Tag Archives: oranges

agenda 21/30, NZ

Sustainable practices?

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I was sitting outside in NZ’s Northland sunshine, December 2024. All year round, it’s the warmest district in the country and has a wealth of orange orchards. The temperature was 24 deg and set to get warmer. I was eating an orange however, that had traveled all the way to NZ from 7798 miles away. Grown in the US of A. I don’t generally buy imported oranges on principle, however someone else had brought me these. Similarly, I also had in my fridge, some Australian oranges. Those had traveled 2583 miles to get here. How big were those carbon footprints? Good luck with those calculations. Generally speaking, it would appear, according to the Davos boys, we shouldn’t be traveling too far or buying stuff that traveled a long way?

Now Northland is known for its orange orchards. It is one of the two leaders in our citrus industry. The other district is Gisborne. Twenty years ago I lived in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, which is near there, during which time we had free access to a local orchard to pick all the oranges we wanted. Why? Because the owner told us the supermarkets weren’t interested in buying them and to pick and sell them themselves was not cost effective at all. Meanwhile, just down the road the local supermarket sold fruit from, you guessed it, Australia and the US. So we would drive to town to shop, passing multiple orange orchards with beautiful ripe oranges falling on the ground and frequently going to waste.

Check out Davos and their ‘sustainable menu’. No mention of where they sourced their fruit from.

Can you see the hypocrisy? And the scam that it is?

Image by Hans from Pixabay

Corporations, Food, GlaxoSmithKline, News

In 2007 Two Kiwi Schoolgirls exposed GlaxoSmithKline’s false vitamin C claims with hardly any found in their Ribena

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Four times the amount of Vit C as oranges? Two NZ school girls found it had almost none

Given Ribena’s advertising claims that “the blackcurrants in Ribena have four times the vitamin C of oranges”, they were astonished after discovering there was hardly any, and wrote to the manufacturers, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). When they got no response, they phoned the company, but were given short shrift. “They didn’t even really answer our questions. They just said it’s the blackcurrants that have it, then they hung up,” Jenny said.

Two New Zealand schoolgirls humbled one of the world’s biggest food and drugs companies after their school science experiment found that their ready-to-drink Ribena contained almost no trace of vitamin C.

Students Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo tested the blackcurrant cordial against rival brands to test their hypothesis that cheaper brands were less healthy.

Instead, their tests found that the Ribena contained a tiny amount of vitamin C, while another brand’s orange juice drink contained almost four times more.

“We thought we were doing it wrong. We thought we must have made a mistake,” Anna told New Zealand’s Weekend Herald. The girls were both 14 and students at Pakuranga College in Auckland when they did the experiment in 2004.