The best laid plans are usually scapered by the most mundane occurrences. I had planned to write this blog about something intellectual, something about the current affairs of my adopted country or even intelligent comments about the various conflicts on my continent, Africa. Unfortunately life got in the way; two weeks ago I lost my phone and now I am using this space to vent my very passive anger at my mobile phone company and Royal Mail.
Granted the cause of this whole situation was my own ineptitude; I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and blissfully unaware of it until I realised I had had my phone stolen. However, seeing as I have insurance (against all possible occurrences of my own incompetence) I was hopefully only going to be slightly inconvenienced. .
My very lovely, organised partner had the phone blocked, while I unhelpfully fell asleep. With his guidance I reported the theft to the local police station before the 'you are out of time to get a new phone' twenty four hours had expired. I called my phone company, had the nicest conversation I have ever had with them and gave them the investigation report number as required. They promised to send a new phone out. They have a seventy two hour service level agreement (SLA) with their customers so I was expecting my replacement phone on Tuesday. I sent out the embarrassing email telling everyone I had lost my phone and then I waited..
As I am writing about this you will have realised that the phone did not arrive, so technically I am still waiting. I am most angry about this situation because being a woman of the noughties I put my life on hold in order to ensure that when it resumed, it was a normal life, with all my necessary appendages (legs, arms, bank cards, mobile phone with all the appropriate numbers). When the phone did not arrive on the Wednesday (three working days after my conversation with the phone company) I called to check on it. I was told I miss counted. As the first conversation occurred during a weekend I should have counted three days from the Tuesday, so the phone would be with me tomorrow. .
The postman came and went and still no phone, so I called back. Apparently my phone was delivered and signed for the day before i.e. on the Wednesday that I had called to ask where it was. The phone company told me as the phone had been signed for I would have to deal with Royal Mail to sort it out; finding my missing replacement phone was now my problem. Being the wimp and control freak that I am I decided to do the required leg work. I quickly showered and rushed down to the local sorting office. It was closed, quelle surprise. .
I called the phone company to further explain my dilemma (I was leaving for France the next day and had been hoping to take my phone with); they told me there was nothing they could do for me. Having been calm I was now annoyed, so I called, my man who is so much more competent than I am. He is much more adept at dealing with 'big business' when they refuse to acknowledge their responsibilities. He spoke to them and received a much more satisfactory outcome. Apparently there was something, other than the nonsense non solutions they had been giving me, that could be done to solve this situation. Unfortunately it was too late to actually do it. The phone company promised to email and phone him back within three hours (SLA's are big in the UK corporate sector). They did not; he phoned them for the third time and coolly gave them a piece of his very capable mind. Still, no satisfaction was to be had. .
Needless to say the various communications and correspondence has resulted in no real resolution. I know my frustration is not uncommon. What is interesting is if I was in my motherland, Zambia, I would not have expected anything from my phone company, the police or the post office. Hey I would not have been able to insure my phone so I would have simply bought a new phone, and then purchased a replacement SIM card and carried on with my life, embarrassed, inconvenienced but without any expectations and thus no disappointment. .
So as I sit here thinking about my situation, I wonder when I became such a Londoner. I count on things I did not three years ago. I do however, realise I am still African, because I was not shocked that someone had stolen my replacement phone and I am much more comfortable with this drama than I would have been with receiving my phone with no hitch. And I have realised there is no point fighting the way life works. My phone will turn up when it turns up and that is just the way things are right now.
Are Supermarkets the spawn of the devil?
I have been to the supermarket today. To most of you this will not sound like a topic worthy of discussion but most people who know me know how much I dislike supermarkets. It’s not only that they are often ruthless and dismissive in their dealings with the communities in which they operate but they are also temples to consumerism. The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that they are designed to draw you in and con you into purchasing more than you really need; they convince you to buy lower quality over quantity, especially when it comes to food. Fortunately recent headlines attest I am not alone. Despite this the majority of people still chose quantity over quality and shop at supermarkets.
