Clipping the wet ticket

One news story caught my eye (SSTimes) over the weekend that should make anyone sit up and take notice.

"Free water to New Zealand homes could dry up if a major water lobby group gets its way.

In a policy document to be released this week, Water New Zealand argues that more of the country's local authorities should be charging for water, a move that they say would slash demand, reduce costs for councils and benefit the environment."

If you haven't heard of "Water New Zealand", it's probably about time you had a look. They want to ration your water on price (and make money while doing it). Their Board is made up of people who appear to have backgrounds in infrastructure for profit.

I'm no enemy of profit or genuine entrepreneurial activity. But I don't think a grab for control of a public resource is even remotely entrepreneurial. It's the same old clip-the-ticket monopoly behaviour we know from the past.

Water New Zealand's web site is full of interesting and worthy stuff. Publications. Standards. Codes of practice. You can nominate an environmental champion. All the 'best practice' gloss is there and there is no small amount of greenwash.

But underneath it all is a desire to control and profit from everything to do with water.

Remember the monopoly import licences that used to be awarded to cronies? Allowing this group and the companies they represent to take control of public water resources and charge us through the nose for it (using infrastructure we paid for) would be a return to those days. Make no mistake, they won't bring $5 to the table. Any money they "invest" would be borrowed and we'd all pay the interest AND the princicipal AND a healthy profit, too.

Water New Zealand claim what they propose is good for the environment, lowers costs to councils and reduces demand for water. Clearly, they aren't pitching to the average Kiwi. They are pitching to the National Party and to the ACT Party Minister for Local Government, Rodney Hide. ACT's policy on water is to offer it on a fully commercial basis.

Soory foks, but water is too important to remove from the realm of public accountability. We've already seen - globally - how greedy cheats stuff their pockets with shareholders' and stakeholders' cash.....even AFTER they drove their businesses into the ground.

The water industry has made their move. They want control of a monopoly resource so they can clip the ticket and ration your water. Let's see what the government now does. Kiwis would be insane to allow these of people anywhere near control of their water. I would hope National be less than a one-term government over this issue alone if they moved to support Water NZ's proposals.

Mid-week miscellaneous: Buses, Food, Iran

The 973 and 974 buses were full yet again today, so people seem to be sticking with public transport. Bouquets to Birkenhead Transport for stepping up with enough buses to make sure everyone gets on one sooner rather than later.

It rained every 15 minutes in Albany, all day long.....I swear. I bought an umbrella.

Went to Valentines near Wairau Valley for dinner with the family. Fourth time in my life I've ever been to a Valentines, and never the same one twice. As it happened, it was "Curry night" and I'm a sucker for chicken korma, butter chicken, chicken tika masala....etc....etc. Keep'em coming. Today I eat. Tomorrow I....don't.

Read in the news that US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, has gone all warm and fuzzy toward Iran. She has even given Iran two more weeks to stop enriching uranium or they will face the consequences. As an incentive to comply within the two weeks, Rice promised Iran would not face any MORE sanctions if they do.

This struck me as weirdly aligned with domestic bullies who promise not to beat their victims any harder or more often than usual if they do as they are told.

Rice's offer seems guaranteed to fail and that appears to be the US's intention. They tried for a whole week to be nice to the Iranians....even promising not to punish them any more than they already are (for things no one has proven they did).....and they got nowhere. What a bunch of charlies. So the US is now back to the previously scheduled build-up to war. The whole 'play nice' thing was apparently nothing more than a stunt, a rush PR job to declare diplomacy a failure.

Let's not forget that the US has never presented any proof at all that Iran actually has a nuclear weapons program.

The US's apparent timetable, commented on by me in several posts in recent months, for some sort of conflict (US or Israel, or both) with Iran in August or shortly after, appears to be back on track. Just in time to get in the way of the US elections.

Oh yeah...and Happy Birthday to me.

Canola oil

I hesitate to bring this up. It may be a post you'd rather not read. At the same time, I want to get some idea of whether or not I'm alone on this one.

I hate canola oil.

I know it is supposed to be the best oil from your heart's point of view, but I don't like it and avoid eating it whenever possible.

I suspect canola oil is not harmful to your heart because canola oil isn't actually food. It's oil. It has other applications as industrial lubricant, apparently. I can understand why if that's the case. As such, I suspect you don't actually digest it....or at least a good portion of it.

My experience is that it passes right through you, unmolested by digestion.

Now if you're eating a little amid a larger body of food, you may never notice this. But if you should eat something in which canola is a major ingredient, you may, if you're like me, find that later on you have oil coming out where you don't really want it to be coming out.

Not nice. Hence my aversion to it. Anyone else come to the same conclusion?

For context: I do not have this problem with olive, sunflower or rice bran oils. Only canola.

