Peter MacDonald
Food has always been New Zealand’s greatest export: our true mana from heaven. In a land once proudly called God’s Own Country, that feels appropriate. We are a nation blessed with fertile soil, clean water and temperate seasons – we grow, herd and harvest enough to feed around 40 million people worldwide.
And yet, in this so called land of a-plenty, hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders now live on the breadline. Most of them are in Auckland, a city swollen to 1.8 million, where the cost of living, especially food, has become unbearable. What was once an agrarian society, built on fairness and shared abundance, has turned into a two-tier system: those who profit from food and those who can no longer afford it.
That’s what makes the recent Wānaka charity gala so painfully ironic. The Food for Love dinner was rightly celebrated as a triumph of community spirit. But the headline moment, 10 blocks of butter auctioned for an eye watering $11,500, exposes a deeper moral contradiction. We were told it was “pure community magic”. In truth, it symbolised the absurdity of our times: the humble block of New Zealand butter, a kitchen staple, turned into a luxury commodity and a fundraising trophy.
Butter should never be a symbol of privilege. It belongs on the tables of all New Zealanders – the very people whose parents and grandparents built this country from the land outward. Yet now, as supermarket prices sit at $11 a block, we’ve reached the point where butter itself has become a psychological game of cents and illusions. Retailers will soon push it to $11.49 or $11.99, using the familiar trick that makes shoppers feel like it’s still “around 11 dollars,” when in truth it’s already $12. That tiny shift in digits masks the larger injustice that in one of the world’s richest food producing nations, the golden symbol of our land is now priced beyond the reach of those who made it famous.
The golden Kiwi block of butter has become a privileged item and now out of reach, not just for those living on the breadline, but for many ordinary families across New Zealand. Instead, households are turning to margarine, a highly processed, hydrogenated product made from seed and vegetable oils. Unlike butter, margarine is unnatural and nutritionally inferior: it’s so artificial that even ants won’t eat it. What was once a wholesome, essential food has become a luxury, while a cheap industrial substitute fills the gap, further eroding the nation’s health and wellbeing.
And the ironies didn’t stop with the butter. Both guest speakers were photographed holding their books at the gala, celebrity chef Nadia Lim with her latest recipe book, which focuses on nutrition and wholesome cooking, and mountaineer Lydia Bradey with her book Going Up is Easy. The juxtaposition is striking. Lim’s recipes celebrate golden blocks of butter, used in her food recipes and now increasingly unaffordable for many Kiwi families, while Bradey’s book title unintentionally mirrors the steep climb of butter prices: going up is easy, coming down nearly impossible.
And what of the charities themselves? Food for Love, like so many others, now measures success by how much more food it distributes each year. Its volunteers are remarkable and their compassion genuine. Yet the fact that such organisations must constantly expand is not a success story: it’s an indictment of an economy that has left so many behind. When charities rejoice that they’ve cooked a record number of meals, we should pause and ask why that number keeps rising.
In God’s own country, the act of feeding the hungry should not rely on gala dinners and celebrity speakers. It should not depend on auctioning butter at luxury prices to fund free meals for those who can’t afford to buy it. We’ve reached the point where generosity itself has become a gala celebrity-studded virtue-signalling performance – a necessary patch for the holes in a fraying social fabric.
The bitter truth about butter is that the very product that made this country prosperous now stands as a symbol of inequality. We export our best food for profit, while our own people are priced out of it. The butter auction was not just a charming local story: it was a mirror held up to New Zealand’s conscience. Ironically, as a food-exporting nation, Kiwis have always understood that much of the best produce leaves the country for export, leaving the ‘seconds’ behind for local consumption. Butter, however, has never had seconds – Kiwis have always eaten the best. Now, the irony is bitter indeed: the best butter produced in New Zealand is increasingly unaffordable for most families, who are forced to buy margarine, a product far inferior even to the ‘seconds’ of other foods.
We call this NZ, God’s Zone, yet our families queue for food parcels and our national bounty is treated like a prized collectible. Until we restore balance between production, profit and people, even the purest acts of charity will carry a shadow of irony.
In a land of milk and honey, no one should need to bid for butter.
