From the Editor

By Matt Cooney, December 4, 2007 @ 12:51 pm

Idealog has often been critical of too much purity. “‘100% pure’ is 100% wrong,” Jake Pearce wrote in these pages a year ago (‘New Zealand, Meet the New You’, January/February 2007). The problem, in a nutshell, is that ‘100% pure’ says nothing about the people on these islands (a few virtuous souls excepted). And yet the label sticks: it’s snappy, it’s memorable, it marks out the space that we like to think we occupy on the planet.

So the phrase may be 100 percent wrong, but it’s at least 50 percent right—as even Jake’s suggested replacement, ‘Pure sophistication’, acknowledges. And as a country that relies on tourism and exporting food around the globe for its income, it’s an image we can’t afford to lose.

And make no mistake: our competitors would love to take it off us. British farmers are happily leveraging the ‘buy local’ movement to attack our meat exports as environmentally wasteful, far from fresh, and of lesser quality than the local product (never mind the foot-and-mouth and BSE). For a new generation of Western consumer, the point of origin is a key purchasing choice: out of sight, out of mind.

It’s largely bunk, of course, as Lincoln University has shown. But we need to protect our patch. Consider the size of the ‘conscious consumer’ market—it’s worth US$300 billion annually in the US alone.

But we’re in a bind here, as New Zealanders tend to rebel when a label is slapped on them. Not many want to be seen as a namby-pamby greenie, as Gena Tuffery reports on page 36. So when we went looking for Kiwi companies that are actually attempting to operate in a sustainable manner, we found that most didn’t think of themselves as on-the-edge environmentalists. It’s just good business. “It’s a competitive advantage because we save on waste, our staff are more productive and we’ve got an authentic story to back our products,” says Dave MacFarlane of Design Mobel.

We need to live up to our pure reputation or we’ll lose it, and it’s creative Kiwis like MacFarlane and cover gal Laurie Foon who are leading the way.

So here’s the challenge: act green without calling ourselves that. If we do a good job, the rest of the world will do the name-calling for us.