Ginger Oatmeal and Food Prices

Following up on the ginger tea post of last week: This morning I made my usual bowl of oatmeal. But instead of plain old water, I used the left-over ginger tea in a pot I had made last night. Well worth trying! It certainly adds a bite to the daily dose of oats. With a bit of brown sugar added, the overall effect was a useful addition to my breakfast bag of tricks.

Maybe tomorrow it will be ginger pancakes. I'm also thinking about "egg nog" custard with nutmeg. Might put it on the pancakes.

Sunday morning, we went to "Fruit World" on Mokoia Road. We left with a swag of fruit and veggies for the week for the four of us, and the total bill was $54.47. I'm still struggling to work out why some people think fruit and veggies are expensive.

Comparing and contrasting, we went to Woolworths at Northcote Centre and had a look at the meat. The lean lamb leg steaks were $22.99 / kg. Enough for two meals for four people, where meat wasn't the main event, was over $15. Now that IS expensive. The rest of the meat prices were similarly off the wall....so we resolved to find someone with a lamb or two who would be happy to sell it to us so we could have it home-killed. Might not be any cheaper in the end, but it can't be any more expensive. I don't know why our domestically-supplied meat has to go to grain-fed prices when our livestock aren`t grain-fed. Is our lamb in such heavy demand that we will be exporting all of it if we don`t pay the 'global' price locally? For now, I'm boycotting the usual lamb meat supply chain and going looking for an alternative.

Our strategy of doing as East Asians do and adding small or moderate amounts of fibre / nutrition / protein to a core dish of rice seems to be paying off. The food is good and the cost is low per meal. Yet we do not feel we are any worse off for it. If anything the revised cuisine is generating curiosity and stirring imaginations into action.

The other popular addition to the household cuisine has been homemade hummus. The litre I make each Monday lasts about a week. It costs under $4 to make the litre, which is huge saving over buying hummus in the shops. The family most often uses as a substitute for butter or margarine in sandwiches or as a spread on toast. The weekly doner kebabs (spiced and diced lamb or pork with hummus, yogurt, chopped lettuce or spinach, grated carrots and diced onions wrapped in a tortilla) also see the hummus well-used. I call that perfect food. Low fat, filling, diverse....and cheap.

It has taken me almost 50 years, but I think I'm beginning to find the fun in food. Getting it at a reasonable price has added spice to the game.

Thinking about food

I watched some of the TV coverage over the past few weeks about rising food prices. One segment on either Campbell Live or Close Up showed a number of women at a supermarket. What was in their trollies was worth noting. I saw lots of bags of chippies and bottles of soft drinks. One had stacks of meat. All were complaining about high food prices.

Chippies must be the world's most expensive way to buy corn or potatoes. The price per kg must be close to $12 or more when bought in bags of 250gms or 300gms for $3-$4. You can get 5kgs of potatoes for half that or less. Leaving aside the obvious health issues inherent in eating deep-dried, salted foods, you can easily and cheaply make your own chippies with a cooker and a bottle of oil and a sharp knife and a flat tray in the oven to finish off. Re-use the oil. It has to be a lot cheaper than buying the packaged stuff and you or the family can have fun making it.

I didn't see any rice in any of the trolleys. Last week I bought a 10kg bag of rice for $20.79. It's gone up a lot. But it's still cheap food. One and a half cups of rice (225gms) will provide enough rice as the core of a meal for our family of four. That 10kg bag will provide enough rice for just over 40 meals (160 servings) at a cost of 50 cents each meal (12.5 cents / serving).

Add some fresh greens: silver beet ($3 / bag) or spinach or beans or peas - perhaps a little of each and maybe some of it from your own garden. Silver beet grows like a weed almost anywhere. Two modest chicken breasts ($6) diced and cooked to your taste can be put on top or served on the side. That's supper for four people for less than $10, even including a small amount of oil and some spices. Silver beet is especially tasty cooked in a small amount of water, a tiny bit of butter and with a bit of pepper over it and the juice of half a lemon.

Breakfast? I buy a 1.5kg bag of oatmeal ($4-$5) and make porridge. Oatmeal is another awesome food. Good for your heart and providing energy for hours...and cheap. 1 cup will make two servings. That's 20 servings in a single bag....or about 20-25 cents each.

"But it's boring!" Doesn't have to be. Add whatever you like. Fresh fruit, perhaps. Cut up an apple and cook it with the oatmeal and maybe add a spoonful of brown sugar and a dash of your favourite spice (cinnamon?)...and it's no longer boring porridge. They charge $20 for a bowl of this via room service in a top hotel. You get it for barely a dollar for two servings....including the apple.

Compare that to buying a 500gm box of commercial cereal for $4-$6 and then the kids have 1 or 3 bowls each for breakfast and afternoon tea and it's gone by the next day. Not cheap.

