Learning difficulties

I have intended to write on this topic for some time but….. Anyway, I have decided that I shall just start writing, and post whatever I have written, whether it is to my satisfaction or not, and then go back and edit it later. Those of you already in the know, will know that I have just demonstrated metacognitive knowledge of myself, the nature of the task and the special advantages conferred on blog owners. Lucky me.

The current focus of my interest in learning difficulties is….. dyspraxia. (note: ask susan how to do one of those clever little in-text hyperlinks to a definition). Basically, dyspraxia describes a whole range of difficulties that arise when the brain does not co-ordinate planning with movement in the most efficient way. So, it includes the clumsiness some people exhibit when they reach out to catch a ball, or the inability of a child to write ON a line, or the lack of spatial awareness of someone who accidentally sits on your lap instead of on the seat beside you. Of course, it also includes many other things that range from inconvenient to disabling and life-threatening.

Why am I so interested in dyspraxia? In part, because it is so common in its milder forms. Also, we tend to blame dyspraxia on the sufferer as if they choose to be clumsy, or messy, or forgetful, or disorganised. This is so unfair because who chooses to have a disability? Of course another reason for my interest is that because since it is a LEARNING difficulty, it can be remediated by teaching and I am a teacher.

Primary and Kindergarten teachers do lots of things to help children learn to co-ordinate their brain with their movement. If this was always enough, I probably would not be interested in dyspraxia. The fact that it is not enough for some children. That Secondary teachers do little, and know less, about dyspraxia is rather shocking because we see its effects everyday and spend a whole lot of time nagging and punishing students for things they just can’t do much about themselves.

We don’t penalise students or yell at them for not being able to read, or do Maths (well we are not supposed to!). We know that if they can’t read, it’s not their fault and it’s our job to teach them those skills or refer them to someone else who will. What about students who can’t estimate time, so don’t know how long it will take them to get to their next class and are therefore often late?

How about students who are given a multi-step task and can’t sequence and so don’t know which instruction to start with and then what to do next? At this point you may be saying, “Well, surely they know to start at the top and work their way down the list?” Your first wrong assumption might have been that the teacher wrote down the instructions. The second was that the student knew there was a top. The third was that it is automatic to work down a list systematically. The fourth was that the student realised that the items on the list were connected in any way. The fifth might have been that the student had a clue that he was actually supposed to do something related to those written or spoken words.

Of course, most students in an average ability high school class can indeed follow multi-step written instructions. They don’t interest me, except in regard to what they do need, i.e clear instructions that are accessible to them as they work through the task. This is called “good practice”. I am interested in the students for whom “good practice” is not enough because they need more practise…duh…lame Englsh teacher pun.. in the micro-skills needed to develop the big skill of following written instructions.

A divergence here, sorry this is not good practice but…this is how my mind works when I am not teaching.

At my SPELD course recently, I asked why it was that even though kindergarten and primary teachers are drilled in the Vygotskian vocabulary of scaffolding and apprentice ship, they let children write stories full of spelling and grammar mistakes? My tutor’s answer was that the teachers are misunderstanding the concept of “first steps”. In other words, they see the end product , for example a magazine article, and think that the first step for the children is to write sentences. I fact the first steps are to form letters, to spell common words, to use punctuation etc. A master would not ask an apprentice to make a complex finished article, unaided, until he was sure that all the steps had been mastered. So, why do we ask students to write “authentic” pieces unaided when they can’t spell, or punctuate?

Back to the hobbies

This one isn’t mine. See how quickly you can work out who it is…

 

My unusual hobby

A strange obsession I share

with my parents

is the almost religious fervour

and respect I give

to the few minutes segment

of the weather forecast

at the end of the 6 pm TV One News

and it must be TV One

because TV3 no longer

gives the national temperature highs

(for the day that has been)

throughout the different centres of NZ.

For the initial few seconds

as the highs for the day

appear consecutively

up the South Island map

I quickly make my estimate

of today’s temperature,

then assess my success

when the actual number appears.

Next I wait for my city

to appear in the forecast

for tomorrow −

the trap

is that a moment’s distraction

or absent thought will cause you

to miss your centre’s forecast.

This is an opportunity for sabotage

that is traditionally seldom missed

by my now 20-something daughter

when she is around.

The closing stages

are a quick scan

on behalf of friends

who live in two Australian cities,

followed by a final fix −

the visual predictions of the weather

for the next few days in my city

and suddenly

my compulsive hobby is over −

until 24 hours later.

