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.

The wind will blow them all away

Ah, Glover Park. In the 90s it was a seedy place, dark and leafy, where you might get a fright walking through. Strolling along, you would look up to find you were surrounded by silent drinkers; half-hidden in the nooks and crannies, screened by big old trees, low walls and shrubbery. 

All the familiar faces would be in there at some point – the people you didn’t know, but saw nearly every day. They were always around, wandering aimlessly through the streets or sleeping on benches in Cuba Street, drinking in the bus stops at the top of Courtenay Place on a rainy day. The little crumpled lady with the Egyptian eyeliner, Happy Santa, the impossibly skinny, white-haired man in the gabardine raincoat and the wild eyed beardy man who shouted all the time. And dozens more, all part of the fabric of the city.

Then in 2006 the park got a facelift. Now it’s a breezy, urbane greenspace, open and airy, with a clear view from edge to edge.

There are no signs that say “No Rough Sleeping”, “No Homeless”, “No Drinking”.

But without the shelter of the natural alcoves, arranged around the old rambling central path, there are no longer any private, semi-enclosed spaces. Now a wide, straight path cuts right through the centre, and the entire site is open to the sky.

New businesses had crept in: a designer fabric shop here, an upmarket French Café there. More and more pressure was put on the Council to do something about the park’s residents. No place in hipsterville for hoicking, swearing, old-school drunks in sleeping bags. So, first a remodel of ‘Alky Park’ to make it less fit for purpose for rough sleepers, and two years later a new bylaw: the Central City Liquor Ban.

Fittingly though, alcohol is still a feature at Glover Park. These days a bar, ‘The Rogue and Vagabond’ sits at its edge, and a corner of the park beside it is roped off on sunny days for the private use of its customers, who can take their ease on

Photo credit: Dreamstime

beanbags on the grass. It could be that when alcohol is a commercial transaction, licensed and regulated, it is less likely to cause a nuisance than when it’s guzzled secretively from a bottle in a brown paper bag, on a dark park bench. Or it could be that the Central City Liquor Ban was not designed to control drinking in the area so much as to penalise and exclude an already marginalised section of society, a community of rough sleepers who had no voice, no place to go, and very little economic power.
Craft beer, anyone?

Land of birds

What would I have thought, when I stepped off the boat? A barren and inhospitable land, too much bush, too many loud birds? Or just, oh dear, someone lives here already?

I suppose like everybody else I’d have been homesick before very long, and if I had the means would have set about sending back to the motherland for familiar things to make me feel at home. Granny’s sideboard, my second-best bustle, some bunnies and sparrows. Maybe a weasel or two.

And maybe it was me who accidentally brought in seeds wedged into the soles of my boots: thistles, dandelions, burdock.

With the benefit of hindsight though, it’s hard to imagine that I would have thought

New Zealand's wildlife: stuffed.
Photo credit: Te Papa

it was a good idea to bring in stoats to eat the rabbits, after I realised the rabbits were out of control. After all, there were so many flightless birds out there, just minding their own business. Enormous, placid parrots, tiny defenceless wrens and ground-nesting native ducks. Surely I would have considered the consequences?

Easy to judge though, at this late stage.

I can imagine thinking gorse was a good idea, having come from a country where farmland hedgerows were so traditional. But decades later when gorse was recognised as a pest, would I have thought introducing gorse-hungry weevils, spider mites, moths and thrips worth the risk? As with all biological controls, in an unusual ecology like ours there’s always a chance these introduced control agents will discover they prefer the taste of something native (and knowing Aotearoa’s luck, something on the verge of extinction).

The possums I definitely would have voted against, while making the sandwiches at

Photo credit: unknown

my local branch of the Acclimatisation Society. Assuming I had any kind of voice of course. But if I’d had anything to do with it, the landscape around you might be quite different today. Wombats, for one thing. They would have been a better choice than the possums. Probably some zebras, because, zebras. And some quokka, who would have been a much better bet than those pesty hedgehogs. If you’re going for ‘exotic’, well, might as well go crazy. How about some giraffes?

Sea cucumbers

I was interested this week, on news of the sad death of cricketer Martin Crowe, to hear that he’d chosen to treat his cancer with 'natural therapies' rather than follow doctors’ advice.  Each to their own, of course. But, given the alarming influence that sportspeople have in this country, well. I despair. One minute it’s weetbix sandwiches, heat pumps, and the joys of crippling debt, and the next thing you know it’s all what a nice flag and eat your sea cucumbers.

Google sea cucumbers and you’ll find there’s no shortage of people who believe they do cure cancer, but actual research is only in its infancy, and is not

Here, kitty
Photo credit: theeggadventure.com

conclusive one way or the other. 

Now I’m in no position to scoff at anyone suffering a severe illness who tries anything that offers hope. I once, in desperation, saw a naturopath in the hope that ANYTHING she could suggest might (might) help me with the crippling pain of endometriosis. Hope was enough. Strangely the waving of a pendulum gave me no relief, though I’m sure Dr Crystal-Muncher would say my skepticism ruined the effect. And this would be so, if she was talking about the placebo effect. But actual medicine works whether you ‘believe’ in it or not, surely?

I’m all for people experimenting with different methods of pain control and quality of life enhancement, don’t get me wrong. Whether it’s prescription painkillers, liquid marijuana, yoga stretches or a nice cab sav, we’re all different in what works for taking that edge off – and if you’re suffering from a terminal illness or any health condition that compromises your ability to enjoy yourself, you should be able to try whatever you like to improve your physical comfort and your state of mind.

But please don’t experiment on yourself with sea cucumber extract, vitamin C , turmeric and baking soda expecting an actual cure for your condition. If you want to know

Quack

whether some wacko treatment works, why not get yourself involved in a clinical trial, and then we can all have some proper evidence about your alternative medicine.

But then as Ben Goldacre has explained there’s no such thing as alternative medicine. Because if it doesn’t work, it’s not medicine. And if it works, it’s not ‘alternative’ is it? It’s just 'medicine'.