Lunch? A sardine or salmon sandwich (a spoonful of fish, spread on bread) with your favourite green(s) and some homemade hummus instead of butter or marg. I make 1 *litre* of hummus every week for about $4. In the stores they charge you the same for 150gms and I find it much more watery than my home made stuff. Or the cheaper ones use loads of canola oil...and I can't digest that. I don't think anyone can. It passes through, untouched, (Good for your heart! Not food at all!) and I *hate* having an oily bottom all day. Seriously yuck! The chickpeas are $2.79 for 500 grams and that will make two batches. Tahini and (rice bran or sunflower or olive) oil and a couple of cloves of chopped garlic and a few lemons make up the rest of the cost of the hummus. You do need a powerful food processor. Blenders can't do this. Add an apple and / or banana to your lunchtime sandwich...and you've nailed it for barely $2 per person. .

Try to avoid anything ready to eat in a package. You pay through the nose for it. Obvious exceptions are canned fish, bags of bulk goods and liquids like milk. Juice is far too sweet for me and I much prefer to eat the fruit. I have diabetes in the family tree and tend to avoid sweet things.

You can have meat with every meal. But do what Asians do and treat it like a condiment or spice adding flavour to the cheaper stuff rather than being the main event and costing you an arm and a leg...and clogging your heart with it.

Horror story: I recently bought 1.1 KGs of lamb shoulder chops at about $6.50 / kg. After I had cut out the bones and the fat (850gms), I had 250gms of lean meat left. So I really paid roughly $26 / kg for the "cheap meat". Wow! Next time, I'll get the lamb leg steaks for $16 / kg - with no bones or fat - and save myself some money. Two small steaks for $5-$6 dollars (maybe less) all diced and spiced and cooked real nice, will be enough for the 4 of us.

Cookies! My daughter makes most of ours and it takes her maybe 20 minutes to make a nice, hot batch of steaming fresh choccy chip biscuits the size of your palm and a fraction of what you pay for the (mostly crud) versions in the shops.

Even better, eating this way is healthier for you.

Bottom line? If food is too expensive, you're probably buying too much of the wrong stuff. Potatoes are also very cheap and you can do lots of interesting things with them. Eggs are relatively cheap, too and good for you in moderation.

It's worth thinking about changing what you've been doing if you've been paying through the nose for 'almost-food'. The food I've described above is no less tasty and a LOT cheaper than chippies and soda drinks.

All we have to do is think......and the problems fall over like dominos.

Good food is still cheap.

Peak Everything? NZ needs a population policy.

I spent a good chunk of this evening trying to get to the bottom of the growing food shortages.

Biofuels have come under fire for shifting grain grown for food into use as fuel. That means less food to go around so prices go up. The US farmers who were persuaded to grow corn for biofuels are happy about being paid well for a change and are moving to defend their new-found incomes. The "National Corn Growers Association" says "corn is not the culprit" and points the finger at higher oil prices and the big margins added to food prices by processors, distributors and retailers after it leaves the farm gate. They use an almost comical example of a box of corn flakes to illustrate the point. Yes, that must be it. People all over the world can't afford boxes of corn flakes any more. Admittedly, their press release is intended for domestic US consumption. In a global context, it comes across (to me) as myopic and self-serving.

There is a spider's web of side-effects and unintended consequences radiating out from almost every measure related to food or fuel. We could spend all day fascinating ourselves with how growing more corn in the US has reduced soy production there, creating opportunities for Brasilian soy farmers who are themselves displacing cattle in the Mato Grosso. The owners of the displaced cattle are felling more rainforests and the cycle repeats. Up to a point. Two years after the trees are cut down, the rain seems to stop falling. No more rain if there's no more rain forest. Not just in Brasil, but everywhere downwind of the declining forest cover. Apparently, those forests seeded rain clouds for places as far away as Europe. The effects of human activity cascade on and on, touching pretty much everything because we are now numerous enough that almost anything we all do can and does have global consequences. We have scale, as they say.

This very brief vid on human population growth and the role oil has played is well worth watching.



What does all that mean? To me, it sounds like the feeling you get when you hit a sharp curve driving at too high a speed. You have reduced your margin of error to a razor's edge and almost ANY perturbation or pebble on the road can turn your finely balanced transit of the corner into disaster and see you through the guard rail and over the edge. Ooops. No 'replay' button in the real world. We have grown used to not being prudent.

Except in our case, speed is actually the increasingly intense pressure our growing population is placing on every system we touch. Water, air, soil, forests, fisheries, energy....all of it...and more. On one level, the core problem behind most others is staringly obvious. There are roughly 70 million more mouths to feed each year than there were last year. The human population of the world continues to rise and that is affecting everything one way or another. We need more food every year this remains the case.

