KEY POINTS:
The most expensive item on the menu at Kim Korkman's upmarket Italian restaurant in Auckland isn't seafood. Or duck. Instead, diners are paying a whopping $40 for a main course of lamb - once the staple of the meat and three veg Kiwi dinner.
"Lamb has become very, very expensive over the last year," Korkman, the owner of Sage says.
He said we may be moving towards the situation in Britain, where customers are prepared to pay a premium for New Zealand lamb.
Federated Farmers meat and wool producers chairman Keith Kelly describes lamb as a "high-protein niche food".
"It has now become more of a luxury than a necessity," he says. "A full leg of lamb on the table has virtually disappeared."
Blame it on the drought - Waikato farmers are having to cull their sheep flocks because they can't afford to feed them, which will hurt ewe stocks in months to come. Blame it on the high cost of lamb internationally and blame it on cheap imports of other meats. Like milk, cheese and butter, the cost of the traditional Kiwi fare is rising - and predicted to soar even further.
Latest figures show butter creamed all other foods in the price-hike stakes, with 500g up by 85 per cent in the year to January, from $2.04 to $3.43, according to Statistics New Zealand.
In the same period, the price of a 1kg block of mild cheddar cheese leapt 63 per cent from $6.42 to $10.47. Milk and yoghurt rose 20 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively.
Lamb shank costs around $13 a kilogram at supermarkets. The price of lamb chops crept up 2.1 per cent in the year to January.
Farmers are being forced to cull hundreds of thousands of sheep as it becomes uneconomic to feed them, with an estimated 270,000 backlog awaiting slaughter at meat works from Timaru to the top of the South Island, and 45,000 in the Wairarapa.
Mike Pedersen, head of Meat and Wool New Zealand, says the drought is leading to a large number of breeding ewes being killed "so over the next two to three years we're going to see [fewer] lambs around".
Restaurant Association president Mike Egan agreed lamb was becoming more exclusive.
"It's a shame, we would love for it to be much more accessible, but it's going to be found more on the menu of more upscale restaurants."
He said pressures on restaurant prices were "irresistible forces". Some restaurants had already lifted prices by 6 per cent.
"I think the marketplace is well aware that prices have gone up across the board - fuel as well as food - so we think [customers] are quite sympathetic," says Egan.
Heavy dairy users, such as pizza restaurants and cafes, would have to put prices up eventually.
But not everyone thinks the rising cost of lamb is a bad thing. Food-writer Peta Mathias said NZ was probably catching up with the world market. "We've been very spoiled here for a long time." Her advice: "Eat less, eat better quality and eat New Zealand. We definitely eat too much meat - you need meat, but only eat it twice a week." She pointed out our high dairy consumption is implicated in our high heart disease and bowel cancer rates.
