the month in food
August ran on grain: a malthouse closing, a bread process from 1961, a mark worth four cents a loaf, and Bürgen off the shelves inside a week. Plus what a cow is given in its lifetime, why mince costs what it does, and two people in Riverton with 400 apple varieties.
I buy organic chocolate where I can find it, which is how an 85% Alter Eco bar came home from Commonsense this week. Classic Blackout. Deep blue box, cacao trees on the front, a white circle with the brand in it. I turned it over and decided it was Australian.
Organic Wine
New Zealand's ninth Organic Wine Week runs 21 to 27 September. Over 70 certified organic wines from 25 producers pour at the Auckland tasting, with more events being added. Here's what's on, what organic certification changes in the vineyard and the winery, and whether it costs you more.
August ran on grain: a malthouse closing, a bread process from 1961, a mark worth four cents a loaf, and Bürgen off the shelves inside a week. Plus what a cow is given in its lifetime, why mince costs what it does, and two people in Riverton with 400 apple varieties.
Fair question. Before you trust anything I write about food, you should know who's writing it. Twenty years of brewing, blind hop selection in the Yakima Valley, judging at the World Beer Cup, and a lifetime of asking where things come from. Here's my answer.
Why do people choose organic food? Sprays, GM feed, soil biology, animal welfare, and the trust underneath it all. An honest run through every reason people pay more, including the weak ones that don't survive the evidence, and what the premium over free range actually buys you in New Zealand.
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.
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.
New Zealand produces over a billion eggs a year. Fewer than 20 farms produce every certified-organic egg among them. This is a map of what actually exists — and how to find the eggs that match what you're looking for.
A new piece most days. Daily investigations into where NZ's food really comes from — sent direct to your inbox.
A tube of antibiotic into each quarter of the udder, every cow, every year. Around 80 percent of them had nothing wrong with them. Here's why it happened, and why it's ending.
Robert and Robyn Guyton have grafted and grown hundreds of apple varieties rescued from old Southland orchards. Meanwhile the apples in the shop are licensed assets with royalty streams. Two gene pools, two very different futures.
Nobody is hiding what your beef was given. Nobody is telling you either. I went looking for the record and found a form that only asks about right now.
A reader asked how much of the $10 he pays for a dozen eggs reaches the farmer and how much the supermarket clips. Nobody in the article was asked. Three economists explained record food prices, and every cause they named sat somewhere no New Zealander can reach.
I stood in front of the mince cabinet and photographed the shelf tags. The cheapest was $21.99 a kilo. The most expensive was $33.98. Both were mince.
Macro sells a certified organic whole chicken in Australia. In New Zealand the Macro chicken lines are free range only. The organic chicken at Woolworths NZ is there, but it isn't called Macro, and the company behind it may surprise you.
Three-quarters of New Zealand's bread is made from imported grain. A certification trademark launched in 2025 to shift that, at a premium of about four cents a loaf. That four cents buys a paddock. It does not buy a mill or a malthouse, and the rule that defines the logo has never been made public.
Live2Give grows organic vegetables at Aokautere, backloads other growers' produce on its chilled truck, labels its own non-organic lines as non-organic, and starts delivering to Auckland on 3 September.
I started with a small question about the emulsifiers on a supermarket loaf and ended up at a 1961 British process that replaces three hours of fermentation with eleven watt-hours of mixing energy. Almost every additive on that label is the bill for the missing time.
Beer has four ingredients and malt is the one nobody thinks about. Follow it back from a New Zealand bottle and you reach three French agricultural co-operatives, a private equity firm, a distributor owned by a competitor, and a court judgment nobody was meant to see. Part two of the malt series.
One stretch of Colombo Street holds a certified organic market garden shop, an organic butchery, a bulk refillery, a Sunday farmers' market and the last stand-alone malthouse in New Zealand. It is about as close as this country gets to a walkable organic weekly shop.
The BioGro sticker on your kiwifruit traces back to a compost club started in 1941. Here is what that organisation publishes now, and whether joining is worth it.