I try to support the non chain local shops in my area, though I have to admit I am well served by organic grocers, a first class fishmonger and butchers, a Middle Eastern food hall as well as authentic Italian and Portuguese delicatessens within ten minutes walk from my house. I don’t know what New York or any of the other US cities is like in terms of the availability of quality food of varying ethnicity, but London is hit and miss when it comes to finding anything other than a supermarket in which to purchase food locally. I have lived in a part of London that will remain unnamed where goods at the closest corner shop were so extortionately priced it was a relief to go to the supermarket even though it was half an hour away on the bus.
However, there has been a growing movement in the UK, championed by our celebrity chefs, led most vocally by Jamie Oliver (the naked chef who last year challenged schools over the food they were providing our children) towards organic, ethically sourced, seasonal food. In his famous campaign we all learned about Turkey Twizzlers, pieces of meat that I am still not sure contain any turkey. His and other peoples efforts have resulted in a backlash against the supermarkets, one of whom have recently reduced the cost of their whole chickens to GBP1.99, despite a recent campaign by the aforementioned chefs against battery bred chickens. We have learned that not only do supermarkets undercut the smaller local shops, they supposedly do it by under paying the farmers who supply the various foodstuffs in their stores.
I know it is hypocritical to preach about buying organic, ethically sourced food given all the other things I do that are harmful to the environment and myself (taking at least one long haul flight a year and drinking copious amounts of wine) but I like food and I want my food to be good. I cook a lot (probably in larger quantities than I should) and I want to know that I am giving my guests, people I care about, the best that I can afford. Besides where I come from everything tastes of what it is, beef tastes like beef, goat like goat, fish like fish, and village chicken, a chicken so flavoursome it is as unlike western chicken as it possibly can be. Even our vegetables taste different, so I demand more from my food than most supermarkets can supply. However, not being as poverty stricken as I would like people to believe, I can afford to pay a little extra for my food, only ever being embarrassed to admit I pay over the odds to have an organic vegetable box delivered to my door every fortnight when I am confronted with people whose families have less to spend on their weekly food bill than I spend for two peoples seasonal vegetables.
My guilt has been felt by a greater part of society in the past few weeks when one of the programmes on battery chickens revealed how much working class people really have to spend on food. In my day job I use standardised household costs to calculate how much people are allowed to spend on their food. The numbers are astounding to me. The allocation is GBP 35 per adult and GBP 25 per child. The child’s allocation is what I budget for my lunch alone and Mr L and I spend the same as a family of three’s allocation on the rest of our food (that would explain our growing girth!). This discrepancy has led to the argument that organic food is the reserve of the middle classes. Perhaps is, although my retort to that is people in my village eat organic food and they are supposedly living on $2 a day or less. This is because they have access to cheap chemical free food. Granted they grow it themselves, but that would tell me that the problem is not the cost of food but the cost of production of food. I find it laughable that let your chicken run free cost more than keeping it in a space smaller than a piece of A4. It seems to me that that food problem has less to do with class than it has to do with the amount of land that is available for agriculture.
My country is large and we value food, so it stands to reason that we would make space to grow food be it vegetable or meat based. It is, however, difficult to farm vegetables naturally in Zambia, so we value them. Historically we ate more vegetables than we did meat, a fact also attached to the cost of food, in terms of opportunity cost. Killing a cow deprived you of milk more than it nourished you, for regardless of the value of the nourishment that its meat gives you; a cow produces milk for far longer than it will ever give you meat. I grew up being served a meat dish accompanied by several vegetable dishes. I cannot imagine a dish such as some of the Nigerian ones I have tasted in London that have meat, chicken and crayfish being served in Zambia. We would see that as greatly indulgent, only having the dishes cooked separately for special occasions. We lived as much in harmony with our animals as our hunger would allow.
Having rumbled on this long I suppose the moral of this story is that I feel it is immoral to argue that organic food is a class issue. We as a society should find a way of making healthy, ethically produced food accessible for all, rather than trying to justify the supply of non food to the less privileged members of our society. And that is all I am going to say about this today (yes you can all breathe now! ).