Localism

I recently watched The Bra Boys, a movie about a notorious surf culture in Australia. I guess that if I had to identify the theme of this movie it would be a defence of localism, from the smallest unit of family through to the larger concepts of geography, social class and the international surfer brotherhood.

The most noticeable and least surprising aspect of this film is that there is little female presence, apart from the saintly grandma. This is the meta-level of localism and is not addressed because it assumed.

The next layer of localism is that of geography..the old concept of locals gathering together to defend their scarce resources from outsiders. That’s why we have borders and passports and workpermits. I guess the interesting thing about geographical localism is that the locals get to let people into their territory when they need them. There is strength in numbers after all. The Bra Boys made a big show of pointing out that they were not racist and that when they had to defend their beach in 2005, half the defenders were “ethnic”.

Large groups don’t seem to satisfy the need for security so people divide into smaller and smaller units and in this case the next layer is the “boys” who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and hangout at the beach. There was a lot of defence of this type of localism in the movie. The argument goes that no-one else takes care of these kids and everyone is against them so they have to gang up together and take care of each other. This leads to all sorts of bonding rituals involving drinking, violence, vandalism, etc. This is a guy culture after all.

I am not going to describe the over micro groups, which were basically based on age, or proximity to the Abberton brothers because it is all just part of a continuum.

The tightest grouping in the movie was the brothers. It was explained that they took care of each other because their mother didn’t. There was the saintly “ma” but it appeared that all she provided was food and a place to hangout. The “boys” created their own culture and group structure based on the imperative of being one’s brother’s keeper. Brothers can do no wrong… as long as they are still “brothers”.

This is what interests me about the movie. That it reflects what I see in my own very “local” town. After all, this is the town where people ask “What school did you go to?” and where house prices are determined by school zoning. We all know about the Old Boys’ network and Rangi girls. This is the hardest place to get a teaching job and it is socially acceptable to beat up tourists and tell coloured immigrants to go home. That last sentence wasn’t incongruous because “having an accent” is sufficient evidence of incomptence in a teacher…unless it is a white accent.

My town works on “knowing someone”. That’s how one gets a job, into a school, a non-notified building consent, police diversion, etc. If it goes too far we call it corruption but we are the ones who define “too far”. That makes us powerful, but also desperate to stay in the “in-group”. This need to be the innermost of the inner group and immune from being cast out into the unprotected “other” is why people participate in bullying, either actively or by turning a blind eye. Broad geographical localism may convey rights of residence in a locality but so many other rights are conferred by smaller groups.

I saw a news headline this morning, quoting a US soldier as saying “Another dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.” The fact that he feels it is socially acceptable to say that is evidence of localism. One doubts he would say “Another dead American is just another dead American”. That is what Islamic terrorists say.

The film justified localism on the grounds that there have always been tribes. This is true. My society is built on tribalism, and even worse as an immigrant society it is made of groups still actively competing for advantage and redefining what it is to “belong”.

I am not going to end with any hippy “brotherly love” philosophy because the effect of the movie was to subvert the “I am my brother’s keeper” message by taking “brother” literally and establishing concentric circles of “other”.

Two hobbies in one post

The first hobby is something I should be ashamed of…but of course I am not. It is getting other people to do things for me. Blame it on the “youngest-child syndrome”. So, here is my big sister writing about one of her hobbies.

My name is Jaybee, I am a comper. Several years ago I was started on my habit by my sister’s teenage children. They told me how they won t-shirts, CD’s etc on the internet.

I thought that it looked like fun so when my son brought a computer into our house I saw my chance .I had never used a computer before, but my son said ”just go for it”, so I did.

First I would get up early in the morning and do all the competitions I could before my son was up and about. When my son left home leaving the computer behind my habit grew, now I could use the computer anytime I wanted. The more competitions you enter the more prizes you win. People say that I am lucky, but it’s just persistence really. I now have a lap-top and broadband which allows me to enter more competitions. When I joined a competition site I learnt about lots of new competitions. Some of the local compers meet up once a month for a cuppa. Compared with me they are big time compers. I don’t save all my grocery dockets in case they are needed for competitions, I don’t search in rubbish bins and I wouldn’t sneak out at night and take a pizza box out of a neighbours re-cycling pile in order to enter a competition.

If you are wondering what I do with the prizes the answer is: find good homes for them.

