Consumer, cow, milkman, roses, tulsi: one ecosystem

When I was little, we got our milk delivered straight from the buffalo sheds a few miles away (this was still Bombay, not somewhere in the countryside). The milkman had a bunch of buffaloes (or tended someone else's), and brought milk in large aluminum buckets, like the one on the left, and measured out as much as my mom wanted, into a large saucepan from the kitchen.

There was no packaging at all, no waste, and the milk had to be 100% fresh or else you'd know at once (it's warm here so fresh milk doesn't keep long unless you pasteurize by boiling). Sometimes the milkman would bring me a rose from the bush that grew by the shed. And when we wanted fertilizer for our house plants, he'd bring a dung cake (dry, not stinky). We'd pound it into a very coarse powder and scatter it in the tulsi pots. One cowpat is quite a lot of fertilizer!

It was such a wonderful, simple and environment-friendly system, and the producers (buffalo and milkman) were a more direct part of the lives of us consumers, not separate. The milk man died, the sheds got moved out, and we now get our milk and fertilizer in plastic packets, and the roses come from commercial farms with a massive carbon footprint (refrigerated trucks or planes). We have no idea who feeds the buffaloes or tends the flowers, what their names are (our milkman was Udit Narayan), whether they look healthy and are paid well, and how fresh or pure the milk truly is.

Mumbai's summer fruit - much more than mangoes

Last month, the mango season ended here in Mumbai. At that time, during a conversation about mangoes, the person I was chatting with grumbled, "You can't get good fruit in this country". These are the tropics, she has lived here all her life (she's no spring chicken) and she has plenty of money to buy any fruit she wants. But apparently third-world fruit does not count as fruit. I'm amazed, always, at the innumerable ways - many divorced from all reality - which we Indians can find to disparage ourselves.

I said in surprise that I ate not only mangoes but also canteloupe, chikoo, and other fruits for breakfast every morning. This rich and powerful woman, who wears lots of gold, diamonds and Louis Vuitton every day, then blamed her fruitwallah for not bringing biodiversity to her doorstep. He only brings mangoes, she complained. Well, why would any smart businessman sell her Rs. 30/kilo fruit when she unquestioningly and regularly buys fruit that costs Rs. 200/kilo and lacks the information to ask for other fruit in Mumbai's peak fruit season! Going to the market is one way to benefit from a market economy, but I guess the market street is a little rough on Rs. 8,000 designer shoes...

I love going to the market, which unfortunately I get to do only once a week. All through the summer, I photographed the fruit I was about to eat for breakfast. Here are those and a couple of other results. Enjoy!

Above: Curbside fruit seller at the corner of Tulsi Pipe and Mori roads, Mahim.

Below: Jackfruit seller in the Santa Cruz market. Jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus or Artocarpus heterophylla), the world's largest tree-borne fruit, is native to South Asia. When I asked for permission to take the picture, I apologetically told the vendor I would not buy any jackfruit because I don't like it. Truth is, I'd never tasted it (except for jackfruit chips - yum!) because the smell puts me off. But he cheerfully offered me a free sample. It was sweet, and I was surprised to find it was somewhat dry (i.e. not juicy) and chewy. I could get to like it, I guess!

Above: Baby jackfruit on the tree. This picture was not taken in Mumbai like the rest of the photos here. It was in Norris Town, Bangalore, in Feb 2007, using a film camera.

Below:Mangoes (Mangifera indica) are native to the Indian subcontinent. They contain several nutrients and phytochemicals and are very good for health. For some reason they have the (false) reputation for being fattening. A mango has about 105-135 calories, of which none are from fat. It's a virtually fat-free, cholesterol-free fruit. The fruit pictured below is the prized Alfonso variety, named after the fifeenth-century Portuguese fidalgo Alfonso de Albuquerque.

Below: Peeled and uncut Alfonso mango

Below: Mango peel

Below: Mango tart at Theobroma, Colaba - slices of mango resting on almond-flavored pastry cream in a small pastry shell. It tastes as magically wonderful as it looks.

