New Zealanders are now consuming less lamb per capita than countries like Tanzania, Malaysia and Bangladesh.

New Zealanders seem to be ditching lamb in favour of cheaper meats. How did this old Kiwi favourite fall so far out of favour? JULIAN LEE reports.

Lamb was once considered a staple of the Kiwi diet, but has been quietly and quickly disappearing from our dinner plates.

New Zealanders are now consuming less lamb per capita than countries like Tanzania, Malaysia and Bangladesh, and only slightly more than India, where about a third of people are vegetarian.

CAMERON BURNELL/STUFF Lambs to the slaughter. This New Zealand lamb is being exported to Iran.

That was according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which in a February report said New Zealand's annual sheep meat consumption has plummeted from more than 19 kilograms per person in 2006 to just 900 grams in 2016.

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The figures were disputed by Beef + Lamb New Zealand. The industry organisation acknowledged domestic consumption of lamb had been dropping off, but did not believe it had happened so quickly.

SUPPLIED The sort of thing Europeans do with New Zealand lamb.

Beef + Lamb senior agricultural analyst Ben Hancock said one of the main reasons for the decline was the high and steadily increasing price of lamb compared to other meats.

"Lamb is a premium meat now – it's competing against your cheaper proteins like poultry and pork.

"The amount of chicken getting eaten is going up per capita [because] it's cheap. Price is one of the main deciding factors in the supermarket aisle."

MURRAY WILSON/STUFF More of the land once used for sheep farming has been converted into dairy farms.

He said land in New Zealand was increasingly being used for dairy instead of lambs and the resulting shortage of lambs had created a price hike.

Chinese buyers had also pushed up the price of the remaining sheep meat stocks, making it unaffordable for many Kiwis, he said.

"There's only so much land in New Zealand to feed these animals on, to raise them. Land has been lost to the dairy sector. In the medium-term there is expected to be relatively stable beef, cattle and lamb numbers."

According to the New Zealand Institute for Primary Industry Management, sheep numbers have declined by 50 per cent over the past 27 years.

Food historian Dave Veart​ said lamb might be considered part of the current Kiwi diet, but that idea had only been in place since the middle of the 20th century.

"In fact, what's weird is that we started eating lamb relatively recently. The favourite sheep cut for New Zealanders before that was hogget.

MY FOOD BAG A modern take on a traditional dish: BBQ butterflied lamb leg, tomato salad and grilled asparagus.

"It was seen as a bit wasteful to be eating the sheep as a baby – especially in the 1950s [when] you might have had four or five kids and a leg of lamb didn't go that far."

He said lamb's popularity took off in New Zealand after it caught on as a fashionable food item in Britain.

"New Zealand farmers were responding to their customers in Britain, where lamb was very much a prestigious food, more than mutton was, which was considered cheaper and more cheap tasting.

"People want to eat what posh people eat. People want to eat what's in the social circle above you."

There remains a dispute about whether the OECD has painted too stark a picture of lamb in New Zealand.

Hancock said the OECD figures of declining lamb consumption were distorted, noting the 2016 measurement of 900g per person was made only at the end of the calendar year, but the peak of the lamb culling season had been delayed until March 2017 due to wet weather conditions in 2016. Wet weather creates low-quality feed, which hinders lamb weight.

He said the average Kiwi consumed about 3.6kg of sheep meat in each of the three years before 2016 and the figures fluctuated too wildly.

"They seemed rather high those first years and that's when those comparisons were made against. It makes that drop-off exaggerated."

Beef + Lamb did not have any figures on domestic lamb consumption. Hancock said the Meat Board Act was amended in 2004, which meant the reporting requirements of processing companies changed, limiting information about domestic meat availability.

Of the 23 million lambs slaughtered in New Zealand at the end of the 2016-17 season, the vast majority ended up overseas. Until recently, Europe had been the main market, but demand there was dropping off and Asian demand was catching up.

By the end of the season, New Zealand exported 296,000 tonnes of lamb and 79,000 tonnes of mutton, the latter of which is in high demand in China. According to the OECD figures, Kiwis ate about 4600 tonnes of sheep meat in 2016 – about 11 per cent of all produced in New Zealand.

Veart said it was important to remember that food choices could take surprising turns. For example, preserving and baking dwindled in popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s, but had since made a comeback.

"I wouldn't write lamb off yet. People appear to be cooking more and more imaginatively.

"I wouldn't be surprised if sheep meat made a recovery and the route that would do it is the sort of cooking of North Africa and Morocco."

He said one part of the lamb that had changed drastically was the backstraps – once the cheapest part of the lamb and now the most expensive.

"Lamb backstraps used to be a rare and wonderful thing and the butcher used to give them to you for free because nobody wanted them."

On the whole, Veart thought the future of New Zealand lamb would be decided by trendsetters overseas in places such as Hollywood.

"There's a sort of rediscovery of what makes New Zealand food special. You're getting people eating a wider range of things.

"Meat's so problematic at the moment with the politics of meat eating. The trend-setters are eating ethically more acceptable meat."

Hancock said he did not know if lamb would disappear from the New Zealand diet altogether.

"Thats a tough one. I couldn't really comment on that. We've got the flock stabilising, but if demand for sheep meat from China is strengthened, it depends on how much people want to pay for it."