My seven-year-old acts horrified, my five-year-old looks twice at her dinner and my three-year-old just doesn’t believe it.
The reality of living in the city means most of us don’t really have to think about where our food comes from.
There’s no arguing the rural-urban divide exists and researchers around the world have been pointing at this gulf between country producers and city consumers for years, often with a sense of dismay.
Even in the early 20th century newspapers raised fears about urban decay and warned of losing the pioneering spirit.
Official records show the prominent educationalist Professor James Shelley wrote in 1923 that children “should not be educated in town … I do not think you realise how destructive it is”.
Looking back at our country in the early 1880s, official figures show urban New Zealanders were a minority but by the 2001 Census, they had become the substantial majority.
A Statistics NZ paper, NZ: An Urban-Rural Profile shows how working on the land was no longer a major occupation by the 20th century with less than 10% of the country’s workforce employed in agriculture, forestry or fishing by 2001.
We’re not alone. This trend reflects an international shift towards urbanisation.
Recent research by the think tank Maxim Institute suggests small town NZ will struggle as regional differences widen over the next three decades.
The Institute’s 30-year projections show 39% of the population of 5.9 million living in Auckland and another 31% living either close to Auckland or in other major centres.
Maxim researcher Julian Wood wonders if we risk “opening the door to broader societal division between people and communities in growing areas and those in stagnation or decline”.
“That's a lot of urban voters and it's going to be very tempting for politicians to focus more and more on urban interests in order to win those votes, possibly at the expense of the rest of the country,” he says in an opinion piece.
So what does that mean for us and what can we do about it?
It’s likely that you can think of local issues where politics have trumped unity and the urban-rural divide feels like a gulf (water quality and urban sprawl perhaps?).
But rural and urban NZ need each other so we must both embrace change and keep an open mind about the future.
Though my children are fortunate to have grandparents who live on a rural lifestyle block I couldn’t name even three Auckland families in my circle of friends who visit a farm in the holidays.
But I’m not sure it matters in the long run. After all, it is 2017 and we can foster a connection to rural NZ in other ways.
Every year thousands of townies flock to Waikato for Fieldays not just for tractor rides but to show their kids where food comes from and to check out the latest innovations in agriculture.
Fieldays organisers are well aware of NZ’s changing demographics and the event aims to bridge the divide between urban and rural communities. It’s on our family calendar for next year.
There are also programmes and schools that offer farming experience. We’re in-zone for Mt Albert Grammar School, which has an 8.1 hectare working farm with livestock. Students from years 10 to 13 can take full academic courses in agricultural and horticultural science.
Just last year a national survey by Rabobank showed an alarming lack of knowledge about the agricultural sector among city teenagers with 81% saying they knew little or nothing about farming or food production.
However, more than 90% of city teenagers surveyed perceived farming and food production as very important to NZ.
Farming is still in our DNA but rural and urban communities need to be intentional about learning from each other.
When it comes to the food chain, many consumers (city foodies, if you like) are looking for a connection to their food again. We want to know the story behind our food, where it comes from and who made it, along with information about farming practices.
We might not be able to visit the farm but we’ll read all about it online if the information is there.
