Remembering the Ribena scandal
Gotta blame it on the juice, baby
Kia ora and welcome to The Weekend brought to you by Coffee Supreme. Christmas gift guide season has started and as much as I enjoy living vicariously through other people’s stuff, I am trying to Covet Fewer Possessions. So, a weekend tip: make a playlist of music (and/or great YouTube videos, favourite movies etc.) for someone you love. I made my sister a summer playlist this week and I suspect I’ve listened to it more than she has, so it’s a gift that you both give and receive. If you don’t have Spotify, fair enough. A playlist can be handwritten or typed out too: I once received a beautiful list from a friend of five graphic novels, five books, five albums and five movies that I could discover then talk to him about. It was delightful. So that’s gifts sorted — now, to Ribena, rapid delivery and dollars for votes.
-Shanti Mathias, staff writer
The other blackcurrant juice scandal
Blackcurrant and pine bark juice company Ārepa found itself in hot water (juice?) recently, when the Food Standards Code said it could no longer link its health claims to L-theanine in its flagship product. It reminded Live Updates Editor Stewart Sowman-Lund of another blackcurrant juice scandal — when a teenage science fair experiment revealed that Ribena didn’t have enough vitamin C in it to justify its health claims. One of those school scientists, Jenny Suo, is now a TVNZ journalist. “Suo remembers feeling quite overwhelmed by her newfound fame in her “really small” teenage world. On one occasion, she recalls being interviewed, in her school uniform, for the Herald. For the story, they had to go to the supermarket and buy some Ribena. “I remember the woman scanning it and looking at us like ‘I thought they said this was bad’,” Suo remembers in an interview with The Spinoff.
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Do political donations make a difference?
How much does it cost to get elected to parliament? We’ve already looked into money spent on Facebook, Google and YouTube; data journalist Emma Vitz has now examined the overall donations (that we know about — the amount of smaller donations aren’t publicly accessible until parties release their returns early next year). Most interesting is the amount of money donated per vote; Act had much more money than other parties, with $20 of donations per vote, while Labour and Te Pāti Māori received less than $2 per vote. “There are a number of ways to interpret these results. On the one hand, rightwing parties are backed by more money. On the other, Act has failed to translate that into the number of votes it was hoping for,” Emma writes. The full story has more detail.
Number of the week: 31 minutes
I hate going to the supermarket; the overwhelming choice and necessity of wandering the aisles week after week often makes me want to lie down on the floor for a rest. So I completely understand the appeal of near-instant grocery delivery, where your items arrive within an hour. Milkrun, owned by Countdown, is now delivering in New Zealand cities, getting your food to you in an average of 31 minutes. It has a shadow side. “Milkrun is entirely reliant on the real world: people growing food, workers processing and packaging it in factories, truck drivers ferrying it around the country; workers packing shelves while others weave through stores following instructions from a computer. But the brand itself is a digital one, blank and seamless.”
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Remember the chocolate milk chaos?
It’s 2014. Your parent has just come home from the supermarket, you’ve just come home from school. In their hands is the talk of the nation: Lewis Road Creamery chocolate milk, plucked straight out of the restocking trolley by a horde of cocoa and dairy fanatics. For Remember When this week, Alice Neville resurrects a zany New Zealand moment which for once I was both alive and in this country for. “The roads were clogged by milk fiends on wheels, pursuing their dairy prize like people possessed. Folk outside of Auckland and Wellington begged to know when it would make it to the regions. Finally, on Wednesday, 8 October, the milk launched in selected New World and Countdown stores in the North Island, and shit got real.”
Sad podcast corner: After eight years, The Real Pod says goodbye
Security threat? No one knows who holds the keys to NZ cities
“The key to the city is one of the most random public honours that can be awarded in New Zealand. From council to council, even from mayor to mayor, there is very little consistency in how – and upon whom – the honour is bestowed,” writes Calum Henderson. After filing many, many requests for information with the nation’s city councils, Calum has discovered that most councils hardly keep track of who has the keys to the city. Here’s more on this shocking revelation. “What I thought would be a simple administrative task ended up being anything but. I had unwittingly set in motion a hugely time-consuming wild goose chase, sending council staff up and down the country on fruitless searches through their city’s archives and beyond…. Further searches revealed keys that councils were unaware of. One city that told me it had never granted a key to the city had actually given one to Paul Holmes.”
Alex Casey attends New Zealand’s biggest agricultural show
Everything else
Understanding the issue of modern day slavery – which happens overseas and in New Zealand
When we don’t have a government, the best opinion writers take what they can get, like explaining how to ride a scooter and performing close analysis on a photo
I have been really appreciating the mundanity and tragedy in The Guardian’s ongoing Gaza Diary
Guess what’s back? Covid🥴🦠🤪
This peek into book festival director Lyndsey Fineran’s reading list has me in awe of her literary gossip
This poem about tui learning phone ringtones haunts me and I finally did some decent internet digging to find it again!
I WILL click on anything with the headline “buy less stuff”; this piece about the limits of “deinfluencing” online is very useful
As a victim of a Soviet era cookbook (which I love to share with my friends), Help Me Hera’s advice this week was excellent
Traditionally, Japanese haiku have been linked to the seasons. But the climate crisis is changing that
Why not make Te Aro park the heart of Wellington? Also, which Wellington laneway is the best?
Very good intensive longread on the fight to make denser housing possible in New Zealand (the same publication, Works in Progress, just released a fun article about cocktail advancements too! 🍸)
Podcast corner: good wee introduction to political DRAMA in the UK this week (aka: Guess who’s back? The former prime minster!)
Chaos and craic at the Corr’s Christchurch concert
In the Cost of Being this week, a couple living on a yacht unpack their expenses
