NZ needs meeting of minds over meat

It was the best soup I’d ever had. My friend Stevie and I must have been about 8 years old when we packed a billy and a couple of sachets of Continental Cup-a-Soup and set out for the back of his grandparents’ 32-hectare farm.

Skirting the dairy cattle, we eventually got to the banks of south Taranaki’s Kapuni River, and set about building a campfire. It took about an hour to heat the soup to lukewarm – but to me, nothing could have tasted better.

That farm has since been sold to Origin Energy for the company to build a gas production plant. And for city kids today, chances like mine are as rare as farmyard hens’ teeth.

Three decades on, Stevie’s dad, Richard Willis, says a lot of farms have been industrialised or merged. ‘‘Small farms don’t really exist any more, so the opportunities are fewer.’’

Willis, a retired Victoria University geography lecturer, argues the rural community is better connected to urban and global concerns now: smartphones, social media and the necessities of running modern agri-businesses ensure that.

Our fast-growing population of urbanites, however, are less likely to have friends and family in the country. We know there are kids who have never left town. We know that social media can create echo-chambers.

All this contributes to a distance between urban and rural New Zealand communities that is manifested in sharp disagreement on issues like Labour’s proposed ‘‘water tax’’, responsibility for the sullied quality of our freshwater, and of course the vexed problem of climate change.

Now, a new rift: meat.

We report today that New Zealanders have reduced their red meat consumption by 25kg a year, on average. That is mostly younger people, mostly urban, following an emerging global trend.

Now, increasingly, scientific evidence suggests our planet will struggle to sustain the levels of meat consumed by the growing population of the developed world.

Sensing a business opportunity, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Google’s Sergey Brin are among the moguls investing in vegetable-based protein: fake meat farmed in labs.

As affluent Westerners start to turn their backs on meat, New Zealand faces a challenge: do we bury our heads in the sand, do we double down on more sustainably-reared meat – or do we work together to turn our best and brightest minds to leading the world in innovative new alt-meat solutions?

Richard Willis is just back from leading a group of 40 university students on a study trip to inspect changing Taranaki agri-business models. His students are changing, he says: every year there are more vegetarians, vegans and those with specific dietary requirements.

But similarly, he says, rural communities are evolving. He points out that farmers have now done riparian planting along 20 per cent of Taranaki’s streams, to lessen the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into our waterways.

‘‘The country is changing, Jonathan. The urban-rural divide was emphasised in the election campaign, but I don’t think it’s that simple.’’

Whether city-dwellers will admit it or not, our economy is still dependent on the primary industries. We have much to lose.

It is imperative that town and country stop shouting at each other and start talking. We need to ensure we are at the forefront of developing and commercialising alternative protein products – or we too will be among the nations that struggle to feed their children.