The Facts

Do you know what’s in your food? Most of us think we have a fair idea. But today I’d like to tell you what I know – because I’ve been researching the facts.

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 An apple – looks nice enough. Fresh. Natural. And our ancestors have been eating the fruits of the trees for 200,000 years – it must be good. But what do we really know about how this apple is produced? We know it grew on a tree – but how did the tree grow? It grew in the soil. In the dirt. Fertilised by faecal matter and the remains of dead animals. That’s disgusting.  Out in the open air, exposed to the elements, crawled over by insects and pooed on by birds, absorbing all the pollutants that wind and rain can bring. And it doesn’t stop there – how many pairs of hands has this apple been through before I chose it in the shop? From the fruitpicker, to the sorter, the packer, the truck driver, through all the shop staff to the check-out operator. All those pairs of hands – all those sneezing, coughing, hoiking hands. It really is disgusting.

By contrast, a packet of Twisties. 

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Produced in a sterile environment, from highly processed ingredients – some of them completely synthetic. Untouched by human hands, completely controlled and regulated, and hermetically sealed in the bag. It doesn’t matter what happens to these in transit – they’re protected. And they’ll stay fresh in here til the use by date. That apple – give it a week and it will be looking pretty sad. Who knows how long it’s been since it was picked? 

Would you really want your children to eat that? 

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But it’s not just about our own health and wellbeing, is it.

It’s about the health of the planet. Because we’ve just about pushed things as far as they can go. The ecological footprint of our wasteful food production methods is enormous. In fact, it’s been estimated that at the current rates of consumption we'll soon need ten planets to sustain our habits. Ten planets. That’s ten planets worth of apple orchards. Ten planets worth of sheep and beef farms. Ten planets of apartment blocks, leafy suburbs and shanty towns. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Imagine yourself living in a 50-storey tower block, in a nice little flat…knowing that just downstairs on the ground floor was your means of food production. A clean, regulated, efficient food factory, supplying your building. We would cut down on our use of resources, we would cut down our use of fossil fuels. Solar powered plant and no need for freight. The food’s not going anywhere, just straight upstairs to you. No more grocery shopping! And what’s more, the waste energy from the plant – the heat – would light and heat your home.  We could preserve our wilderness areas like this. By making our urban areas more dense, we would use our available land more efficiently. We could decommission all the farmland, and put it to a much more practical use, building more and more of these tower blocks – like vertical villages. It would be a Utopia.

Obviously not everyone would be content with the vegetarianism that this change of lifestyle implies. And research into synthesising meat from stem cells is still in its infancy – it’s early days. If you feel you need to have animal protein in your diet, I ask you to consider this. In March last year there were 10,260 people in prison in this country. 10,260 prisoners. They all need feeding. They all need housing – the real estate for our prisons is considerable. This is land that could be put to much better use. 58% of those prisoners were convicted of a violent crime: assault, rape, murder. That’s nearly 6,000 people. Do they have human rights? Some say human rights are a privilege that they forfeited, when they chose to behave in such an antisocial way. Such an inhuman way. 

I say we eat them. 

More protein for you – more resources for society at large. Will there be a drop in violent crime? Possibly. Will there be an increase in vegetarianism? It wouldn’t be at all surprising. Are either of these bad things? 

It’s a win-win situation. 

A no-brainer.

It’s the future.

To conclude, let me ask you a question. What kind of future do you want, for your children, for your children’s children? For (environmental conditions permitting) your children’s children’s children? Do you want a bright, clean, modernised future, regulated and consistent? Or a world mired in the past: shambolic and unpredictable, with its roots in dirt and decay? 

 You choose.

Everything in moderation

Kate Moss. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” – that’s what she said. I’d grown up with girls can do anything, the personal is political, and Fat is a Feminist Issue, so I was a bit shocked. And it seemed to set the tone for the decade to follow, all primping and posing and pretending you disliked other people more than you disliked yourself. 

I suppose she was subversive in her own way, projecting a different kind of sultry on the magazine covers that was often more about bad attitude than femmey sexual signalling. But still, she was just another packaged product, sulking and pouting and making a living from her surface; banking on the male gaze.

So worth it
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I suppose it could be she's one of those people without a sense of smell, who can't taste their food at all. Rather than someone so mired in concern about her physical acceptability, so absorbed by her presentation of herself to the outside world, that it's become preferable for her not to actually feed herself. 


But either way, I feel sad for Kate Moss. So I wrote her a poem.

Things that taste as good as skinny feels

Baked potatoes,

Fresh baked bread, 

with real butter

melting

Whittaker’s almond gold.

Peanut butter, cheese on toast, garlic mushrooms

Carrot cake,

nutmeg cake,

chocolate cake,

basically, cake.

That thing your mother used to make on the weekends,

a really good, fresh, still-warm croissant

The first feijoa of winter,

Pumpkin soup, salt

and vinegar

chips

Roast kumara, pikelets, a ripe apricot

the last beer of summer,

doughnuts.

Vitamins

It's like magic: a bottle of pills will sort you.

Worn down by the toxins of bad air and over-processed food, poisoned with the by-products of industry and factory farming, you're feeling exhausted. You probably have adrenal fatigue. Or Wilson’s Syndrome.  You’re almost certainly deficient in the necessaries of nutrition: vitamin C, the B group vitamins, zinc, selenium, iron….because modern life is killing you.