In an effort to learn more about my own carbon footprint, I've taken these days to asking vendors where the fruit I'm buying comes from. Cherries and peaches, for example, come to Mumbai from Kashmir. More on other fruits below.

Below: Canteloupes (Cucumis melo) are native to South Asia. The one below came to Mumbai's Santa Cruz market from Muzaffarpur, Bihar.

Below: With a little bit of homemade yogurt, it made three healthy and yummy breakfasts!

Below: Another variety of canteloupe

Below: A third variety. They're all equally delicious!

Below: One half de-seeded. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I'll say that cutting open a kharbooza (canteloupe) or sitaafal (custard apple) is a reminder of the abundance of nature: sweetness, nutrients, juice, and seeds, all crammed into one package. I would never buy cut fruit in a plastic cup in an American supermarket, and certainly never unnatural seedless fruit - I enjoy taking the time to cut and peel fruit. Nothing in life can be so important that you have to eat in a tearing hurry on a regular basis.

Below: Black jambul (a.k.a. jambu, jamun, Syzygium cumini, Syzygium jambolanum, Eugenia cumini and Eugenia jambolana) is native to the Indian subcontinent. It was introduced into the Americas by the Portuguese (Brazil, of course). They're about 1.5" long, but packed with enough dye to make your tongue purple for a few hours. The ones pictured below came to Mumbai from southern Gujarat. I asked the young woman who sold them to me what she would sell after the jambul season, and she said wouldn't sell anything, she'd go back to the fields.

Below: Jambul seeds are a pretty green inside, and useful in controlling diabetes.

Below: These lychees (Litchi chinensis) came to the Santa Cruz market in Mumbai from Bengal. Native to China, they grow in much of S. and SE Asia, and are rich in Vitamin C.

Below: Chikoo (also known as sapota, sapodilla, nispero, Latin name Manilkara zapota). Native to southern Mexico, introduced in SE Asia during colonization. It is very cheaply available in India. The fruit pictured below is local, i.e. from within Maharashtra state or from southern Gujarat. It's sweetest when it's soft enough to take apart with your hands - no need for a knife. If it smells a bit sour, that means it's overripe. Humble though it may be, the chikoo's sweet flavor and malty texture makes it ideal for milkshakes and ice-cream.

Below: The custard apple or sitaafal (Annona reticulata) is another exotic fruit (from the Americas, I think) that it's hard not to think of as Indian. It's about the size of an apple.If you let yourself be put off by its unfortunate toad-like appearance, you're denying yourself a wonderful treat! The meat is very sweet and creamy, with a slightly sandy texture. It's a very popular ice cream flavor in Mumbai when the fruit is in season.

Below: No need for a knife - you can gently take the fruit apart with your hands when it's ripe. The seeds are not edible, though (generations of grandmothers crushed and boiled them in coconut oil to make an effective herbal lousicide!). This fruit yielded 60 seeds. Yes, I counted.

Below: This peach came to Mumbai from Kashmir. European scientists called the peach Prunus persica because they thought it was native to Iran. But it's originally from China (not Georgia!). An average sized peach contains 30-35 calories, Vitamins A, C and E, fiber, and phytochemicals. In other words, it's healthy! Here's a nice American webpage that explains the history of peaches and links to peach recipes.

Below: Papaya (Carica papaya) is native to Central America, and unrelated to the North American pawpaw. I guess the season really starts in the early monsoon. Papaya is very common in South and SE Asia, South Africa. It can be eaten ripe (yellow) or unripe (green, in salad or curry). It is fat-free and very high in Vitamin C. Did you know that green papaya has contraceptive properties? The papaya tree below is in rural Karjat. I took the picture on a film camera in 2004.

There are still many fruits not pictured here, including the incredible palmyra fruit, known as taar gola in Marathi and Gujarati (I ate my purchase before I started this project, and never bought it again, and the season passed), plum, red date, ber (Ziziphus jujuba), red cherry, plum, pomegranate, pineapple, watermelon, etc., etc., etc.

