A few years ago a company moved its production of peanut butter from Australia to China, causing a huge hubbub over the ditch. The company compromised and continued a small line of Australian-made peanut butter, which sold at a higher price. Stalwarts in both countries, including me, stubbornly continued to purchase the Australian product, until it disappeared from the supermarket shelves.  Never fear, I have now found a much better alternative. Pic’s peanut butter, made in Nelson from Australian peanuts, is a particularly delicious partial solution to the food miles problem in New Zealand, given that we do not grow peanuts ourselves. Pic’s consists of well-roasted peanuts and sea salt. Pic began making and selling his peanut butter at the Nelson markets, and has since expanded across the country.

Noshing my breakfast toast with Pic’s on top, I began pondering the politics, and indeed the economics, of peanut butter. So I decided to do some research, so that you can all be well informed on this important subject. I went along in late October 2013 to my local Countdown supermarket and listed down as much information as I could about all the peanut butters on the shelves. I excluded organic products as I could not find them! Here is a table of brand, country of manufacture, price (on that date) and where the ingredients came from.

How Much Are Peanut Farmers & Workers Paid

We should nod our thanks to the Australians for the mandatory country of origin labelling regime they have. As Countdown is part of the Australian Progressive Enterprises chain, and as a number of peanut butters are made in Australia, we benefit on both counts from their mandatory labelling. There seems to be a rule that the closer the product is made to us, the more expensive it is. Given that peanut butters are normally made of just peanuts and salt, with (in most of the cheaper ones) a little vegetable oil, it is quite hard to work out the price differential.

Take the not quite cheapest product, Eta. No origin is given for the peanuts, so we assume they are Chinese, and we know that the peanut butter is made in China. The packaging appears to be of reasonable quality (plastic, but so are most), the label is well printed and we know it has to be shipped in containers to New Zealand. You get all this on the shelf for $2.99. So some hard questions need to be asked: What misery do the peanut farmers live in? What wages are paid to the factory workers who make the product and packaging? How much are the shipping workers paid, to take the product so far for so low a price?

And while I mention factory workers, one would have thought that making peanut butter was essentially an automated process: grind the peanuts to desired texture, add salt, mix and bottle. Surely that would not be so much more expensive in one country than another? There was one relatively expensive Chinese product on the shelf. Called Eta Roasted (which is odd, as all peanut butters contain roasted nuts) it is marketed as containing only nuts and salt. It is roasted to a darker colour than the ordinary Eta. The packaging is the same quality. But this product retails for $5.49. Why does it cost so much more? Is this related to higher production costs, more expensive ingredients or higher profits?

Alienated From Products Of Our Own Labour

Incidentally, I managed to have a chat to a lovely man, let’s call him Deep Throat, about the industry.  He told me that the cost of shipping is very low – say three to four cents per jar. The two expensive New Zealand products contain only nuts and salt. 100%Nutz makes a big play of using high quality Australian nuts, while Pic’s focuses on the great roasting of good products and the use of glass jars (the only one to use these). These really are expensive, the beluga of peanut butters. Why is this? Is it so much dearer to pop Australian peanuts in a container from Queensland than to import the finished product from China?

The third NZ product – Hillary’s – is not really peanut butter. It appears to be the kind of superfood that TV action man Bear Grylls might survive on for weeks in the wild. The dairy industry has demonstrated how we can become divorced from our local products, even in a food producing country like New Zealand. The price of a bottle of milk is now determined more by the price that is paid in Beijing than by the actual cost from farm gate to supermarket shelf in New Zealand. We are alienated from the products of our own labour. It is hard to know, in this distorted market, what anything is “worth”. Peanut butter is, of course, merely a metaphor for the whole food industry. With no political leadership (except the Greens) expressing the need to buy local products  - no Buy New Zealand campaign – and no compulsory food labelling, we seem condemned to a world of indifferent but cheap food made anywhere but here, except at the expensive artisan end of the market. An unpalatable truth, you might say. Stick that on your breakfast toast and eat it!