Problem. Soils are degrading. Energy and fertiliser to produce food are rapidly rising in price. Demand is outstripping supply. Water is becoming insufficiently available in more places as rains stubbornly refuse to fall or there just isn't enough of the stuff to grow people as well as their food.

The whole picture adds up to a level of human activity that isn't sustainable. The core reason is human population, with a supporting cast of myriad subsidiary effects that are in turn causes of other effects.

Kelpie Wilson of Truthout.org has written an excellent article ("More food is not the answer") on the the present situation. The article is prompted, in part, by a recent United Nations report by the IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development).

Ever heard of "Peak Phosphorous"? Read the article.

New Zealand doesn't have a population policy that I'm aware of. If it does exist, it is rarely talked about. We should begin that debate as soon as possible and take the time to have a real debate about it and let people think on it. How many Kiwis would be enough? Almost everyone I've talked to says somewhere between 5 and 6 million. Is that reasonable?

As it is, the issue of population rarely comes up and when it does some idiot or other automatically assumes any move to look at population consciously will lead to forced sterilisation or other nonsense. Another idiot will then tell you to "off yourself if you're so worried about it". Not much rational debate to be found in that sort of atmosphere. But it does need to begin.

Water Quality and Instant Coffee

Here's the YouTube version:


I used to be a fanatic about drinking "real" perked coffee. Grinding the beans, preparing the percolator, savouring the result. Wonderful. A weekend morning ritual.

Then, we shifted house and moved to an area where the people we socialised with actually preferred instant coffee. ANY instant coffee. None of that perked muck for them, thanks. Oh dear.

I've drunk most of the cheaper instant coffees at one time or another. You know the ones, "coffee dust". Granules so fine a sneeze at the wrong time can blow the contents of half a bag (jars are too posh) around your kitchen in a tic. Worse, they make me bleed out of my bum. Something about the colouring. "DB Double Brown" used to do the same.

You probably didn't want to know that, but these are things grown-ups should get out into the open in case we all secretly experience bleeding arses after cheap instant coffee, but were too afraid to discuss it......and the rivers and seas run red as a result of our silence on the matter.

To cut a long story short(er), I discovered "Nescafe Gold". It's more expensive than the usual instant coffees. It may well be the most expensive one of the all. I don't know. The point is, that of all the instants I've tried, I found I could make a "latte" with Nescafe Gold that was good enough and close enough to the real thing to satisfy me. It's a smooth instant that goes down very nicely all things considered....and rivers and seas remain their usual colour - an added bonus.

Then, in December, we shifted to Auckland. one of the first tasks one does in a new town is roll around to the local supermarket and stock up on supplies. These included included Nescafe Gold instant coffee. Immediately, from the first sip, I noticed my instant coffee tasted odd. Sort of a burnt taste. Not at all what I had come top expect after 4 years of drinking the same beverage. After several more cups, I decided it much be a bad batch or perhaps they had changed the way they made it, so I called Nestles 0800 consumer line (How often does anyone do that?!). They told me that they had not changed anything about the product and asked for the batch number so they could trace it back and record any other complaints that might arise. They sent me a cheque for $10 to cover the cost of the jar of coffee that had not lived up to my expectations. That was very decent of them. I was impressed. But my coffee still tasted like crap.

I cashed the cheque and bought another jar. Same result. Coffee tastes bitter and "burnt".

At about this time, I was standing in the shower (hours later....not really at the same time) and noticed the fairly strong smell of chlorine. Like in a swimming pool. I wasn't used to this as our previous house had used water from a domestic bore which we then filtered several times and radiated to kill bugs until it was crystal clear and tasted very nice. No chlorine, nothing....just water and any very tiny sediment that managed to get through the carbon filter.

I checked the Internet for information about chlorine levels in Auckland and other major cities. Auckland stacks up well. Enough to keep the water lurg-free, but not anywhere near the level thought of as risky. The issue of chlorine affecting water taste had been widely discussed and there were several solutions offered ranging from refrigerating the water for drinking to reduce the prominence of the taste, through to filtration systems of various types, complexity and cost.

OK...I had learned enough.



Maybe the chlorine in Auckland tap water was affecting the taste of instant coffee? Checking the web, I found that I could buy a "Brita" jug with a small carbon filter for $39 from Farmers or Countdown that would let me remove almost all the chlorine from about 1.5 litres of water at a time.

I tried it and it worked. The drinking water tastes much better and the Nescafe Gold Instant Coffee has been restored to its usual taste.

Feeling guilty about the $10 Nestles had sent me, I called them back and told them what i had found. I suggested that this might have a marketing impact for them in cities with chlorinated water supplies as their product did not taste as good as it should if there was much chlorine around. The woman I was speaking to seemed genuinely interested and thanked me for going to the trouble to find all this out and reporting it back. She said I could keep the $10. Whew!

Enough typing. Time for a cuppa.