I must acknowledge Indira of Mahanandi, whose approach to food I share in many respects, and whose delightful photography is partly what inspired me to put together this photo essay, even though my skill, patience and talent does not match hers.

Itadakimasu.

Bandel cheese

A friend brought me this cheese from Calcutta (Kolkata) recently. My friend said it had orginally been made by priests (presumably Catholic), while another story of indeterminate source has it that was named for the Portuguese corruption of "bandar" (Arabic for port) and made by local cooks under Portuguese supervision. At any rate, today bandel is available at two shops in New Market.

An FAO webpage on traditional milk products in developing countries describes bandel as an "indigenous unripened, salted soft variety of cheese made in perforated pots. It is similar to surti paneer but made from cow's milk."

The little rounds are about 2" or 5 centimeters across, and maybe half as thick. The way to eat this cheese is to immerse it in water overnight. By morning it is distinctly softer. I pared off the rind with a knife (a butter knife is enough), and found the texture to be surprisingly spongy, like a good paneer but a bit more crumbly. The smell, however, is not like paneer! It's distinctly smoky and porky, both before and after soaking.

And you know how some things surprise you by turning out to taste quite different from how they smell? Well, bandel won't surprise you at all -- it tastes smoky and porky. I didn't like it, actually, although I like pork, and I like many kinds of cheese. This one was too strong for my liking, at least by itself.

I don't know yet whether it's supposed to be eaten in a particular way, how it might melt/cook, etc. It would probably work well crumbled into a salad, with some mild sort of greens and simple dressing. I think I could acquire the taste for bandel.

More Mumbai summer

Bougainvillea. Photo by moi. If you'd like to use it for any reason, please let me know!

Bougainvillea (Bougainvillea brasilensis) is named after an eighteenth-century French navigator who discovered the colorful and very thorny vine in southern America. This would be the chap Diderot alluded to in his "Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville", which was not really about travel but a critique of French society and politics.

The pink papery part isn't the real flower, the little white thingies are, although I've no idea on what basis botanists decide these things (if you do, please leave a comment). Based on the pictures I've seen of French colonies in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, and my own sojourn in Pondicherry, it seems French colonists liked to cheer up whitewashed architecture with pink, white, and deep orange variants of bougainvillea. And although Mumbai was never French territory, bougainvillea has always been part of my landscape here. It clung to a stretch of chicken wire along my school boundary, creating a shady canopy under which you could sit on the low garden wall. And there was also a big jumble of it in a corner of the garden around my parents' home. Sadly, that went when the railways took a strip of land from our landlord to widen the rail corridor. Can't think why the landlord didn't put it back inside the new property boundary, because it's pretty easy to grow. The photo above was taken on May 17, at the gates of the "haunted house" at the end of the street.

Photo of anthurium below, taken on the same day, outside the building next door to ours.

Anthurium. Photo by moi. If you'd like to use it for any reason, please let me know!

A Mumbai summer ends

Mumbai has been intolerably humid. The air was so still and thick with humidity that I felt I simply couldn't bear it. Neither my nor my friends' homes have air conditioning. Nor do the buses, trains, nor most taxis. But bear it I did, simply because there was nothing else to do. These past few weeks, the air conditioning at my workplace was a sort-of incentive to go to work. (I say "sort of" because they crank the damn thing up until your brain freezes and your fingers stop moving. That's not very pleasant, either.)

A couple of hours ago, it rained -- a heavy shower for a good 20 minutes. It's like someone turned the air conditioning on for the whole neighborhood. It's dark now, and although tomorrow Mumbai is sure to be back to its nasty muggy self, at least the dust will have washed off the leaves, and the air, normally a yellowy-brown despite the year-round coastal breeze, will be a little clearer.

For the rest, here are a few glimpses of Mumbai's summer. Photos by yours truly. If you want to use them, ask me, okay?

Photos I regret not taking

We all see beautiful or moving moments that we couldn't photograph for some reason. In my case, more often than not, it's because I was too lazy or disorganized to take my camera along. I created this new tag so I can share the images that now exist only in my head.

