Luxon finds ‘woke food’ questioning unpalatable

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was irked by questions from journalists following the Government’s announcement of funding for free school lunches yesterday, making a dig at a reporter for asking about what foods were and were not “woke”.

“It’s all the big questions from TVNZ today, isn’t it? Fantastic,” Luxon said in response to a question about whether there was such a thing as “woke food”.

The term “woke food” was lobbed into the debate about free school lunches by the Act Party’s X (formerly Twitter) account, which said: “We’ll be doing more with less money to feed kids the fruit and sandwiches their parents would, not woke food like quinoa and sushi.”

In response, Luxon said: “I’d just say, given everything that’s going on in this country, do you think that is the most sensible question to be asking?

“Is it news today? Do you think that’s a really smart question — honestly?”

Luxon told the reporter he did not believe sushi and quinoa were woke.

In the first eight days of this month alone, MPs have used the term “woke”, meaning socially progressive, in five instances.

NZ First MPs have a particular elan

We’ll be doing more with less money to feed kids the fruit and sandwiches their parents would, not woke food like quinoa and sushi.

The Act Party

for dropping the word in the House.

MP Shane Jones, answering patsy questions from colleague Andy Foster, said earlier this month the “naive wokeism, the juvenile understanding of economics that drove the stigmatisation of the gas industry has disappeared, no longer to be seen anymore”.

Leader Winston Peters jumped in with his own patsy question: “Could the minister tell us what he and his department are doing about the irony of importing so much inferior Indonesian coal while not using our own, and thereby placating our socalled green woke conscience?”

Yesterday, Jones repeated the term again, attacking “juvenile, wokeriddled, foolish belief that we don’t need our natural resources, that we don’t need our natural gas, that we don’t need coal”.

It’s out with quinoa and hummus and in with sandwiches and other lunchbox basics as Associate Education Minister David Seymour aims to save about $107 million a year with a new no-frills school lunches programme.

Seymour announced yesterday that the school lunches programme would get $478m in the Budget — a top-up in funding to keep it going for the next two years. He has also announced that it will be extended to some low-decile early childhood education services.

The Government will review the programme before making decisions on its longerterm future. In the meantime, primary schools can continue to use the model they currently use, but there will be changes for high schools as part of a bid to save $107m, some of which will be used to fund the early childhood education (ECE) policy rollout.

The Ka Ora, Ka Ako school lunches programme was launched by Labour in 2019 and feeds about 235,000 students at schools and kura facing some of the greatest socio-economic barriers. The Labour Government had allocated $323.4m for this year but it had not been funded beyond that.

Questions over the future of Ka Ora, Ka Ako were raised when Seymour was given ministerial responsibility over the policy. During the election campaign, he described it as “wasteful” spending and urging National to abandon it.

Yesterday’s announcement provides a reprieve with $478m to be allocated in the Budget to keep the scheme going until the end of 2026, but with some changes. For the rest of the year, the programme would remain as it was with all contracts and commitments in place. From next year, a new alternative provision model will be established.

“Students will receive nutritious food that they want to eat. It will be made up of the sorts of food items thousands of mums and dads put into lunch boxes every day for their kids — forget quinoa, couscous, and hummus, it will be more like sandwiches and fruit.”

Seymour said while the topup funding was in place in 2025 and 2026, a full redesign of the programme would be undertaken. He also announced yesterday that $4m from the money saved would fund a new food programme for children at lowequity, not-for-profit, community-based early childhood centres.