Just when restaurants are beginning to experience the benefits of innovation from craft food producers around the country, our politicians produce a piece of interfering legislation that threatens restaurateurs’ most exciting potential. The Food Bill’s attempt to fit all producers into regulatory straitjackets will limit restaurants’ ability to present the best expression of our food-growing capacity.
It has taken more than 50 years for the restaurant sector to develop the skill base in kitchens and service areas that can begin to represent the enormous potential of our natural food resources. All that is needed is an equally creative food production sector that can meet that challenge, but the Food Bill currently before Parliament threatens to compromise that potential by submerging artisan aspirations in a mess of bureaucratic form filling.
New Zealand restaurants have always struggled with this country’s food regulations, which are determined by a culture dominated by industrial food processing. In a country noted for dairy production it took 40 years for local producers to meet restaurant demand for soft cheeses, so that the standard offering on menus in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s was Danish “camembert” and “brie”.
We have engineered a revolution in real food through the unquenchable inspirations of a new generation of food artisans from Invercargill to Hokianga. Now the Food Bill promises more industrial favouritism in the form of costs that small producers struggle to meet, but are neither here nor there for mass market players.
While our Australian cousins have had the benefits of artisan foods for most of their history, for us handmade cheeses, perfectly raised lamb, crème fraiche and readily available venison are recent developments.
So in the interests of better food and better restaurants, the whole hospo sector should have very strong words in the ears of their political contacts that this Food Bill is not in the best interests of the quality food sector in this country. It should at best be stopped and shelved for the foreseeable future, or, in the spirit of moderation and balance, be reopened for more submissions so that it can be turned into a benefit for the whole food industry.
The future for all of us is in how we nurture our aspirations to be the best we can be. The Food Bill in its present form obstructs rather than nurtures. It needs to be remade away from the dominating influence of manipulative bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists to become a tool for innovation, as well as for sensible food safety standards.
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Thank you Keith for your great articles.
Hope more people will be aware of the great danger s of this bill.