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Is it just a multi-vitamin you need? A broad-spectrum approach. Or should you get specific: have a blood test, a hair test, a pendulum test, have someone check the iris of your eye?  It’s always hard to know. 

Thing is, you could eat some vegetables, drink less alcohol, or get to bed earlier, and chances are you sit in a chair all day and could do with some more exercise. But god, who has the energy to make a bunch of changes? After all, you are Fatigued.

So, they market to you.

B1, B2 and B3, some pantothenic acid. A large dose of Vitamin C, and a variety of herbs. Licorice root, ashwagandha, Siberian ginseng, and some rhodiola rosea (as used by Vikings!)

You will need a very large glass of water to get all that lot down you. Actually, maybe that’s all you need? Maybe you were just thirsty.

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Ordering

At first it was self defence. They never got her name right, and it made her squirm. At one place they made her spell it out, so embarrassing.  All she wanted was a bloody sandwich. So she lied.

Sally, Jenny, Angela.  She gave so many different names she started to get funny looks at her local haunts; she had to go further away from work and start afresh. 

Sarah, Rachel, Sam. It was liberating when they didn't know your real name. She'd never really realised what an intimate thing it was, when they asked it. Somehow it broke an unspoken contract: a sudden demand for intimacy, that didn’t let you keep the

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walls up. But not anymore. She became emboldened by the pretence.  As Christine she sent her trim latte back: too cold. The next day it was a pita pocket, they knew she wanted it toasted, but they put lettuce in it anyway. Lettuce. Cooked. Disgusting! Next thing, she couldn't go back to Subway, they had banned her. Well, they banned Fiona, bad tempered cow. 

Anna, Lisa, Linda. The more she lied the more invisible she felt, and the more unsatisfied. She was hungry. So hungry! She was always hungry. But nothing was ever enough. A wrap, a soy trim latte, a baked potato with the works. Did she want plain or wholemeal? Did she want olives? She didn’t even know. 

One morning at the end of winter she stood in front of her wardrobe, trying to pick an outfit. It was no good. She needed someone else’s clothes. How could she leave the house without a disguise? 

She slumped down at the kitchen table, and cried. How could this happen? Who was she? She should probably call in sick.

But instead she rang her own number at work, over and over, listening to her voice on the answerphone.

Good night

No one sees what you can see,
when you turn out the light
You go trying to describe it all, but
say what you like
They said it would be peaceful, 
I guess that's alright
Just put your head on the pillow darling,
say good night.

Room full of shoes

This room, filled with donated shoes, shows the desperate need of many women in poverty during

A room full of shoes to be given to the wives of unemployed men during
the Depression. Unknown photographer (1932)  source

the Depression  –  and also the generosity of women. Charity was high profile during the inter-war Depression years, and women were generous contributors of goods and time. The collection and distribution of food and clothing, and the provision of social services were activities largely coordinated by women, even though men, like ‘Uncle Scrim’, tended to be the figureheads and spokespeople for charitable organisations.

The women who needed these shoes may well have been workers themselves, rather than just the ‘wives of unemployed men’.  Working women who lost their jobs were not captured in the national statistics, not recognised as unemployed and not entitled to a benefit. A husband was expected to support them. Just as in this picture, they were invisible, and out of the frame. But even those who did not have a paid job in a factory or shop were contributing to the economy. Taking in laundry, swapping backyard produce, making clothes and child-minding: providing services to other women at home, and to working sisters, daughters and neighbours who could not have worked paid jobs without their support.

The shoes are, to modern eyes, very stylish, reflecting the boom in fashion and consumer goods that followed the Great War in a relative time of plenty. Although New Zealand’s culture didn’t develop to the extremes of self-indulgence and consumerism seen in countries like America, still there was an explosion of new fashion and entertainment in the 1920s. Many of the shoe styles seen here date from this decade, when people were buying more goods – including shoes – than they needed; more than they had been able to afford for a long, grim time. And when the Great Depression hit hard, many who had more than they needed were willing to share.

The photo illustrates the scale of poverty and need in New Zealand during the Great Depression in a very intimate way. Each pair of shoes gives a sense of the personality of the woman who donated them, and the desperate situation that the woman who needs them is in.  At a time when a struggling woman probably went without to ensure her family had more, the gift of a pair of shoes that were only for her must have meant a lot.  New shoes addressed a practical, everyday need for women in poverty, but also gave a message that each recipient was deserving, and important in herself.

It’s difficult to look at this photo without thinking of photos of other rooms full of shoes, taken at the end of the Second World War. But in 1932, before World War II and before those images became an unforgettable part of our history, this image illustrates a time when poverty was being recognised as an effect of capitalism rather than a moral failing, and communities were helping their disadvantaged members to meet the challenges of the Great Depression as part of an interlinked, supportive society.

Romance

Fairytale romance: hold me back.

A frog, the Beast, a necrophiliac,

a foot fetishist

who can’t even remember what you look like.

A hair puller,

a prince who doesn’t believe you’re a princess

and makes you prove it,

with your bruises.

The dance partner who doesn’t notice that your feet are bleeding

let alone that you’ve traded in your tail,

a series of dodgy woodcutters

who keep turning up to help when you’re in danger -

because they’re stalkers.

The man who breaks and enters through the bramble patch

wakes you up early, ruins the garden,

and, Bluebeard. 
Seriously:

not much of a catch.