Republished from Vernacular Nicely Said #49
Hello. Good to see you. I just reviewed my subscriber list. Many of you are bots. Oh well, soon enough you’ll be calculating my social credit score and access to public services. To my human readers, I love you.
$40 for a dainty plate of pasta. Really? I don’t care how buttery, velvety, lemony or other y’s. That’s nosebleed.
I gobbled it down and thought fine culinary thoughts.
Time to pay.
“How was your meal, sir?”
Transcendent. Life-changing. I’ve seen God and he’s wearing a toque blanche. I just did the math: $40 buys seventeen and a half packets of Diamond Fettuccine at PAK’nSAVE @ $2.29 for 500g x 17.5 packets = 4+ kgs. I could swim in it, make a garden statue, start a fettuccine-based pension fund.
“Wonderful, see you next time,” I said.
“Goodnight.”
Eating is getting hellishly expensive.
Food prices increased 4% over 2025, according to Stats NZ. Bread is out of control – the price of a loaf rose almost 60%. Milk was up 16% and beef steak 22%. Beef steak! That’s the chewy stuff from the hindquarters.
There’s an obvious fix: Put less in the “fettuccini hole”. Eat a little less, pay a little less.
Turns out we don’t have the stomach for restraint.
Over one third (33.8%) of New Zealand adults (nearly 1.5 million people) are obese, up from 31.3% in 2018/19, marking one of the highest rates in the OECD. Childhood obesity also remains high, with 12.5% of children aged 2–14 years classified as obese, up from 11.4% five years ago.
Yep, we Kiwis punch above our weight on the food eating index.
Fortunately, where willpower is lacking pharmacology will step in.
Food spending drops 5% in households where at least one person is on Ozempic or other GLP-1 drugs. Savoury snacks go down 10%, fast food spending down 8%. The only thing that seems to go up is yoghurt, according to researchers at Cornell University.
Something for Pharmac to ponder: a golden GLP-1 trifecta of shrinking waistlines, increasing household disposable spending, and plumper Fonterra profits.
Fatter we are, but at least we’re not getting shorter, unlike Americans, who have been shrinking since the early 1980s, according to analysis based on 17 NHANES surveys (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey).
The trend parallels diminishing life expectancy.
Height is the new marker of biological wellbeing.
Happy New Year, you fat bastard.
May you and your offspring grow taller.