Day 7: Meat

For every New Zealander, the country has 1 dairy cow, 1.1 beef cattle, and 9.5 sheep (down from 23 in 1982). Lamb alone is a $2b industry. There is a lot of meat in New Zealand, and plenty of it is from the greater Auckland area.

The farms in the hotter, drier and hillier area north of Auckland are mostly for beef cattle, while the soggier Waikato prefers dairy. Although there are sheep farms in both these areas, most sheep are in the South Island.

The butchers I spoke to assured me that all their beef came from the local area, and the lamb too. They weren't nearly so certain of chicken or pork, so I stayed away from those during the week.

I have never eaten so much meat in my life. I spent a few months on an Atkins Diet years ago without eating this much meat. It creates a strange wolflike sensation to eat meat without carbohydrates; there is satiety, but also a kind of hollowness. Meat cannot fill you up in the same way because you reach the point where you can't eat any more meat before the point where you can't eat any more food. It takes longer to convert into usable energy, and so the body waits for the effect of eating to kick in, and while it waits you sit there with a ball of ground meat in your stomach.

Tomorrow my week ends and I will, without a shadow of a doubt, eat a pizza.