When Te Whatu Ora stopped giving toast to new mums, did it rob them of the greatest toast a human being can consume? The only way to find out is via the medium of rankings.

If our health system was a person, it would have a black, asymmetrical mole expanding on its thigh and bright red beetroot shits. New, worrying symptoms pop up on it almost every day. Desperate patients queue outside doctor’s clinics at 6am. Psychiatrists resign after being denied basic safety equipment while doing the job of three people. Dargaville Hospital tells people who turn up to its emergency department after hours to go through their symptoms over Zoom.

Despite this, the country has generally adopted the same approach it has to climate change or White Island’s crater lake turning green on December 9, 2019, which is to make some concerned noises and then muddle on as usual until a crisis arrives which we can’t ignore.

On Friday, that catastrophe struck. In a post on Facebook, a father said his partner had been denied a Milo and toast after giving birth at a Wellington hospital. An email seen by RNZ from hospital services general manager Shane King said he’d cut off the hospital’s bread supply over a $1.5 million overrun on its food budget. He also cited nutritional concerns for new mothers.

Neither option is great. Either our health system is so skint it can’t give two pieces of bread to someone who has pushed a human out of their body, or so paternalistic it’s policing the diets of people who’ve just spent hours in labour. More than that, it’s denying what many believe to be the most profound culinary experience you can have involving toast, and probably food overall.

It’s that latter crime The Spinoff is most qualified to assess. Is it possible to find a toast context better than “just after giving birth”? What is the best toast a person can have? Behold: rankings.

9. The toast you have during an early morning drive to the airport

Things may feel bad now, but here is the toast of excitement. The toast of adventure. The toast of new beginnings.

8. The toast you have hungover

Maybe the only thing in the world that doesn’t make you want to spew, and thus the best thing in the world. 

7. The toast you have just have after a food poisoning-induced chunder

Maybe the only thing in the world that doesn’t make you want to spew, and thus the best thing in the world.

6. The toast you have when you’ve forgotten to bring lunch to work and you remember there is a shared loaf in the freezer

The horizon dims. A great mist gathers on the edges of your vision. Hunger moves inside like a rat gnawing at your pancreas. Surely only starvation and painful death await now. But what is this, under the blackened banana? A loaf of Vogels. Hope rises anew. You will live. You will live.

5. The toast you have in the middle of the night while pregnant or breastfeeding

I have not had either of these experiences but still feel confident and objective in ranking them here, right between chundering and tramping. 

4. The toast you have in a DOC hut after a long day tramping 

Spiritually, the journey to this toast resembles the one you take to a post-birth bread feast. An otherwise ordinary meal is magically infused with the sweet, unreplicable flavour of relief.

However, walking through the bush is easier than giving birth thanks to the scroggin. 

3. The toast you have before a long and likely undercatered and overboozed event

This toast will taste similar to any other slice of cooked bread in a physical sense. In an emotional one, it will be delectable, its gastronomical delights only growing as you watch the foolish, unbreaded saps around you lapse into fits of spewing and oversharing as you stand serene and unbothered, your intestines guarded by an unbreachable layer of Molenberg starch. 

2. The toast you have when you wake up from surgery after sprinting into a drinking fountain during a game of schoolyard touch rugby and lacerating your leg to the bone

This one might be specific to me.

1. The toast you have after giving birth

I like to think of myself as birth-adjacent. I’ve participated in one birth, though my capacity to enjoy toast afterward was limited by my lack of teeth and inability to digest solid food. Since then, I’ve attended two more as an observer. However, at neither of those did I push a human child out of my person. This is, by all accounts, a crucial part of the alchemy that transforms two slices of heated bread into a degustation dinner from the world’s best fine dining restaurant. 

The joy on my wife Rachel’s face when toast arrived 30 minutes after our son’s birth rivalled the happiness she showed upon meeting that son for the first time. She can still remember exactly what receiving, and consuming, the toast felt like. “I have never eaten anything better,” she says. “And I am confident I never will. Give my midwife a Michelin star, as far as I’m concerned.”

She’s not the only person inspired into near-religious fervour by cooked bread in the perfect context. The Spinoff senior editor Madeleine Holden was offered toast and Milo somewhere in the flurry of baby measurements and general activity following a difficult birth. “I can’t remember heaps about it other than that the toast had peanut butter on it and was transcendentally good. Way, way better than anything I’ve eaten in fancy restaurants or my mum’s best home cooking – it was more like a ‘tasting food for the very first time’ kind of buzz,” she says. “The milky Milo absolutely slapped too. The combo was perfect – just good, honest, pure comfort food. That meal is a precious birth memory at least as positive as seeing my baby’s face for the first time.” 

Lawyer and mum-of-three Clare McIlwraith’s experience was also life-changing. “I imagine it feels the same as the feeling one has after pulling Excalibur out of the stone or discovering you’re an X-man with an awesome power. It feels like it’s giving you your life force back.”

In the past few days, scores of councillors, politicians, and ordinary people have expressed similar sentiments. The toast you have after giving birth isn’t just the best toast you can have; it may be the best meal in the world. It’s comfort and kindness at the time you need it most. Any hospital that won’t deliver that meal, whether out of concerns over funding or nutrition, isn’t just in crisis. It’s hurting. It’s burnt out. Maybe two slices of toast and a warm cup of Milo will help.