An absorbing Australian television programme Ask the Butcher screens on Choice Television on Thursday evenings at 8.05. Host is Sydney meat retailer Anthony Puharich who takes viewers on a culinary journey from farm gate to dinner plate via his family-owned butchery called Victor Churchill.
A few weeks ago he featured lamb on the programme and said among other things that Australia has the best lamb in the world. Some of the owners of the rural properties he visited reiterated that claim.
I recalled that earlier in the evening TV One screened an advertisement on behalf of Silver Fern Farms that featured a lanky New Zealand farmer escorting a suited city dweller around a well-stocked sheep farm who made the statement: “New Zealand has the best lamb in the world,” as he jumped a barbed-wire fence.
A few weeks ago he featured lamb on the programme and said among other things that Australia has the best lamb in the world. Some of the owners of the rural properties he visited reiterated that claim.
I recalled that earlier in the evening TV One screened an advertisement on behalf of Silver Fern Farms that featured a lanky New Zealand farmer escorting a suited city dweller around a well-stocked sheep farm who made the statement: “New Zealand has the best lamb in the world,” as he jumped a barbed-wire fence.
Now surely they can’t both be right?
Actually, having had some experience with the retailing of meat in both countries, I’d have to concede that Australian lamb is better than ours. However not having critically examined the product further afield I can’t honestly say with any certainty that either of us can necessarily lay claim to having the best lamb in the world.
That accolade could well belong to any number of countries.
But it seems there is something in our makeup, probably because we are so tiny and situated at the bottom of the world that makes us want to proclaim to anyone who will listen that many of our features, good or bad, are “the best in the world.”
I read recently for instance that New Zealand has the biggest number of problem gamblers in the world. We’re also said to have the most teenage suicides, and the highest level of obesity. It is even claimed we have the worst child poverty rates in the OECD.
We blithely accept all these allegations which I suspect are made by people who are pushing their own particular barrows wanting support for what in most cases are justifiable causes.
I thought about this when I read an article in last weeks’ Time magazine on the many veterans returning from the variety of wars that America has got itself involved in who are ending up in prison. Time said there are about 200,000 incarcerated veterans in the US who may have committed crimes due to untreated post-traumatic stress.
In a later unrelated paragraph it said there are 49,000 inmates in Illinois prisons.
Whenever the conservative Sensible Sentencing Trust in New Zealand calls for more of our criminals to be jailed for longer terms, liberal commentators invariably claim that we already incarcerate more people per head of population than any other civilised nation in the world.
So here was a chance to do some comparative research.
First I checked out the population of Illinois; 12.8 million. New Zealand’s population is 4.5 million. So Illinois in population terms is almost three times larger than we are.
To match or exceed Illinois 49,000 prison population would mean we would need to have around 16,000 incarcerated in our penitentiaries. In fact New Zealand has 8618 people in prison, 6764 actually serving a sentence and 1864 remanded in custody. This looks to be about half the population of the US jails.
Now I’m not saying that locking up people for longer is the answer to our crime problems, but I’m simply exposing another statistic that is quoted for effect without having a grain of truth to sustain it.
So I suspect many of our ‘best and worst in the world’ claims wouldn’t survive closer scrutiny.
One interesting statistic about the New Zealand prison population is that only 527 are females. I suspect many of these will be there due to mistreatment by men in the first place.
We are told that in China with their one-child-per-couple policy, baby girls are not particularly welcome and often aborted if the gender is diagnosed in the womb.
Perhaps if we reversed that policy and only accept girl babies here we could eventually breed a law-abiding society.
When Phyllis Diller was asked what the world would be without men she said, “Free of crime and full of fat, happy women.”
Fat, happy women; so now we’ve resurrected the obesity problem.
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