Allergic reactions
The makers of the EpiPen should have been well pleased with the feature on food allergies (“Death by food”, February 2). Readers were shepherded towards the conclusion that Pharmac should be funding these auto-injection devices, designed for emergency use in case of an anaphylactic reaction.
While there is no doubting the suffering undergone by food allergy sufferers – and the feature told their stories well – the article was disappointingly vague on the actual scale of the problem.
We are told one expert estimates two to four percent of adults and six percent of children in New Zealand suffer food allergies, but how were these figures arrived at? What proportion of these suffer life-threatening allergies? Are food allergy rates changing? How do we compare with other countries? If the problem is getting worse, as the article seems to suggest, do we know why? If there aren’t answers to these questions, the writer should say so.
In the January 2008 issue of Harper’s magazine, Meredith Broussard has a very different take on food allergy trends. According to Broussard, the non-profit Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN) in the United States says 150-200 Americans are killed by food allergies each year. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports just 12 such deaths in its latest available (2004) figures. FAAN is supported by donations from the US distributor of the EpiPen and from its competitor – support that is well rewarded by FAAN’s advocacy for their adrenalin-injection devices.
The food allergy story is an interesting, complex and occasionally tragic one. By telling us only part of it, you risk straying into some of the lopsided reporting that surrounded the Herceptin debate.
Phil Stewart(Brooklyn, Wellington)
CHARITABLE TAXING
As “The God dividend” (February 2) states, only 10 percent of 97,000 not-for-profit groups in New Zealand are religious charities, yet Max Wallace singles out only these as needing closer scrutiny. In this, he reveals his anti-religious motivations.
I am a member of a local Anglican congregation. Most members freely give a percentage of their net (tax-paid) income to the church. This is used first to pay the staff of the church. The staff pay tax on these salaries and are employed to minister in the community. Substantial funds are also used for a range of local and international aid and assistance purposes.
Double taxation of charities, religious or otherwise, would simply reduce funds available for good works. And, no, there’s not a Harley-Davidson or private yacht in sight.
Stephen Cole (Waitakere City)
QUEEN AND COUNTRY
Mike Moore’s comments (Politics, February 2) on reforming our constitution, with a view to ultimately achieving republican status, are the latest in a line of comments to this effect. He says we should take our time, but it seems we have been talking of this all my life, although the dumping of the Privy Council was an important, tentative first step. He probably wasn’t aware of the irony in his reference to a royal commission.
Perhaps one of the better arguments for a republic is that the UK and New Zealand often seem to have conflicting foreign policies. Examples are Margaret Thatcher’s invasion of the Malvinas (the Falkland Islands) and Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq, both opposed by New Zealand.
One wonders how the Queen can support and be head of state of both. The worst possible excuse for continuing with a foreigner as our head of state is nostalgia for the bad old days of empire.
I think most New Zealanders would consider the continuation of the monarchy after the Queen’s demise an outrage.
Murray Eggers (Paraparaumu, Kapiti Coast)
BAGS OF SENSE
Despite what Bill Ralston says (Life, January 26), life without plastic bags can be quite tolerable. My wife and I have used cloth bags in Germany for the past 16 years with no problem whatsoever. I don’t recall ever having to wash them – there is certainly no “bloody, dripping meat” there.
As for weaning people off plastic, the solution is simple – stop using them. Three years ago, just across the French border from where we live, the Intermarchie supermarket had plastic bags one day and none the next – they simply stopped using them overnight. Ce n’est pas un problème.
John Maioha Stewart (Matua, Tauranga)
DROWNING SPECULATION
Representation of the mid-Cenozoic drowning speculation in New Zealand geology and biogeography as novel and newsworthy by Gerard Hutching, in his advertorial article (“Not waving, drowning”, January 26), needs to be refuted.
It is not news that New Zealand is just the emergent part of a sunken continent. That marine incursions inundated ancient New Zealand, resulting in submergence and a blanket of marine deposits, was proposed by pioneering geologist Julius von Haast in the 1870s and is hardly a novel hypothesis.
Likewise, the proposal that old flat land surfaces or peneplains result not from subaerial processes but through marine erosion was not discovered recently in Central Otago by Chuck Landis. This idea dates back to the British geologist A C Ramsay and was published in 1846.
Notions that our flora and fauna have all originated from elsewhere and arrived through means of dispersal over oceans and seas date back in science to Charles Darwin in Victorian times. More recently, they were promoted by the American entomologist and prominent opponent of continental drift P J Darlington in his 1965 book Biogeography of the Southern End of the World.
In their search for ancient New Zealand, all Hutching and Hamish Campbell have demonstrated is that they belong to an old school.
Robin Craw (Dunedin)
A LONG FORGETTING
In her review of my book The Long Forgetting (Books, January 26), Jane Stafford perfectly illustrates the dominant culture’s practices for sustaining cultural amnesia (see my page 25). She assumes a universal viewpoint outside ideology, strongly reinforces the existing canon, and falls back on aesthetics to counter the dangers of examining the ideologies that construct our thought (thus writing is “terrific”, or, presumably, not “terrific”).
Missing is any comprehension of my argument that avoiding examination of one’s own writing position is crucial to all these modes of forgetting, which always rely on repeated counter-assertions of the apparently obvious – of course, this is how things are; we’ve got along fine for years without talking about this kind of thing; culture just happens (see my pages 32-37 and 72). Thus white settlement continues to naturalise itself as unproblematic.
Most fully symptomatic of the white middle-class response to the threat of cultural remembering is rage and fear, expressed in this review as a dismissive anger whose desire is to remove from existence any discussion of our collective past and keep us focused on a literary criticism that contains no real argument or purpose at all, so that we may continue, comfortably but (it seems) defensively, to forget. Terrific.