To start off, a really old image, and one from last night.

Sometime in April/May 1990. Beach on the Andhra coast, somewhere near the estuary of the Godavari and the town of Narasapur. Blue sky, empty beach, quite barren - just a little bit of scrub - and scores of iridescent red crabs teeming astonishingly on clean white sand. Sarojamma breaks off from our little group of women who had briefly stopped there, and, in a moment of exuberance, runs towards the crabs, sending them scurrying in all directions in a panic. Just remembering Sarojamma's impulsive joy gives me a sense of freedom.

Sunday, January 20, 2008. Mumbai Festival event in the amphitheater on the Carter Road promenade, Khar/Bandra. An Australian hip-hop band called Downsyde is playing on
the stage, egging the audience on to sing along, raise their hands in the air, and dance. During the last couple of songs, the little area near the stage is packed with dancers. Two little kids, a girl of around four, with a cloud of curls, and a younger boy appropriately sporting a wool beanie, are up on the stage with the four hip-hoppants, three of whose names I remember as Shabazz, Armee, and Dazaztah (sp?). The little girl, especially, had a great sense of rhythm, and even improvised in time to the music improvisations, hurling her little arms in the air with abandon. Joy!

Just realized as I typed the last full stop - they're both seaside moments of joy...

Globalization => no ginger in dinner :-)

From a forum I'm on:

It's been a few years since we have stopped buying our fruits and vegetables at the regular chain grocery stores, and have instead been enjoying fresh locally grown stuff from coop etc. So naturally (pun intended :-) ) we've been immune to what the local grocery chain store peddles as "fresh" vegetables.

I was highly amused when on Sunday evening we were sitting with a few of our friends, and one of them says "Hey, I couldn't find any ginger at the local Giant Eagle store", and another replied, "Yeah, there was some news about some problem with import of ginger from China"! So immediately, I piped up about Nature's Bin, our local foods store where one doesn't need to be worried about imports! :-)

There's our ad for our local coop :-) Maybe someone can make a youtube video!

Hehe! But I guess it's not so funny, after all, that not even the smallest, most ordinary things are consumed close to where they're produced any more. Even in a poor country like India, kerbside fruit vendors have big cardboard boxes of fruit from other countries, and it's not even all upper-crust exotic stuff like kiwi, just regular stuff, year round.

And I wonder, what is life like in the Chinese countryside, with just about anything being cultivated or manufactured for export? Bamboo, wood, paper, plastic, food, fabric... 50 years from now, who will be better off, India or China? The answer is probably Bhutan!

Image source: http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/g/ginger13-l.jpg

A toast to America's tap water

Image: http://www.drinktap.org/consumerdnn/

I originally posted this NYT editorial to a forum I'm on, and expressed hope that Pepsi was fighting a losing battle. Pepsi recently announced that Aquafina bottles would say they contain tap water. The edit highlighted the excellent quality of American municipal water, and the economic and environmental costs of bottling and shipping water.

Then someone shared this Canadian news item. Then I found this news report about NBC's Today Show calling in professional wine tasters to judge water from 12 cities (turns out most American tap water is yummy, and the best tap water is from Salt Lake City). Excerpts:

To avoid bias, New York City’s water — whose quality is generally held to be among the best in the nation — was not entered. NBC affiliates in 12 cities were given two identical, clean plastic bottles which were filled from taps and shipped to New York, where they were stored at 60 degrees — cellar temperature — at the request of the judges. The tasting was done in the studio kitchen production area with clean glassware, cubes of French bread for palate-cleansing and spittoons.

Running close behind [Salt Lake City] in the unscientific, blind taste-test of the water from 12 cities were runners-up Boston and Columbia, S.C. Boston’s water, said Bastianich, "has a purity — it’s straight down the middle." "It’s very crisp and appealing," offered Lynch.

Columbia’s tap water, said Lynch, is "luscious — I like its guts."

