The humble cauli is more expensive to buy these days. Photo/Getty
The world may be reeling after this week's elections, but here in New Zealand, we are reeling at the cost of a cauliflower.
Given our beautiful climate, fertile soils and mostly happy blend of sunshine and rain, you would think that things that can be easily grown here would be cheap as chips.
But that's the thing, chips are not even cheap any more if you buy the potato, chop it and fry it yourself. They are cheap if you buy them processed in a bag.
As Anna Whyte reports today, vegetable prices are on the rise. The latest Consumer Price Index September 2016 quarter showed that vegetable prices made the largest upward contribution (up 16 per cent), influenced by seasonally higher costs of tomatoes and lettuce.
Earlier this year, NZME reported that cauliflowers had risen to record levels, $10 a head, up by 66 percent since 1994 when Statistics New Zealand started recording prices.
Reasons cited were a combination of dry weather and demand.
Demand may have surged for the humble cauliflower given the craze in Paleo eating or no carb eating, where people use grated cauliflower as a rice substitute or instead of a pizza base.
The irony is in a country with an obesity crisis, a plate of fresh vegetables can cost more than a Big Mac and fries.
Despite many conflicting and often confusing advice about how to eat healthily, there is one thing that most nutritionists and dieticians agree on: for both weight management and general health, pile your plate with vegetables.
How can we expect people to do this when they are so expensive?
You can try to trim the cost by buying in season and shopping around for specials.
You could resort to your own vegetable garden. I admire the people in Anna Whyte's story who have taken the time and initiative to do this such as the Gullick family who had not bought a vegetable since last year.
Mrs Gullick says this saves the family $40 a week.
However, is there any real saving if you factor in the time it takes to grow the vegetables and to care for them? With many families time-poor, both parents working, if you factor in your hourly rate in growing your vegetables, then they could be costing you more than buying at the supermarket.
However, when I put this line of reasoning to a colleague he said it was bananas, pointing out that growing your own vegetables should not be costed like a chore, but should be a hobby and the benefits were not just in financial cost, but in health, given that eating straight from your own garden was far healthier than purchasing vegetables which may be older or treated with various products.
Removing GST on fresh fruit and vegetables is one option to reduce costs of eating healthily but is a political hot potato and it is uncertain how much impact this would have on struggling families' food bills.
Other options could be more subsidising of fresh, healthy foods, initiatives such as big community gardens, schools building their own vegetable gardens and teaching children to grow them, sharing the spoils with the community, planting of fruit trees in public reserves and parks, free fruit in schools, and adding gardening to the school curriculum.
Until then, given the rising cost of vegetables, whether you find kneeling in the soil digging for spuds at the bottom of your garden after a hard day's work one of life's pleasures, or as enjoyable as a pile of washing, you may have no choice if you want to feed your family greens.