Dialogue: A slippery slope for these thieves with an appetite

By ELEANOR BLACK

Thieves on the lookout for a fresh challenge, take note. Those old standards - gems, credit cards, artworks, luxury cars, electronics - are passe. There is a fresher commodity to be swiped and it is a lot harder to transport than a fistful of cash.

In Rotorua, burglars threw down the gauntlet last week by making off with $45,000 worth of frozen goods, including three tonnes of butter.

What, you might wonder, does the modern, cholesterol-conscious thief do with three tonnes of butter?

Coat an enormous pan to fry the huge quantities of bacon, chicken, sausages, marinated mussels, beef, lamb and pork pieces they also nicked and give everyone in town a free breakfast?

Sculpt a tableau of giant cows and daisies, perhaps?

Smear it on busy intersections and take candid footage of hapless motorists pumping the brakes as fast as they can?

Not to make light of what must be a devastating loss for the uninsured frozen-food couriers who were storing the goods, but what a lot of trouble the thieves must have gone to for what is now probably rapidly deteriorating booty.

Keeping the more than 330 cartons of poultry, fish and meat fresh would have been challenging enough - police imagine a 40-tonne truck outfitted with a chiller would be the logical means of moving it - but who is going to be dumb enough to buy it from them?

Anyone who might want such large quantities of edibles - grocers, butchers, restaurateurs - would know better than to buy it out of the back of a truck.

If they don't, they deserve to be slapped silly with the missing salmon steaks.

And unless the burglars are compulsive cooks, surely that is far too much butter for personal consumption.

It's hard enough imagining what three tonnes of butter would look like, let alone coming up with ways of using it.

If the foodies who took it have not managed to incorporate it into bulk quantities of sinfully smooth shortbread, flaky croissants, old-fashioned bread and butter pudding, white sauce, chocolate cake or drizzled it on to outsize buckets of popcorn, I am as appalled at the waste as I am at the deed itself.

The police have asked locals to watch out for bulk sales of frozen goods and to report anything suspicious.

But even if the butter and meat are found, would they still be edible? The heist has triggered a health alert because of the mass tummy aches that could result from eating frozen food that has not been properly stored.

The couple who own the burgled business are afraid they might lose it if they cannot find a way to pay for the missing goods. Those responsible for hauling the food away, regardless of whether they manage to host one heck of a barbecue, have potentially bankrupted a blameless pair of businesspeople.

This sort of mean-spirited criminal activity makes me ill - in the purely figurative sense because I can assure you I have not been anywhere near the missing food. It makes you wonder what happened to honour among thieves.

Picking on someone who can't bounce back is cruel. Considering the likely taste of large amounts of the stolen food makes this particular crime all the less palatable.