A new university-backed study claims Māori food insecurity is “not the result of individual choice or lifestyle” but a “direct and ongoing consequence of colonisation”. It is a claim that sounds humane and progressive — and one that creatively explains everything while proving very little.
No fairminded person denies that history matters. The problem is that colonisation is treated not as one factor among many, but as the decisive and permanent cause of present-day outcomes. It becomes an all-purpose explanation that absolves individuals of responsibility, shields current policy from scrutiny, and discourages honest discussion about what actually drives food insecurity today.
That is ideology, not health science.
The study relies on qualitative interviews with Māori “kai [food] experts” operating entirely within a kaupapa [ideological] Māori framework. There is no attempt to test competing explanations or compare outcomes across income levels, household structures, regions, or behaviour. Colonisation is assumed at the outset and rediscovered at the end. This is narrative reinforcement, not inquiry.
The article also avoids an obvious question: if colonisation is the primary driver, why do Māori with similar historical backgrounds experience very different outcomes today? Why do some Māori families and communities achieve food security and good health while others do not? History does not operate as a uniform force acting equally on everyone.
The romanticised portrayal of pre-colonial Māori food systems deserves scrutiny. Māori were skilled food producers within a subsistence economy, but that economy was constrained by climate, seasonality and vulnerability to crop failure. Life expectancy was low and famine was not unknown. To contrast a selectively idealised past with the modern food environment — refrigeration, global supply chains, year-round availability — is not analysis. It is mythology.
More importantly, it distracts from the central reality that food insecurity today is overwhelmingly correlated with income, household structure, spending priorities and local food prices, not with ancestral land tenure or spiritual disconnection from traditional food.
The article insists obesity and diabetes should not be framed as “lifestyle diseases” because not everyone has equal choices. Unequal choices, however, do not eliminate choice altogether. Fish and chips are not cheaper than basic home-cooked staples. Rice, potatoes, oats, frozen vegetables, eggs, chicken portions and mince remain among the most affordable foods in New Zealand. Supermarkets do not deny Māori access to them.
Yes, some harmful products arrived with European settlement — tobacco, alcohol and refined sugar among them. But exposure does not equal compulsion. Colonisation did not force anyone to smoke, drink to excess, or base their diet on sugar and processed food. Suggesting otherwise strips people of the ability to make their own choices and replaces responsibility with inevitability.
European settlement also brought institutions of self-reliance: wage labour, education, savings, enterprise and personal responsibility. Those tools were available to Māori as much as to anyone else. That outcomes differ today is not proof of colonial determinism; it is evidence that behaviour, family stability and economic choices still matter.
What the article leaves out is revealing. There is no discussion of alcohol expenditure, smoking rates, or the strong association between food insecurity and single-parent households. There is no engagement with educational underachievement, work participation, or the repeated failure of race-based social programmes to materially improve outcomes.
Instead, readers are offered the familiar solution: “decolonising the food system”. This slogan sounds radical but is strategically vague. In practice, it means more race-based policy, more regulatory exemptions, more public funding channelled through identity-based structures, and less accountability for results — an approach already tried across health, education and housing with little success.
There is a deeper harm here. By framing poverty and poor diet as an inherited condition rooted in colonisation, this narrative normalises failure and lowers expectations. It tells people their circumstances are not really changeable without sweeping political transformation. That is not empowerment. It is treating people like children dressed up as compassion.
Colonisation is history. Food insecurity is present. Confusing the two may be emotionally satisfying, but it is a dead end for good decision-making — and a disservice to the people this research claims to help.
Geoff Parker is a passionate advocate for equal rights and a colour blind society.
The study relies on qualitative interviews with Māori “kai [food] experts” operating entirely within a kaupapa [ideological] Māori framework. There is no attempt to test competing explanations or compare outcomes across income levels, household structures, regions, or behaviour. Colonisation is assumed at the outset and rediscovered at the end. This is narrative reinforcement, not inquiry.
The article also avoids an obvious question: if colonisation is the primary driver, why do Māori with similar historical backgrounds experience very different outcomes today? Why do some Māori families and communities achieve food security and good health while others do not? History does not operate as a uniform force acting equally on everyone.
