New Zealand's major food companies are run by evil goblins who sit in their offices counting piles of cash while selling us dodgy, over-priced food they've deliberately changed the flavour of to ruin our childhood memories.Well, maybe not, but you'd be fo
New Zealand’s major food companies are run by evil goblins who sit in their offices counting piles of cash while selling us dodgy, over-priced food they’ve deliberately changed the flavour of to ruin our childhood memories.
Well, maybe not, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that if you had been following some of the recent media coverage of the companies that supply most of the food we put on our tables.
Over the past few months New Zealand’s intrepid media have uncovered some shocking scandals in the food industry:
• fast food companies are trying to mass-medicate the New Zealand population by selling pancakes with several forms of penicillin growing on them.
•the two supermarket chains are in a “cosy duopoly” and the bosses of both companies spend all day working out ways to rip customers off while sitting in their head offices in Mordor.
• New Zealand’s largest chocolate company is run by a sinister man called Damien who has the number ‘666’ tattooed on the back of his neck and smells suspiciously like sulphur.
Okay I’ll admit it; I made all these stories up.
But they’re only a little bit more preposterous than some of the garbage that passes for news both on TV and in newspapers when it comes to the food industry.
Just look at the recent hysteria over Cadbury choosing to import the Crème Egg from Britain, meaning a slight change in flavour for the beloved treat.
Much of the coverage glossed over three important facts.
First, product testing by the company showed that about half of people actually preferred the Crème Egg’s new flavour.
Second, hardly anyone actually noticed the change until it hit the media (and Facebook), after which the number of complaints to the company skyrocketed.
And finally, if Cadbury hadn’t made some tough choices it would have been forced to close its Dunedin factory (one of the biggest employers in the South Island) instead of spending nearly $70 million upgrading it.
And imagine the uproar if that had happened!
Cadbury makes a good whipping boy for the media because for many years it has been one of New Zealand’s most trusted brands and some of its products are pure Kiwiana.
Supermarkets are also attractive targets because when prices go up many customers blame the supermarkets rather than supply and demand or inflation or even, in many cases, misguided government intervention (biofuel pushing up food prices, for instance).
It’s demoralising when your food budget buys you less each week and the New Zealand media know how to tap into this feeling of resentment.
In one television interview Foodstuffs managing director Tony Carter was filmed in a darkened room that made him look as if he was a wheeze away from being Don Corleone.
Perhaps he and Progressive Enterprises boss Peter Smith need to stage a Hell in a Cell Barbed Wire Extreme Rules Burning Tables Bloodfest match to show that, far from colluding together, the two supermarket companies are intent on destroying each other.
While supermarket bashing taps into anxiety about what’s going out of our wallets, fast food bashing captures concerns about what’s going in to our mouths.
Buying takeaway or restaurant meals requires a high level of trust because unlike home-cooked meals we don’t see what is going into the food.
Stories about maggots in burgers and mould on pancakes make us wonder what else is going into our meals that we don’t know about.
But what they neglect to mention is how many thousands of burgers and pancakes are consumed at the likes of McDonald’s and Wendy’s every year with no nasty surprises and no adverse health effects apart from an increased risk of developing love handles from eating too many super-sized combos.
In fact large takeaway chains are probably among the safest places to eat a meal in New Zealand, a country where a backyard barbecue has become a game of Russian roulette with salmonella and a range of other nasty food-borne bugs that will make you lose your lunch far faster than the sight of creepy crawlies in your cheeseburger.
Bear in mind that having an (alleged) maggot in a burger is a pretty small stuff-up when compared to, say, cutting off power to thousands of Auckland homes or having an entire cell phone network go down in most of the country.
And it’s ironic that New Zealanders tolerate all kinds of ineptitude from our government but if we get meatlovers pizza when we asked for Hawaiian there’ll be hell to pay.
Shows you where our priorities lie.
