody Taught Them was the one that hurt to write. Food culture isn't transmitted through information. It's transmitted through being in a kitchen while someone cooks. When that stopped happening, the food system moved into the gap.

Part 4: When the Ships Stop Coming closed it out. The counterargument to everything the series had argued is real — New Zealand is a high-cost producer and imports reflect that. But it assumes stable shipping, stable trade, stable geopolitics. None of those assumptions are holding up.

The Supermarket Pieces

Running alongside the Long Drift were the brand investigations.

Better Than Organic: The New Standard Coming to NZ Shelves — I picked up a packet of beef, noticed a sticker I'd never seen, and two hours later was still reading. ROC again. Different angle this time: what it looks like when it actually lands on a New Zealand shelf.

What Soylent Green actually warned us about — the famous twist isn't the point. The point is the world the twist sits inside. A city fed by one corporation, no alternative. From New Zealand in 2026, where two chains run most of the groceries, it stops feeling like fiction.

Is Macro Organic Really Organic? — the Woolworths house brand looks like one organic line. It's actually an umbrella covering certified-organic, free-range, "wholefoods," and "no artificial" products. Only some of which are organic. The piece explains how to read the difference at the shelf.

And on May 27, something a bit different: Wacky Wednesday at the Supermarket. A homage to a certain Dr Seuss book. Five wacky things hiding in plain sight at the supermarket — starting with a pink chicken wrapped in plastic that had bathed in chlorine to keep it just right. The format is playful. The findings aren't.

The Meat Question

Two pieces this month went looking at meat — what's local, what isn't, and what the labels don't tell you.

There's an 80% chance the bacon you eat is imported — the packet is technically telling you, but the line "Made in New Zealand from local and imported ingredients" has been so worn smooth by repetition that we've stopped reading it.

The 20%. Who actually grows the pork in New Zealand. — the companion piece. If 80% of bacon is imported, who grows the rest? There are fifty-eight commercial pig farms in the entire country. There are more Pak'nSave supermarkets than that. I sat with that number for a while.

The Bigger Picture

Two pieces this month stepped back from individual products to look at the system.

Germany's organic food market is bigger than New Zealand's entire dairy industry. If buying organic in New Zealand feels lonely, that's because we're the outlier — not the people doing it. The rest of the developed world is having a serious conversation about organic food that we haven't started. Germany's organic retail market is bigger than our entire dairy export industry. In Austria, more than one in four hectares of farmland is organic. In New Zealand, it's 0.6%.

How New Zealand quietly stopped telling you what's in your food. The Gene Technology Bill runs to over 200 pages. Most people haven't read it. Most people won't. But it sits inside a quieter pattern — country-of-origin labels softened, "Made in NZ from local and imported ingredients" everywhere, GM labelling exemptions, the slow withdrawal of the information you'd need to actually choose. The piece walks through what's been removed and what's coming.

The Map

On May 22, the Real Food Map went live. 128 places across New Zealand where you can buy food you can actually trust — organic shops, farmers' markets, growers, refilleries, suppliers worth knowing about. Not crowdsourced. Hand-checked. This is the resource I wish had existed when I started.

A Tea Plantation Turns Thirty

On May 23, New Zealand's only commercial tea plantation celebrated thirty years. Zealong. Half an hour outside Hamilton. BioGro-certified. Sold at Harrods. Family-owned. And almost nobody in New Zealand has tasted it. The anniversary was the reason for the piece — but the story underneath it is bigger. Why do we export our best food and import the cheap version? You'll see that question come up again and again across this site.

The Chicken Trilogy

The last three days of May closed the GM soy question that the egg piece had opened.

Every chicken in New Zealand is eating GM soy. 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, and which Bayer has paid US$11bn settling cancer cases over while insisting it's safe.

The chlorine bath you didn't know your chicken took maps the whole journey from hatching to packaging. Coccidiostats in the feed. A chlorine bath at slaughter. Chlorinated water absorbed into the meat and sold to you by weight.

And to close the month: Bostock vs everyone else — is the organic chicken actually worth it? The maths surprised me. About $200 a year more per person. Roughly $3.85 a week. A takeaway coffee.

Where To Go Next

If a thread landed for you, follow it.

• The Guides are where individual investigations get pulled together into something you can actually use. New ones being added all the time.
• The Real Food Map — 128 places across the country, hand-checked.
• Subscribe and a new piece will land in your inbox most days.
• Share this page. If it's useful, send it to one person. That's how the site grows — quietly, by word of mouth, the way good food does.

A new piece tomorrow. Then another the day after. Thanks for being here.

— Luke