Some get saved for birthdays or Christmas, which was my original intention. However most are quickly given to whoever I think needs, or would appreciate, them. Is my habit hurting anyone? I hope not. Could I quit? Maybe, if I won Lotto!

Kia Kaha

Jaybee

Vicarious travel

This, in no specific order of importance, is the third of my hobbies. I am mentioning it now because I have indulged in it rather a lot this weekend and writing about it is preferable to going out into a Christchurch morning that is grey with icy fog still at 9am. As long as I keep the curtains closed I can be somewhere other.

One of the most delightful things about vicarious travel is that there are so many ways of doing it nowadays. Letters are still good, of course, and give a vintage thrill. Putting a hand in the letterbox and finding a plump little envelope nestled among the bills and circulars. Familiar handwriting, foreign stamps, maybe a little battered and stained, that letter has been places. What next? Rip it open there and then and read it on the front lawn or take it inside and consume it slowly with a cup of coffee on the sofa? At this time of year that is a no-brainer! After that, the touch and smell of the paper….but that is another hobby and maybe I shall invite one of my special readers to write about THAT one.

Logically, we have postcards next. Another retro thrill but not as rare or endangered as the letter because postcards are one of the least demanding forms of communication. Any idiot can go into a tourist shop, or airport or convenience store even and pick up a postcard with a local image or cliche and scribble a few words in really big letters about how they are there now and bought this card for you and hope you are well and will see you soon. I suppose the purchase of stamps is an added stress but, on the other hand, postcard sellers often also sell stamps and have a handy postbox nearby. But then who am I, in the comfort of my livingroom, to know how hard it is to send a postcard in China, for example. I hope it doesn’t sound as if I don’t appreciate postcards because I do. They have their own distinctive letterbox presence, sleek and defined and cool to the touch like my new HelloMoto phone. They look good propped up against the computer screen too and that of course transitions nicely into the next paragraph.

The internet. It could be listed as a hobby by itself I suppose but I think of it as the master enabler of millions of little hobbies brewing like staphylococci and reaching out its tentacles into all the crevices of our lives. (Mixing metaphors as a hobby, ya reckin?). It is so hard to know where to start writing about the internet, isn’t it? Today the topic is vicarious travel so I will stop wandering about and map out the remainder of this post, set a course and head for journey’s end (horrible thought that, an end to the journey). There it is again, meandering, wandering in circles (is that really because we have one leg longer than the other) full of sidetracks.

Email is the one form of internet travel. The good thing about it is that it is personalised (unless the sender thinks it is like one of those appalling Xmas newsletters where acquaintances feel the need to describe their beautiful family’s achievements for the year inside a customised card they have printed out themselves on A4 paper and signed in ink with a personalised message so you feel you are not just the recipient of a Microsoft Word template). Again, a disclaimer, the occasional group email is perfectly welcome, as long as it is not the only email and the group is not too big. “Dear family” is fine when “family” means only 2 or 3 people are sharing the email that I know was actually written for me and has been copied to them too so they won’t feel left out.

Blogs can also provide vicarious experences of many kinds, including travel. I suppose the only drawback is that the writer has to sit in an internet cafe somewhere and write the thing instead of going out and experiencing the things I want to read about (not internet cafes by the way). So thank you to those of you who are not writing simply to avoid a cold Sunday morning but are nobly forgoing real experience just for me. And for those of you who haven’t posted anything for weeks on end (yes you), I know its worth waiting for because you know that I am waiting……

Another whole set of vicarious experiences has been provided by the kind people at flickr.com. Pictures can be linked to blogs or travellers can simply give their photos titles and write comments under them like a good old-fashioned photo album tranformed by modern technology into a photo travel diary. China will never look the same in my mind now that I have “Dave was here” images superimposed on those classic sites and Spain will be empty of people (other than a few crazy Basque) but full of peaceful buildings and windows and moorish arches.

Phonecalls, the best and most illicit of vicarious travel experiences. I get to hear birds singing and breakfast being prepared in the south of France, or traffic noises and raucous shouting in China. This adds another sensory layer to my images of my nearest and dearest. Talking to someone in Europe is just better somehow than talking to them in Auckland!

Time is pressing and I will just mention a few other sources of vicarious travel experiences that are available to anyone (I resort to these when I am short of emails, blogs and pictures that were created just for me). Maps, websites for towns and regions,wiki (never wrong according to Mike), STA travel website, oh, and then there are travel brochures on stands in the street and Pilot guides in bookshops, and magazine articles. I could go on, but I won’t.