The romanticised portrayal of pre-colonial Māori food systems deserves scrutiny. Māori were skilled food producers within a subsistence economy, but that economy was constrained by climate, seasonality and vulnerability to crop failure. Life expectancy was low and famine was not unknown. To contrast a selectively idealised past with the modern food environment — refrigeration, global supply chains, year-round availability — is not analysis. It is mythology.
More importantly, it distracts from the central reality that food insecurity today is overwhelmingly correlated with income, household structure, spending priorities and local food prices, not with ancestral land tenure or spiritual disconnection from traditional food.
The article insists obesity and diabetes should not be framed as “lifestyle diseases” because not everyone has equal choices. Unequal choices, however, do not eliminate choice altogether. Fish and chips are not cheaper than basic home-cooked staples. Rice, potatoes, oats, frozen vegetables, eggs, chicken portions and mince remain among the most affordable foods in New Zealand. Supermarkets do not deny Māori access to them.
Yes, some harmful products arrived with European settlement — tobacco, alcohol and refined sugar among them. But exposure does not equal compulsion. Colonisation did not force anyone to smoke, drink to excess, or base their diet on sugar and processed food. Suggesting otherwise strips people of the ability to make their own choices and replaces responsibility with inevitability.
European settlement also brought institutions of self-reliance: wage labour, education, savings, enterprise and personal responsibility. Those tools were available to Māori as much as to anyone else. That outcomes differ today is not proof of colonial determinism; it is evidence that behaviour, family stability and economic choices still matter.
What the article leaves out is revealing. There is no discussion of alcohol expenditure, smoking rates, or the strong association between food insecurity and single-parent households. There is no engagement with educational underachievement, work participation, or the repeated failure of race-based social programmes to materially improve outcomes.
Instead, readers are offered the familiar solution: “decolonising the food system”. This slogan sounds radical but is strategically vague. In practice, it means more race-based policy, more regulatory exemptions, more public funding channelled through identity-based structures, and less accountability for results — an approach already tried across health, education and housing with little success.
There is a deeper harm here. By framing poverty and poor diet as an inherited condition rooted in colonisation, this narrative normalises failure and lowers expectations. It tells people their circumstances are not really changeable without sweeping political transformation. That is not empowerment. It is treating people like children dressed up as compassion.
Colonisation is history. Food insecurity is present. Confusing the two may be emotionally satisfying, but it is a dead end for good decision-making — and a disservice to the people this research claims to help.
Geoff Parker is a passionate advocate for equal rights and a colour blind society.
14 comments:
This university "study" really shows how low our academic institutions have fallen. Before colonialism Maori were essentially mesolithic hunter gatherers, apart from a couple of root crops that grew in limited places. Their main form of protein was each other. By following these types of "academic studies", based on mythology, we are now heading back to that mesolithic past.
'Qualitative' is a euphemism used in fashionable social science research for having a few chinwags with subjects of like mind and then treating their beliefs as though they were hard fact. This is to set this kind of pseudoresearch aside from quantitative research which involves making measurements of the phenomena under investigation.
Any moron can do 'qualitative research' (Mary said, Sally said, Lizzy said, Annie said........) and you can start with a conclusion and work backwards - totally intellectually dishonest but hey, intellectual integrity is an evil White hetero male conception aimed at dominating every other sod, y'know.
So, Ms Shelling has a Phd and uses it to come up with this piece of fiction - heaven help us. (As an aside, if one ever needed yet more proof that educational standards have fallen.)
Of course, before colonisation Maori had food security, that's why they travelled the Pacific to search out new visual delights in a much cooler climate, because they were tired of the heat and having to strip-off and also deal daily with fresh water supply issues, having otherwise having mastered the art of sustainable living. When they arrived here, they set up camp and stayed put, only moving on to satisfy their innate, inquisitorial desire to search out new sights and expand their matauranga while, naturally, also giving their former camp some R&R in their renown practice of kaitaikitanga. Yeah, right!
The only mistake you made, Geoff is calling her (I was going to say 'work', but that's usually associated with a useful output) article "research". The latter it is not. It's an example of pro-regressive make-believe to fit with a narrative and predetermined ideological outcome. As for it adding to the sum total of human knowledge, one can only hope it wasn't physically published, for the tree would have been far more useful to humankind livng.
Colonisation is responsible for the more than doubling of Maori life expectancy and the huge increase in Maori population. Consumption of tobacco and alcohol and diet choice are individual responsibilities. Our universities are now rubbish, because of the Maoris and their sniveling sycophantic sympathizers. They seek to destroy everything the colonists built; they bite the hand that feeds them.
