Hamilton City Council has announced that, as of next year, Hamilton Gardens will charge a fee of $20 for out-of-towners to enter the enclosed gardens. For readers not familiar with the world renowned destination, the enclosed gardens are where you’ll find superstar...
Opinion
Every week The Feed interviews the movers, the shakers and the makers in the New Zealand food industry. Check out the interviews on The Feed Weekly podcast or in a Q&A format below. And if you’ve got a story to tell or an opinion to share, drop us a line at editor@thefeed.co.nz
Can lamb fetch super premium prices? Headwaters reckons so
Change It Up: Headwaters is reviving an old project with its newly branded Lumina premium lamb. Ben Fahy profiles a transformative project in the latest of our Change It Up series, brought to you by Everybird coffee. Cast your mind back to 2006: Germany hosted...
Leaft Foods – the end or the friend of dairy?
They’re both in the white powder business. Both produce protein for export. And they both love occupying flat, rain-drenched New Zealand pasture. So is plant-protein pioneer Leaft Foods a competitor or a complement to the dairy sector? The irony of the question is not...
Digging up the past: what secrets lie beneath your vege garden?
We tend to look at our backyards as unremarkable plots of soil. Good for growing a bit of fruit and veg, a few flowers if we're fancy, a tree or two. Pakeha New Zealanders like me have a tendency to think of the land we live on as being a product of recent history:...
Pinoli Pine Nuts: a special company growing a very special nut
In the latest in our series, brought to you by Everybird, we meet the couple behind Pinoli Pine Nuts, the award-winning novel nut farm from Nelson. One fateful day, Andrew Wiltshire was looking around a block of commercial pine forest near Nelson when a colleague...
‘Glitch fruit’ and growing up: LILO ready to take their cheesecakes to the world
When a brand starts growing, it also needs to start growing up. A good idea at the outset might create the momentum required for it to take off, but that idea often needs to be refined, the right people need to be found and the right processes need to be developed to...
Getting fresh in the field: a day with The Fresh Grower
It’s a miraculously sunny Monday morning and I’m standing in a field in Pukekohe. No, it wasn’t a crazy weekend gone awry, I have purposely turned off the motorway to be here. In fact, I love the chance to don my gumboots and quite literally get out in the field. ...
Is a thriving alcohol industry compatible with Te Tiriti o Waitangi?
New research from the University of Otago suggests that New Zealand teens are drinking less than they did twenty years ago. While binge drinking is still prevalent, alcohol is no longer seen by young people as a mandatory part of their social lives. Perhaps older New...
Food is cheaper than you realise: but can it get lower still? With difficulty, says agri expert Aidan Connolly
Food prices seem high right now. And they are. But take a step back to look at the bigger picture and you’ll witness one of those chin-scratching miracles of industrialisation: the price of food has been falling steadily as a share of income since your grandad was...
The heartbreaking tragedy and unlearnt lessons of the annual feijoa glut
The world was a better place in late March. I’m not just saying that because I am temperamentally predisposed to believe that all things are get getting worse all the time and have been doing so forever. I’m not just saying that because it is colder now than it was...
Floods, pestilence, roadworks: how Cassia is defying the odds to bring us Sid’s iconic lamb chops
It’s worth enduring floods, a pandemic and a maze of orange cones just to try the lamb chops at Cassia, the Indian fusion restaurant by Sid and Chand Sahrawat. Flavoured with Goan spice and topped with cream cheese, the chops are a hit in a menu of bangers. Like all...
Top tips for not disgracing yourself this Mother’s Day
This Sunday, across the length and breadth of Aotearoa, children and partners will be getting up at the crack of dawn to prepare breakfast in bed for the mother of their household. The thought behind this ritual, I suppose, it that poor mum is indentured to prepare...
The future of NZ food in seven charts. Plus one they ignored
Every so often the bowels of the public service blows out the kind of data analysis and insight you just hope someone in government is doing. Last month MPI released the first of its once-every-three-year Long-term Insights Briefings. All ministries must do this now....
(Still) life is like an onion: the special relationship between painting and food
An Utrecht-based chef Ernst de Witte was visiting the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam when he noticed an incongruity between one of the paintings and its wall label. Van Gogh’s still-life painting “Red Cabbages and Onions” (1887) was actually a painting of red cabbages...
How farmers, forests and greenies found a friend in bearded bureaucrat, Dr Rod Carr
This week’s draft advice from the Climate Change Commission has achieved a rare win: it’s given farmers, foresters and environmentalists all reason to cheer. The document, out for consultation, is the second formal advisory from the Commission and is designed to help...
The red devil: beetroot and how I learnt to love the big pink burger bomb
Food that changed my mind: in the second of an occasional series we explore foods we misunderstood, misrepresented or mansplained away. Today David looks back on his early traumatic experience with pickled beetroot, and how it took a real mean head chef to change his...
Who writes the recipe matters: food writing, culture, and the problem with white-washing
“Why don’t you sell a butter chicken paste?” is a question I get everytime I tell someone about my business, Dolly Mumma. Two years ago, I used to answer with a passionate but disjointed spiel about radioactive orange butter chicken, how it tastes nothing like the...
More fertiliser and feed does not necessarily raise dairy farm profits but increases climate harm
Wanglin Ma, Lincoln University, New Zealand; Alan Renwick, Lincoln University, New Zealand, and Kathryn Blackman Bicknell, Lincoln University, New Zealand New Zealand is in an unusual position in the developed world when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. About...
Real or fake: a question of what’s real enough.
You don’t have to spend a lot of time on social media or scrolling Netflix before encountering the ‘real or fake’ trope, mostly in the form of cake. In a strange way I enjoy the moment of tension as various D-grade celebrities try to determine if it’s actually a...
Outside of the box: Dicey wine and the art of doing things differently
For many New Zealanders, bag in box wine brings to mind teenage excursions into the world of binge drinking; moribund corporate gatherings with ‘refreshments’; or at best, a decent bolognaise sauce. It certainly does not conjure thoughts of high-quality wines grown...
Actually, I do thank Christ for hot cross buns
It’s the time of year when the pedants moan about the pagan origins of Easter and the arrogance of imposing a northern European religious rite on this proud South Pacific nation. Holy heck, not even the crosses on hot cross buns are authentic. It seems they’re Saxon...