I shall end with an amusing image. I have a map of the world in my head and I see Sus ricocheting around Europe like an airhockey puck. Dave, on the other hand, is a pingpong ball attached by elastic to a medium-sized town in China.

Footnote: There is a cunningly hidden message in the third paragraph

Hobby #2 Sending mail

Not all mail is worthy of hobby status because it is just too simple. Competition entries, account payments, anything that just requires a peel-off stamp from the book of 10 already tucked into the wallet, these mundane tasks do not qualify as hobbies….yet.

Now, a stack of design magazines to Botswana, that’s a challenge. Which is best a post office box or physical address? Depends on how postmen in Botswana travel I suppose (I hope some poor thin little man didn’t have to balance them on the handlebars of his bicycle) and whether anyone would want to steal design magazines. And how should they be packed? Did you know that everything goes by Air these days? Don’t suppose it’s easy to get a boat from Christchurch to Botswana anyway.

The ladies in the post office are nice. We have geeky post office conversations about how weird it is that there is so little difference between the price of the slowest and second fastest postal methods (there are only 3 rates), and about how long it takes for a standard letter to reach Madagascar. (Sending letters to Madagascar is a thrill because the names are so long it’s hard to fit everything on the envelope).

It’s lucky for David that I look forward to my post office expeditions because one of his hobbies is receiving parcels. I guess this is what is meant by co-dependence. Ironically, he hates the post office and will do pretty much anything to avoid going there. One man’s meat is another man’s poison I guess and it would be a funny old world if we were all the same, eh?

I reckon I have sent 7 parcels to David in the last 3 months and I am getting a bit worried that this hobby is getting out of hand. How often is too often? Will the nice ladies start to think that i have a problem and refuse to give me my gratification or suggest I enter a 12 step program? It’s a bit worrying because I already have contents for 2-3 more parcels waiting in the cupboard and I have visualised how I will pack them and saved up more than enough bubblewrap. You know, I am not being entirely honest, I haven’t actually mailed all those parcels myself, I have had help with some of them from lovely internet people who even remember David’s address for me and do all the packing, so if the post office ladies cut me off, I can still get my illicit postal thrill.

I received 2 parcels last week, and that was fun. Maybe if I post this blog entry I will get a postcard too!

My hobbies

The challenge has been issued. I may not do light, but I am confident I can do trivial.

Hobby #1

Buying cheap swimsuits

What distinguishes a hobby from the routines of everyday life? This was a puzzle for some time and a great difficulty when asked that horrid question, “What do you do for fun?”. Then I realised that its a rhetorical question really, so “going to movies, shopping, swimming” pretty much covers it and provides the camouflage of normality and blandness that protects single older women from witchburning.

Did you know that a regular, moderately expensive one-piece swimsuit only looks good for the first 20 swims? After 50 swims it is faded. saggy, bad for the self-esteem and a target for sniggers and sideways glances from the spa pool. Spending $100 for a swimsuit every 4 months is depressing, especially since swimsuits make us think we should look like swimsuit models and that boat sailed 30 years ago, so what’s a girl to do? Make swimsuit shopping a hobby! A hobby is something one does by choice, so how can swimsuit shopping be a hobby if one must do it?

My answer is to turn mundane everyday chores into stunning achievements by adding an element of difficulty. Anyone can fork out $100 for a nice enough swimsuit in any womenswear shop in summer, or $180 for a very nice swimsuit from a posh shop in winter but how many people can get a swimsuit in winter for $5? I am not talking about the occasional bargain bin, Postie Plus end-of -season, last-one-in-the-shop find here, though those do count as part of the whole endeavour. I am talking about being able to regularly, and reliably source cheap swimsuits at will. This is not just a hobby but a supreme life skill which takes experience, focus and acute observation. If you have no understanding of what i am saying, or appreciation of the supreme difficulty of my hobby, my guess is that you get someone else to buy your swimsuits, they are from The Farmers, and your name is David.

I am not going to demystify my hobby by telling you how I do it. All I will say is that we camouflaged middle-aged women have our secret thrills and highly developed life skills. Next time you wonder at the strange patterned, slightly weird swimsuits the answer is “Because it was cheap”, or better still “It was free”.

Light reading

Dave is bored and wants some light reading. I don’t do light reading! As a compromise, here is a poem I wrote while subjected to the torture of professional development. It doesn’t have a name but its context is outside Centennial Pool at 5pm on a familiar Christchurch day.

