I attended a committee meeting of the Masterton Food Bank this week and there was good news and bad news. The good news was that there are many generous individuals and businesses that add value to the Food Bank coffers on a regular basis allowing the good people that voluntarily operate the facility to buy-in and access lots of food and other household items of necessity to fill their constantly depleted shelves.
The bad news is that demand for the services is increasing exponentially.
I tried to think why in a country that should be prospering; the constant demand for food parcels for families is an ever-increasing problem.
I might have at least part of the answer. I happened upon an advertisement for our butchers shop back from 1990. Legs of lamb were $13.95 each, a leg of mutton was $9.95 and you could buy a two kilo pack of sausages for $2.95. Sausages in a smaller pack were $1.95 a kilo.
Some explanation. “Mutton” was in fact ewe mutton. The government meat inspectors at the abattoirs would give it a red stripe (first quality) if it had good conformation. We would buy around 200 ewes a week and the best 100 of these we would set aside to make into cuts and joints for retail sale. The other 100 we would bone out and trim to create lean meat. This meat would be mixed with our beef trimmings to make beef flavoured sausages.
(We also bought in weekly about 30 lambs, around 50 hoggets, plus about 25 bodies of beef and twelve porkers.)
The legs of mutton, which were half as big again as a leg of lamb, were sold (as previously mentioned) for $9.95.
We would bone the forequarters and roll them up with seasoning, wrap them in cookable netting and market them as “colonial goose” for $5.95 each.
The loins were sold for $7.95.
There was good profit in this for us, and great buying for our customers.
I looked up our old wages book and found that our senior staff were being paid $12 an hour. Checkout operators and meat packers who were invariably of the female gender were paid between 8 and 10 dollars an hour. I Googled the minimum wage in 1990 and it was $6.12 an hour.
Fast forward to today. Average wage in New Zealand, according to Google, is $50,000 a year. This equates to around $24 an hour. So wages have doubled. Now let’s look at meat prices. A full leg of lamb will set you back $50, mutton has disappeared from the market entirely, so too has hogget which was usually mid-priced between mutton and lamb.
Beef flavoured sausages, once a staple diet for many, in my New World supermarket today were selling for $9.49 a kilo!
Do the math and you can see why so many families today are, comparatively speaking, finding it hard to make ends meat.
The bad news is that demand for the services is increasing exponentially.
I tried to think why in a country that should be prospering; the constant demand for food parcels for families is an ever-increasing problem.
I might have at least part of the answer. I happened upon an advertisement for our butchers shop back from 1990. Legs of lamb were $13.95 each, a leg of mutton was $9.95 and you could buy a two kilo pack of sausages for $2.95. Sausages in a smaller pack were $1.95 a kilo.
Some explanation. “Mutton” was in fact ewe mutton. The government meat inspectors at the abattoirs would give it a red stripe (first quality) if it had good conformation. We would buy around 200 ewes a week and the best 100 of these we would set aside to make into cuts and joints for retail sale. The other 100 we would bone out and trim to create lean meat. This meat would be mixed with our beef trimmings to make beef flavoured sausages.
(We also bought in weekly about 30 lambs, around 50 hoggets, plus about 25 bodies of beef and twelve porkers.)
The legs of mutton, which were half as big again as a leg of lamb, were sold (as previously mentioned) for $9.95.
We would bone the forequarters and roll them up with seasoning, wrap them in cookable netting and market them as “colonial goose” for $5.95 each.
The loins were sold for $7.95.
There was good profit in this for us, and great buying for our customers.
I looked up our old wages book and found that our senior staff were being paid $12 an hour. Checkout operators and meat packers who were invariably of the female gender were paid between 8 and 10 dollars an hour. I Googled the minimum wage in 1990 and it was $6.12 an hour.
Fast forward to today. Average wage in New Zealand, according to Google, is $50,000 a year. This equates to around $24 an hour. So wages have doubled. Now let’s look at meat prices. A full leg of lamb will set you back $50, mutton has disappeared from the market entirely, so too has hogget which was usually mid-priced between mutton and lamb.
Beef flavoured sausages, once a staple diet for many, in my New World supermarket today were selling for $9.49 a kilo!
Do the math and you can see why so many families today are, comparatively speaking, finding it hard to make ends meat.
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