Air New Zealand has been lambasted for serving Business Class passengers a burger without meat in it, which is obviously an assault on the NZ economy. Here The Spinoff’s leading New Zealander, Madeleine Chapman, recounts the day in the life of a true patriot 

Every night, before I slide beneath my All Blacks™ duvet cover, I retrieve a sheepskin pouch from my rimu bedside table, open it, extract a piece of medium rare New Zealand beef steak, and take a bite. I do this because I am a patriot.

It’s not that hard to be patriotic when it comes to food, and yet Air New Zealand has failed. They’ve succumbed to the pressures of fringe activist group known as Vegetarians, or People Who Don’t Want To Eat Meat This One Time, and introduced a vegan “Impossible Burger” to not one but two flights in their schedule.

“We’re confident vegetarians, flexitarians and dedicated meat lovers alike will enjoy the delicious taste of the Impossible Burger, but for those who want to stay with the tried and true it will sit alongside our regular selection of menu items,” said an Air New Zealand press release in a blatant attempt to downplay this national incident.

NZ First primary industry spokesman Mark Patterson has spoken for patriots around the country in criticising the promotion of fraudulent cow flesh. “The national carrier should be showcasing our premium quality grass-fed New Zealand red meat, not promoting a product that has the potential to pose an existential threat to New Zealand’s second biggest export earner,” Patterson said.

The impact has been so strong that it’s travelled back in time and led to meat being named New Zealand’s third biggest export earner last year, behind dairy and tourism.

While our beloved country’s national carrier attempts to singlehandedly bring down the economy, we, the people, are not entirely powerless. Former primary industry spokesman Nathan Guy suggested that Air New Zealand “should be pushing our premium products and helping sell NZ to the world”.

I’ll be pushing our premium products through the art of consumption and living a patriotic New Zealand life. Here is my planner for today. You can either follow it to the letter, or admit to yourself that you hate your country.

0600 I wake to the sounds of Mt Eden fauna. I live in Mt Eden in order to be close to Eden Park and the All Blacks.

0700 For breakfast I drink a glass of full-fat milk, expressed from a New Zealand cow, and eat a full block of Kāpiti brie cheese.

0800 On my walk to work I pause for a moment of silence outside Eden Park and vow to fight any charity event wanting to be held there.

0900 My boss Duncan Greive walks by my desk. He’s a vegetarian and has not eaten New Zealand meat in years. I punch him in the face for my country.

1200 For lunch I walk to the local fish and chip shop and order the fish of the day, a meat patty and kūmara fries. I pay $6.50 for two squirts of Wattie’s tomato sauce.

1500 I’ve hit the 3pm slump and need a pick-me-up. Another nameless vegetarian in the office offers me a vegan snack. I throw it on the ground and open a block of Whittaker’s chocolate, pausing only to wonder when they will introduce a special block with chunks of beef.

1700 As I’m leaving the office, I overhear my colleagues saying that thanks to Air New Zealand, they’ve forgotten beef even exists. I call the police.

1730 I fly to Wellington on an Air New Zealand flight. I accept the complimentary cheese and crackers but don’t eat the crackers. I give the child proffering a basket of lollies a death stare and denounce her as a traitor.

1830 For dinner I place two rump steaks on the footpath and let the setting sun cook them for 90 seconds. If your steak’s not still bleeding when you eat it, you’re doing a disservice to your fellow countrymen.

1900 For dessert I eat a pavlova with kiwifruit and meat. I’m allergic to egg whites and kiwifruit but I eat them anyway because I love my country.

2000 An hour is put aside to make overseas calls. I find a directory and call random citizens around the world to tell them about New Zealand beef and lamb.

2100 I bathe in milk like Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman. I haven’t seen the movie because it wasn’t made here but I saw a picture once by accident.

2115 I dry myself with the skin of a possum and brush my teeth with a silver fern.

In the whole day, I do not think about vegetarians or vegans once. In fact, I forget they exist. But now, with Air New Zealand and their despicable unKiwi burger, vegans are being pandered to. They may have to fly to Los Angeles and be in Business Class before October, but they’re being pandered to. Not catered, pandered. Think of the other passengers whose menu will be unchanged. Think of the cows who might miss out on being killed for food. Think of Mark Patterson and Nathan Guy, desperately fighting the good fight. Think of all this and realise there’s only one solution: we need to jail all the vegans.