Tired feet

struggling to catch up with the day.

Fending off the static of
endless traffic,

seeking

stillness

in a damp, grey sky.

Science? (part 1)

As my only reader knows, I have long had a love/hate relationship with science. Science, as a genre, is a wonderful source of the kind of random information that my brain loves to tuck away and bring out to gloat over and play with again and again. My Viking hoard. Science, as a discipline, intensely annoys me because it seems to be so constrained by “rules” of rigour and correctness but so dishonest in not admitting that it has been so wrong so often while insisting that it is the only acceptable source of knowledge.

Why am I angry at Science right now? The lastest earth-shaking, ground-breaking news in women’s health is that Hormone Replacement Therapy increases the incidence of ovarian cancer. Science has proven that there is a statistically significant blah, blah, blah. Of course the “practioners” who have been supplying these cancer causing substances to their clients on the basis that there was no science to show thay were harmful, are explaining away the risks by using statistics to show that if 10,000 women took the drugs for a year then there would be relatively few extra deaths because this is not a VERY common type of cancer. One anticipates that these pseudo-scientists who are now denying the findings of science are going to next tell us that we are more at risk pushing a supermarket trolley across the carpark than getting ovarian cancer because of HRT.

Am I being unfair to criticise science because doctors, drug companies and politicians misuse it? No way. Science adores being used because that makes it useful and brings in the money for it to do more science. Science claims itself to be objective and value-neutral but come on, nothing done by man is objective or value-neutral and science has always served the best paymaster.

You may be thinking, “Isn’t this old news? Didn’t we hear about the risks of HRT some years ago?” Well, you are half right. We heard about the relationship between HRT and breast cancer. Actually, the incidence of breast cancer has fallen since that relationship was “discovered” and now statistics from the UK are showing that there is a clear, direct, statistically significant relationship between the reduction in the number of women taking HRT and the reduction in the rate of breast cancer. It is always good when reality proves the science.

So, why is this relationship with ovarian cancer even an issue? Surely only women who really need HRT for life-saving reasons would still be taking it? Actually it is still widely prescribed for “quality-of-life” saving reasons. Why put up with “it” if you don’t have to? “It” being a range of things like hot flashes, dry skin, wrinkles, grumpiness, heart disease and otsteoporosis, some serious some trivial but all supposedly best treated with HRT.

Again, why is this Science’s problem? Aren’t women responsible for making their own choices and if they think that wrinkles are worse than an increased cancer risk, isn’t it their choice? The thing is, doctors don’t take the time to explain to women that science is value-neutral and doesn’t care if they are in the percentage who DO get cancer because, after all someone has to be in that group just as others are in the group that DON’T get cancer. Guess what the women are thinking? “The doctor wouldn’t give this to me if it wasn’t good for me. Scientists wouldn’t have created it if it would harm me.” Innocent self-interest shuts out the possiblility of thinking, “Were the people who created, produced and marketed this product motivated by my well-being?”

Am I being a little unfair here? After all there are well-meaning doctors who believe that women don’t have to “suffer” menopause. Time for some feminist outrage. Menopause is not a disease. Yes, there is a small number of women who experience such severe changes that they feel that life is not worth living. HRT may be their best option for now but will they still feel that way when they are “living with” terminal cancer? What a choice. Life is full of choices but unfortunately we often personally don’t have much of a range of options to choose from because we are not offered the full range of theoretically possible options. As an information scavenger I know that my doctors have given me a fraction of the readily available information about my own medication. I also know that they have tried to persuade me into options that are now thought to be harmful and have not told me about alternatives because they are more expensive or not funded in NZ. As a health services consumer I have to make my choices based on label-reading just as I do as a grocery shopper (though in NZ,  prescribed medication comes packaged with way less information than a can of beans). I would love to be able to rely on an “expert”, a doctor or scientist who would just do what was best for me, so my heart goes out to all those women throughout history who thought they could do just that and ended up dead statistics.

What is the alternative to science? Isn’t it our best and only valid source of knowledge? I am torn here because there is still the love part of my stormy relationship with science. I believe that science belongs to everyone and is something that people have always “done” and we have moved too far away from an intuitive folk knowledge of science that is based on observation and common sense. Common sense says that menopause is supposed to happen because it always has. Folk knowledge said that the less pleasant effects of menopause could be dealt with using remedies that didn’t have lethal long term consequences and that once women got to the other side they had reached a new stage in life where wrinkles no longer mattered. Imagine how much money we could save if wrinkles didn’t matter and value-neutral” science” could concentrate on cures for cancer instead of fighting the seven signs of aging?