Patrick Evans (Christchurch)
In the 2006 book Maoriland: New Zealand literature 1872–1914, the authors – Jane Stafford and Mark Williams – argued that the at-times embarrassing New Zealand literature of the late-Victorian era “cannot be excised from memory without attendant loss of knowledge in the present”. They concurred that these first-generation works of cultural nationalism began a form of Pakeha identity politics, benefiting from Maori displacement.
I find it hard then to see why in her review of Patrick Evans’s The Long Forgetting Stafford seems so signally to miss Evans’s point. This new study is not a simple continuation of his 1990 book Penguin History of New Zealand Literature – which she approves of – but a critical account of that very dispossession and displacement, the appropriation of Maori tropes by Pakeha writers, leading to an erasure of Maori voices until the early 1960s.
She seems to be describing the book she thought Evans should have written, not the one he did, which is concerned with the way Maori were by turns exoticised, caricatured and written out of the colonial literary script until after World War II. A long forgetting indeed, and one that Evans argues – agree or not – is an essential part of our own colonialism.
As for absentees, the book isn’t about C K Stead: it is about where Maori disappeared to in our literature, and where they are now coming from. Bill Manhire gets a mention, as do many of the Victoria University Press writers; those she says he ignores have multiple references (six for Elizabeth Knox, 10 for Janet Frame). The chapter “Resisting” devotes 36 pages to biculturalism, tino rangatiratanga, ethnicity and Oceania, but is dismissed as beset with moralism and a “constrained understanding of how literatures work”.
This review would lead any prospective reader to think twice; it does neither Evans nor Stafford justice. I have read both their books and I would urge readers of New Zealand literature to obtain them and make up their own minds.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (St Albans, Christchurch)
THE GOOD OIL
One of the boxed articles on omega-3 (“Peak oil”, December 29) says “it’s also used to beef up baby formula so bottle-fed babies are no longer at a disadvantage compared with their breastfed peers”.
Statements like these give the impression that formula is almost as good as, if not as good as, breast milk.
Manufacturers of artificial infant milk formula add vitamins, proteins, fats, carbohydrates and micronutrients from many different sources to their products. Research on breast milk is constantly revealing different beneficial factors, which formula companies try to match by adding what they can to formula.
Breast milk is a dynamic living substance in which the beneficial factors change from feed to feed, and even during a feed. After exposure to infection there is a surge in appropriate protective anti-infective factors in breast milk. Formula is not a living substance; its additives are constant and don’t include any of these anti-infective factors.
For some babies, formula is essential and it is important that formula com-panies continue to make their product to a high standard. However, formula-fed babies will always be at a disadvantage and statements saying otherwise subtly undermine breastfeeding.
Alison Burt (Pt Chevalier, Auckland)
PACIFIC PIONEERS
The article accompanying stunning photos by Jane Ussher (“Milking the coconut”, January 19) just scratched the surface of a really interesting and powerful story. For too long, the Pacific has tried to export unprocessed commodities. Pacific development has suffered through low prices and little influence over how the end products are marketed. Adding value to the Pacific’s resources is a key to a better future for a region that is facing huge development challenges.
Women in Business Development Inc (WIBDI), profiled in the article, has pioneered links between community-level producers and international markets. This has been achieved through initiatives such as restoring the quality and value of the ie-toga (fine mats), providing direct benefits to the skilled women weavers. WIBDI has also pioneered organic certification in the Pacific, with the number of organic growers having more than doubled over the past two years. The benefits flow back to people at the local level, enabling opportunities for young people to stay in their villages and homeland, rather than being forced to emigrate for employment.
These achievements have been driven by a number of remarkable women, supported in achieving their vision through a close partnership with Oxfam New Zealand. Funding has been provided through generous donations from individual Kiwis, as well as recent support from the government aid agency NZAID. Oxfam is working with WIBDI to develop this approach across a wider Pacific region.
Committed individuals and organisations like WIBDI need our support in terms of seed funding and our demand for fair trade. This kind of partnership can offer real hope and opportunity for people of the Pacific.
Barry Coates,Executive Director, Oxfam New Zealand
Sadly, Brian Easton did not “milk the coconut” to its full potential (“Milking the coconut”, January 19). One of the waste products from coconuts is the fine material called cocopeat, which comprises nearly half of the husk. In the past it has been a serious waste product, pollutant and source of disease in areas where coconuts are produced.
It is the ideal substitute for the growing medium peat, which has a very limited long-term potential because of the increasing interest in retaining the natural environment and the increasing scarcity of readily available peat.
Cocopeat can be dried and compressed at source, and can be shipped worldwide and then reconstituted with water to about six times its shipping volume. A large proportion of New Zealand’s greenhouse tomatoes are now grown hydroponically on cocopeat slabs, which unlike many other substrates, such as rock wool, can be easily disposed of by using it also as an organic soil amendment.
Mike Nichols (Palmerston North)
A HEALTHIER, SAFER SOCIETY
It is clear from “Show me the child” (January 19) that New Zealand has the means to create a healthier, safer and more just society, perhaps even to the point where mayhem and violence cease to be the common currency of our domestic headlines. We know, in broad terms, what we have to do to achieve this and we know, in broad terms, what kind and degree of resources this will take.
It is, therefore, interesting to note that this year’s election campaign looks set to revolve around which of the two major parties will deliver the most attractive personal tax cuts. Having voted in the one that offers the most succulent lolly, we will then be able to use our extra income to finance ourselves into gated, “secure” communities in a futile attempt to keep at a distance the increase in mayhem and violence that we will have failed to prevent.
Do we have one politician with the vision and courage of an Ed Hillary to cry “enough!”? And are we prepared to forego short-term personal gain in order to support that politician?
Bernard Schofield (Titirangi, Auckland)