I try to support the non chain local shops in my area, though I have to admit I am well served by organic grocers, a first class fishmonger and butchers, a Middle Eastern food hall as well as authentic Italian and Portuguese delicatessens within ten minutes walk from my house. I don’t know what New York or any of the other US cities is like in terms of the availability of quality food of varying ethnicity, but London is hit and miss when it comes to finding anything other than a supermarket in which to purchase food locally. I have lived in a part of London that will remain unnamed where goods at the closest corner shop were so extortionately priced it was a relief to go to the supermarket even though it was half an hour away on the bus.
However, there has been a growing movement in the UK, championed by our celebrity chefs, led most vocally by Jamie Oliver (the naked chef who last year challenged schools over the food they were providing our children) towards organic, ethically sourced, seasonal food. In his famous campaign we all learned about Turkey Twizzlers, pieces of meat that I am still not sure contain any turkey. His and other peoples efforts have resulted in a backlash against the supermarkets, one of whom have recently reduced the cost of their whole chickens to GBP1.99, despite a recent campaign by the aforementioned chefs against battery bred chickens. We have learned that not only do supermarkets undercut the smaller local shops, they supposedly do it by under paying the farmers who supply the various foodstuffs in their stores.
I know it is hypocritical to preach about buying organic, ethically sourced food given all the other things I do that are harmful to the environment and myself (taking at least one long haul flight a year and drinking copious amounts of wine) but I like food and I want my food to be good. I cook a lot (probably in larger quantities than I should) and I want to know that I am giving my guests, people I care about, the best that I can afford. Besides where I come from everything tastes of what it is, beef tastes like beef, goat like goat, fish like fish, and village chicken, a chicken so flavoursome it is as unlike western chicken as it possibly can be. Even our vegetables taste different, so I demand more from my food than most supermarkets can supply. However, not being as poverty stricken as I would like people to believe, I can afford to pay a little extra for my food, only ever being embarrassed to admit I pay over the odds to have an organic vegetable box delivered to my door every fortnight when I am confronted with people whose families have less to spend on their weekly food bill than I spend for two peoples seasonal vegetables.
My guilt has been felt by a greater part of society in the past few weeks when one of the programmes on battery chickens revealed how much working class people really have to spend on food. In my day job I use standardised household costs to calculate how much people are allowed to spend on their food. The numbers are astounding to me. The allocation is GBP 35 per adult and GBP 25 per child. The child’s allocation is what I budget for my lunch alone and Mr L and I spend the same as a family of three’s allocation on the rest of our food (that would explain our growing girth!). This discrepancy has led to the argument that organic food is the reserve of the middle classes. Perhaps is, although my retort to that is people in my village eat organic food and they are supposedly living on $2 a day or less. This is because they have access to cheap chemical free food. Granted they grow it themselves, but that would tell me that the problem is not the cost of food but the cost of production of food. I find it laughable that let your chicken run free cost more than keeping it in a space smaller than a piece of A4. It seems to me that that food problem has less to do with class than it has to do with the amount of land that is available for agriculture.
My country is large and we value food, so it stands to reason that we would make space to grow food be it vegetable or meat based. It is, however, difficult to farm vegetables naturally in Zambia, so we value them. Historically we ate more vegetables than we did meat, a fact also attached to the cost of food, in terms of opportunity cost. Killing a cow deprived you of milk more than it nourished you, for regardless of the value of the nourishment that its meat gives you; a cow produces milk for far longer than it will ever give you meat. I grew up being served a meat dish accompanied by several vegetable dishes. I cannot imagine a dish such as some of the Nigerian ones I have tasted in London that have meat, chicken and crayfish being served in Zambia. We would see that as greatly indulgent, only having the dishes cooked separately for special occasions. We lived as much in harmony with our animals as our hunger would allow.
Having rumbled on this long I suppose the moral of this story is that I feel it is immoral to argue that organic food is a class issue. We as a society should find a way of making healthy, ethically produced food accessible for all, rather than trying to justify the supply of non food to the less privileged members of our society. And that is all I am going to say about this today (yes you can all breathe now! ).
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