Anyway. back to my current outrage with modern science.  Folk science (otherwise known as commonsense) tells me that scientists should have known that HRT would increase the  incidence of a variety of cancers. How should they have known? Well, they already knew that women who started menstruating early, or finished late were at increased risk of cancer because of a greater number of years of exposure to estrogen. They also knew that breastfeeding reduced the life-time cancer risk because it reduced the exposure to estrogen. My outrage is that scientists didn’t consider these simple facts when they decided that it would be a good idea to try giving women extra estrogen.  I am further outraged that they also didn’t consider that the harmful effects of additional exposure to estrogen would not be evident for most women in the short-term. This is not a little “ooops we couldn’t have predicted that”. Value-neutral be damned. negligent scientists deserve a special place in hell alongside global warming denying politicians.

Too much information for the masses

As a label reader I have been aware for some time that a lot of products that used to be made in New Zealand are now imported from Australia. That would be ok if it was obvious that they were no longer local products.. but of course it is not obvious at all because they have the same old brand names and packaging.

The supermarket megopolies say that people don’t care where their food comes from, only that it is cheap. So why don’t they advertise it as a cheaper imported alternative instead of camouflaging it as the old trusted brands? Sanitarium peanut butter is now made in China. Fair enough maybe since we don’t grow peanuts. On the other hand we expect Sanitarium to be healthy and wholesome and I am not sure that that image would stand for long if consumers knew that the Chinese government is concerned about the levels of soil contamination in 20% of their land. If the Chinese government is concerned about pollution, it must be truly serious! We are not just talking about pesticides here, but heavy metals like lead, cadmium and mercury. As a South Islander it’s good to know that out weetbix is still made from local wheat, unlike north island weetbix which is made from wheat imported from…China. Well, it would be good to know that if I was sure that ther is not some mega warehouse where all the weetbix boxes from all over NZ get stored and then get randomly shipped out. Sanitarium, could I have my weetbix labelled ” Made from NZ wheat” please?

It sounds like I am China-bashing but it’s just that all the Chinese students I have taught have marvelled at how the sky in NZ is actually blue and they thought that blue sky was a picturebook fiction. The air smells better here too and you can drink water from a tap! I want my food from NZ too, please.

If I was going to hit below the belt, I would point out that the contaminated gluten that killed so many American pets was imported from China. I bet most of the pet owners had no idea that gluten was added to the petfood to increase the protein levels or that someone might add contaminants like melamine just to make a buck. Ever wondered about what might be added to the human food chain for the same reason?

The deceptions around bacon have become better known recently becuase the media have picked up on some of the scams. “Kiwi” bacon is made from imported pork and the manufacturers have explained that there is no deception involved since “Kiwi” is a brand name and does not imply a local product. Premier Bacon “produced in the heart of the Waikato” also imports its pork and explains that “produced” means it is processed in the Waikato and does not imply any involvement with local farmers. This is particulary annoying because apparently the company stopped buying from local suppliers partly because of negative publicity about the unethical treatment of pigs on large scale farms in the area. Come on now, are NZ pigs more deserving of humane treatment and porcine rights than wherever the imported pork is coming from?

So, why isn’t NZ food labelled with country of origin? Well, apparently because it would be bad for our export industry. Yeah, I know we have made a big deal about being clean and green (not always accurately) and yes, that is something that commands a premium on the world market but the politicians think that if we insist on labelling imported products as such then other countries will retaliate and tell their consumers tha NZ lamb is imported from NZ. Duh, I think they already know that!

Back to that compulsive label reading. I have the time and resources to buy find and buy local food so what’s the big deal? It’s that many people can’t afford to pay a premium just to buy local. The last local processor of tinned apricots stopped production last year because imported products were cheaper. Cheaper yes, better no. Now we can only get unripe fruit that has been bleached to remove blemishes. Not my problem really since I don’t eat tinned fruit but lots of people do, especially children and old people. Should they really be dependent on the food safety standards of the cheapest suppliers in the world? Why are we scrambling to be first in the race to the bottom of the food quality trough when we can produce our own high quality food?

I guess the people who make these decisions can afford to make healthy choices for their own families so why bother about everyone else?