Dinner*

It all started so well. Salmon with green pea and lemon risotto on the Monday, Vietnamese glazed beef sliders on Tuesday, and never the same thing twice. No one had time to do this stuff from scratch anymore but now we could all eat like kings, every night, without racking our brains. No more dragging the kids around the supermarket after daycare, no more arguments over what to make. Just there on your doorstep every night – the menu, the ingredients, the recipe.

The food bag.

It was a dark time in the world outside: the global financial crisis, bombings, riots and fear. But as the nation hunkered down and re-focused on home renovation,

Photo credit: isaynotomato.com

cooking shows and family values, it was an exciting time as well. Homes around the country were mesmerised by Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules, Jamie and Nigella. But who has time for all that hard work! This way everyone could be a foodie, without the prep and planning. Well, everyone who could afford it. At work the next day, everyone was on the same page: did little Oliver eat his broccolini last night? How did your family like the fennel dressing? And all over New Zealand kids were learning about the world while they helped Mum and Dad cook Sumerian lamb with roast parsnip and spinach couscous.  It was quality family time.

No one claimed responsibility when it happened. On Thursday, everything was normal - by Friday the world had turned upside down. It started like any ordinary evening, with the bag on the doorstep and a recipe for Catalan pork fettucine with a parmesan garlic crumb. And all over the country, life coaches, software developers,

Photo credit: Ibelieveicanfry.com

conveyancing solicitors and real estate agents were chopping and mixing and firing up the Le Creuset. Instagram was going off. Little Sophies and Jacobs set the tables in a hundred thousand households, and dinner was served.

And then, suddenly, silence. Where were all the tweets, reviewing this one? The eye-rolling teenagers’ ironic dining-table snapchats? What on earth was going on?

The next morning it became startlingly, horrifyingly clear. The entire middle class of New Zealand was gone. Wiped out – by a food-bag-borne illness. Was it accidental? Botulism? Or something more sinister? A food bag hack. There was simply not enough of the medical fraternity left to run the tests. But as the survivors slowly came to grips with this disaster, the realisation dawned that no matter who was responsible, things would never be the same. The balance between production and consumption was lost. Trade, policy, finance – the entire personal training industry – nothing could be sustained. The corridors of power were deserted and the million dollar homes stood empty. And this was how The Collapse began.

 

Photo credit: Chris Luckhardt

*From an idea by Nicola Little.

Nature lovers

In the 19^th century, you could be a nature lover and go off on a jolly expedition blasting animals with your shotgun. Perfectly normal. You might also be a taxidermist (handy), preserve your little friends in formaldehyde,

Photo credit: UCL UK

or be a dab hand at jamming pins through beetles. All very respectable, and a noble pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Find it, kill it, own it seemed to be the Edwardian and Victorian ethos: a childish drive to collect and possess. This still goes on today among trophy hunters, but these days naturalists are more focused on preserving wildlife in its context (or what’s left of its context).

This change seemed to begin in the 20^th century, but even then naturalists were such busybodies. It was as if they’d emerged from their childhood of pulling the wings off flies and developed some empathy, but they still just couldn’t leave the animals alone.

Gerald Durrell for instance, a very engaging writer, conservationist and educator. But he had some strange ideas about wild animals as pets.

Photo credit: Hermann Tirler

 Amazing for kids obviously (I would have loved it), but a huge disservice to the animals (if I’d been that sloth I would’ve been really annoyed). And Gavin Maxwell, what a terrible egotist. I was captivated by Ring of Bright Water as a child, but when I read the book as an adult I was horrified by his determined mistreatment of otter after otter, as he tried to domesticate them and bend them to his will.  

And then there were the Adamsons. Born free indeed. Couldn’t she have just got a tabby? 

Why do we do this to animals? Maybe it’s all the childhood literature, the way we’re brought up to think of animals as fictional characters, with human traits. Little

George, Elsa, Joy.
Photo credit: Classic Safaris Africa

friends to have tea parties with. Is that what those naturalists were acting out, while they thought they were ‘doing science’? What kind of ego buzz were they getting from pestering wild animals and believing they had a special rapport? They were like emo teenagers, “nobody understands me – except animals.”

You have to ask, was it doing the animals any good? Did it do the natural world any good? It would be fair to say these mid-century tv shows, books and movies

Dr Dolittle. Photo Credit: 20th Century Fox

influenced a generation of kids, and made them more conservation minded than their parents. But I think it skewed our perspective on what respect for the natural world really entails.

There were other naturalists of course, more interested in context, and education. Jacques Cousteau inspired a generation of marine biologists, they are just everywhere these days. And of course there’s David Attenborough – a more gentlemanly naturalist altogether, but still, not above getting too hands-on with the wildlife.

But I worry that time is running out for us to finally grow up, and learn to appreciate animals in their own habitat, valuing them as part of the fabric of the world rather than for the uses we can put them to, or the emotions we can project onto them.

Sometimes I wonder if naturalists like David Attenborough are just the same as the Victorians, really. Still collecting. Wanting to categorise and record every little thing, every part of the planet. There’s a sadness and nostalgia that permeates Attenborough’s later work, as if he’s getting ready to say goodbye to this beautiful world. Or as if he knows this beautiful world, that he has so lovingly explored and catalogued, is saying goodbye to us. He’s been quoted as saying that humans are like ‘a plague on earth’. And he’s seen more of it than any of us - he should know.