Bruce Bisset says vegetables were missing from the barbecue at Dawn Ceremony at the Upper Marae, Waitangi Treaty grounds. Photo / File
Bruce Bisset says vegetables were missing from the barbecue at Dawn Ceremony at the Upper Marae, Waitangi Treaty grounds. Photo / File
Seems there's one thing you can count on for any Waitangi Day gathering, and that's controversy - though this year it was not so much the political power-plays as what was on the barbie.
Images of a smiling Jacinda Ardern and Greens co-leader James Shaw tending mounds of barbecued sausagesand bacon for the prime minister's breakfast at Waitangi were designed for a feel-good effect.
But it has struck a nerve with social activists, both for promoting what are seen as our unhealthy dietary traditions and more particularly because red meat is top of the chain for agricultural climate emissions.
True, out of shot other MPs were serving potatoes and scrambled free-range eggs, but the photo-op was only ever going to be about Jacinda cooking meat.
The point is, regardless of where you stand in the debate about what we should or should not consume, this was a missed opportunity.
After all, Jacinda "this is our nuclear moment" Ardern and James "zero net emissions" Shaw are supposedly leaders in the race to prevent the gathering climate emergency from consuming us all.
What better way to lead – and capture the interest and imagination of ordinary voters – than to barbecue up some fake-burgers and seasonal vegetables instead?
To say, in one piquant shot, "Hey, New Zealand, we're cooking up our future".
Now, before every stock farmer or just plain carnivore out there rises in umbrage, here's a few things you might like to consider.
There are an estimated 70 billion animals being farmed in some fashion globally (including 23 billion chickens). Collectively animal agriculture is responsible for around 18 per cent of human-induced greenhouse-gas emissions – here, it's nearly half our total.
Beef, closely followed by sheep, is the least efficient food to produce, requiring 20 times more land and emitting 20 times more ghgs per gram than edible plant proteins like beans and lentils.
Bruce Bisset
In New Zealand, 32 per cent of land is used for beef and sheep farming and another 10 per cent for dairy, compared to just 1 per cent for fruit, vegetables and berries combined.
And here's the big crunch: synthetic proteins are becoming not only cheaper but fashionable; whereas it took a million dollars to ferment a kilo of artificial "meat" back in 2000, now the cost is almost equivalent to stock at the butcher, and will soon be less – and consumers are becoming willing buyers.
Add in that modelling in a 2018 report for the Biological Emissions Reference Group concluded doubling the size of the country's horticulture sector would reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as full implementation of a methane vaccine, and farming's future direction seems abundantly clear.
Moreover while it's estimated the world's population will need 50 per cent more food when there are 10 billion of us, circa 2050, the only way to meet that demand "traditionally" is to cut down forest for pasture – and land-use change like that adds a lot more ghg emissions to the problem.
But it's not about somehow stopping stock farming – especially as there are sustainable alternatives to the intensive/chemical methods currently widely used – it's about recognising the winds of change are blowing, and adjusting to them.
Kiwi farmers would, if they stopped dragging the chain, be on or ahead of this step-change. They – and given our dependence on agricultural exports, the country as a whole – certainly can't afford to be behind.
Which is why Jacinda and James tending a few vat-grown "steaks" and accompanying veges would have been the smart thing to have seen on their Waitangi barbecue.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet. Views expressed are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.