The Bulletin is The Spinoff’s acclaimed, free daily curated digest of all the most important stories from around New Zealand delivered directly to your inbox each morning.

The impact of forestry on the East Coast came to the fore last month as Tolaga Bay was deluged with offcuts. How did it come to this, asks Michael Smith

Satellite images show how the disaster in the forests at Tolaga Bay on New Zealand’s was a long time in the making. The length of time and the extent of the damage rendered to the East Coast and its vulnerable communities serves as a warning for the government as it plans a new surge in tree planting to meet its promises on carbon.

The images, sourced via Google Earth, illustrate how land use changes from farming to plantation afforestation and wood harvesting have impacted the landscape around Tolaga Bay, near Gisborne.

Covering the period from 1984 to 2016, the images start out showing a landscape laid bare as indigenous forests were cleared in the previous century, followed by increased planting of fast-growing pine plantations through the 1990s and the rapid deforestation as fast-growing softwood timber was harvested.

Responsibility for disaster around Tolaga Bay and the restoration of the land have become contentious issues since torrential rain delivered widespread flooding in the Gisborne area. Concerns have been raised that “slash”, timber left over from logging operations, was forced down the flooded Mangaheia River during the storm.

As the images from 2010 and 2016 illustrate, steadily increasing areas of once-forested land have been laid bare, making the area susceptible to quickly eroding in a high-rainfall event.

The government did have an opportunity to prevent this scenario from playing out when it privatised forests formerly administered by the then Forest Service in the 1980s. The East Coast Catchment Board, which already administered large areas of eroded land in the region, attempted to persuade the government to let it run the Forest Service’s forests. Arguing against taking a purely business strategy, the then chief soil conservator Bob Miller said the government had a duty to support continued afforestation on the steep hills of the region.

An article in the international journal Unasylva in 2001 outlined how the earlier governments had responded to a report in 1967 recommending that “a line be drawn between the more fertile pastoral river flats and the critical headwaters, and that the whole of the latter area be afforested, even if this meant taking pastoral land out of production.”

A new Forestry Corporation established when the Forest Service was corporatised saw the highly erodible land as not being economically viable. Although 36,000 hectares had been planted over a 16-year period up until the planting programme ended in 1987, a further 110,000 hectares needed to be afforested. However, it was also noted that downstream control of rainfall flow-off from the pine forests was minor, due to many of the pines being too young, insufficient afforestation and the build-up of water at the river mouth took decades.

A problem for those now seeking to not only find ways to mitigate carbon but also protect downstream land from exotic forest plantation management system is that, as Rhodes stated then, “Neither Pinus radiata nor Douglas fir is suitable for planting with very active gullies” with both providing only suitable peripheral planting.

The start of an East Coast Forestry Project and the subsequent ownership by private forestry companies saw exotic planting increases, as illustrated in the maps from the 1990s onwards. However, as they grew to maturity, the wood from those trees has been steadily harvested in larger volumes. Government data shows roundwood removals from the East Coast/Hawke’s Bay region has gone from 2.23 million cubic metres in 2002 to 5.1 million cubic metres in 2017, or a 45% increase. However, it should also be noted that the economic benefits of all the trees taken out, deforestation, have been limited in the actual region where originated. In the same period that the trees were chopped down, roundwood/log processing (sawmill, plywood and panel board-making) went from 1.0 million cubic metres to 1.4 million cubic metres, or barely a blip in a 15-year period.

The Labour government has launched a plan to plant a billion trees over the next decade along with the re-establishment of the Forestry Service. Already a tug-of-war has started over what species of trees should best be planted. The forest industry has already put a stake in the ground for fast-growing commercial species, although admitting “natives have their place…where commercial timber extraction is not viable or would risk serious loss of soil” to quote Peter Clark, chief executive officer of PF Olsen Ltd.

The East Coast experience suggests that economic imperatives will always come to the fore unless the new forest gold rush is controlled by environmental rather than strictly economic imperatives. Either way, the decision-makers might keep in mind that the ramifications of their decisions will be tracked from space for future generations to ponder.

Michael Smith is the editor of The Mud, a Rotorua-based news site. He wrote extensively on the forestry industry changes in the 1980s for the National Business Review and was publisher-editor of the Southern Hemisphere Forest Industry Journal