Colonialism is the reason Maoris exist.
Without it, they would have exterminated each other.
I take food insecurity to mean an urge to stuff when food available on the basis it may not be tomorrow. Stone age maori certainly practised this and for very good reason. Months on fern root was not a pleasant propect. It ended the moa. Polak describes how one of his expeditions was seriously delayed by the maori "boys" being totally fatigued after sneaking off in the night to devour a dead whale they had passed! Maori tradition was much modified with the arrival of Cook and the potato; traditional "memories" back that far even less reliable than usual. The cannibal gorging is conveniently forgotten. The instinct continues today but it is no more appropriate to blame colonists who have enabled adequate food, than it would have been to blame the whales or the defeated battle opponents. The instinct is absurd today when unlimited food is available, and apart from maybe nucleur war, state services will always find a meal. It staggers me that reports such as this latest are not immediately dismissed by all as claptrap. From my local very cosmopolitan supermarket the gross overweight of maori/polynesians is strikingly obvious. The trolley contents provide much of the explanation. Observation of meals at food courts also revealing/fascinating. Social services are presumably too scared of the racist accusation and/or too cosily related to provide frank race based instruction.
Pre European Maori lived a very short miserable life without the proper nutrition of enough protein, leafy veges, fibre.
Poisonous fern roots were a gamble.
No medical services.
Another fine example of the ingratitude of Maori radicals to the western world that increased the typical Maori lifespan by a factor of 3, and life quality many fold.
I spend 17 years cruising the S. Pacific on my yacht, visiting many island communities and anchoring in front of villages for weeks at a time. (not your typical tourist or "academic" experience). In Fiji, locals invited us to dinner. Wow, we thought fresh fish, lobster, etc. The reef was teeming with fish. What we got was Spam out of a can! Why? Because for them it was a "status food", something they had to pay $ for and impress their guests. No thought of "healthy food." We saw lots of fatty imported lamb flaps from NZ in villages that had easy access to fish and local vegetables and fruit.
This Phd lady obviously has no conception of the many reasons for food choices among Pacific people. Just another WOKE academic pushing more neo-Marxist Pacific wonderfulness versus evil whitey ideological B.S.
This sounds like a thinly disguised pro-cannibalism argument
The idea that anyone has “food insecurity” (whatever that means) in NZ with one of the world’s most generous developed welfare states is ….. misguided at best.
Concluding that colonialism is responsible for this ill defined negative state while ignoring the doubling of average life expectancy of Maori is … disingenuous.
You’d of hoped phd folk would do better than this, but here we are
I strongly object to the lazy assessment of "alcohol" as a harmful product.
In fact, I consider it to be puritanical nonsense.
Alcohol has been around since the beginning of recorded history.
Beer is officially considered a food product. It contains calories, carbohydrates, and nutrients. Some classify it as a "liquid bread" historically known as an essential, source of food energy.
It built the pyramids (in 20 years if you can believe that) and has been integral to the foundation of most empires for Millenia.
Captain Cook first brewed alcohol in "New Zealand" to help his crew stave off scurvy.
The indigenous "TRIBAL" people (there were no Māori then) didn't like the taste of alcohol.
But I guess that also answers the question - "why do Māori with similar historical backgrounds experience very different outcomes today?"
I personally wish Maori had invented gravy to go with their traditional hangi.
Am I the only one who finds it incredibly dry when forced to partake as a "treat" by my employer. Has anyone read the study? Does it mention gravy or some sort of jus or sauce?
On RNZ Wed evening the Salvation Army presented a report. Their policy analyst, in the modern fashion a female maori, managed to insert the stock platitudinous statement that food insecurity is due colonisation. RNZ being RNZ this standard insurrectionist propaganda was accepted without challenge or comment. The SA have not so far been as brainless as St John and adopted a corrupted maori name but they should realise that such programmed pro maori attitudes will lose them donations big time. Without seeing the complete household budgets I am very sceptical of the claims of extreme food hardship, and especially when most are overweight.
Robert, not only have St John been infiltrated by the white ants, but also the Sallies.
Donations made in good faith of doing some public good, ard being wasted on specific Maori projects in te reo.
My charitable donations are now being channeled into organizations that speak English only.
Another riveting academic study. I never (never) could have guessed what the study would say....
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