The report also mentions an interesting San Francisco Chronicle investigation:

Last month, partially in response to a “San Francisco Chronicle” investigation that found that the city had spent $2.36 million of taxpayers’ money in 4 ½ years on bottled water, [San Francisco mayor Gavin] Newsom ordered all city departments and agencies to stop buying bottled water effective July 1.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has also told his agencies to stop spending tax dollars on bottled water.

Then, oddly, a couple of people on the forum responded skeptically, saying their friends and roommates drink bottled water. Well, we all have anecdotal evidence to show that people persist in drinking bottled water. I too could have mentioned the plastic bottles that litter train carriages and railway stations in Mumbai. But how many of us have "anecdotes" from bottlers, marketing professionals, and municipalities? I'm trying to say that bottled water is a growing concern of governments and municipalities. Apparently, even marketing professionals are concerned about it. It's obviously something the media are taking up, as a simple Google News search will reveal.

So I explained my optimism to my forum fellows. I don't think Pepsi's business is going to plummet or close any time soon; such battles are never won or lost quickly; such huge corporations have tremendous staying power. I was reckoning several years. But I do think it's significant that US municipalities are asserting themselves against bottled water. It's not unrealistic to expect that other municipalities may join San Francisco and LA. If the momentum gathers or even just keeps up, Pepsi and other bottlers will have to up their ad budgets (i.e. lower profits) and will see a decline in sales. It would spur them to re-evaluate the profitability of bottled water. It took years to make a dent in Big Tobacco, but much of it happened after governments woke up to the issues.

As for the media coverage, here is just the first page of results from my Google News search for Fiji drinking water. Remarkably, these are nearly all mainstream news media bringing the issue to the public, not environmentalists and progressive community newsletters preaching to the choir.

Americans rethink wasteful approach to water Independent, UK
Chugging bottled H2O is bad for earth Newsweek/MSNBC
Some upscale restaurants shun bottled water Associated Press, via MSNBC, from Berkeley, CA
Bottled water industry fights back through ads Newsweek
Bottled water trend hits dam of protest Albany Times Union
Let's bag those criticisms of plastic Baltimore Sun (weakly defensive piece, IMHO)
Drink to your health By a rabbi, in Five Town Jewish Times, NY.
Clean, cheap water vital to nation's health Monterey Herald (reproduction of NYT editorial)

All the above stories are from August 1 onwards. Below are some early stories, the first drops of the deluge, so to speak. Same Google search.

Bottled water=bad...right? Plenty Magazine, NY, July 18, 2007
Don't buy water from Fiji Groovy Green, Ithaca NY, July 9, 2007
Label change adds clarity to bottled water debate Arizona Daily Star, July 27, 2007

I'm willing to bet this onslaught isn't going to cease soon...

Get into the garden

Sarah Raven in The Guardian Online

...In the nineteenth century the invention of the refrigerated ship meant that meat could be brought fresh from anywhere in the world. With the endless land available in the Americas and beyond, meat became cheap [in Britain]. The development of factory farming and the efficient networks of the global economy have meant that daily meat has become a reality for everyone. Meat and potatoes have come to dominate our cooking culture, but that is such a sad and reduced place to arrive at, almost fetishistic it seems to me, as if a meal is no good unless it contains a slab of steak or chicken.

It doesn't need to be like that, wasn't in this country before 1850 and isn't like that in most parts of the world. My new garden cookbook is about returning to an older habit, where meat was a regular, delicious, but occasional visitor to the plate. Vegetables can take their place, not as a stand in, or supporting part, but as centre stage, where they belong.

Mediterranean cooking cultures are a wonderful source of inspiration for this way of eating. Traditionally, the relatively high cost of meat in a non-factory dominated environment gives a natural sense of meat's true value. In France and even more in Italy and Spain, you eat meat or fish on high days and holidays, but not for every meal. Allied to that is a far more intimate connection, family by family, to growing things and looking after and slaughtering animals themselves. Meat was and is precious and respected, and so on most days, households inherit, devise, cook and eat delicious things made with grains, vegetables, salads, herbs and fruit.

As a child, we often went on holiday to Asolo in the Veneto, a honey-coloured hill town in the foothills of the Dolomites, with orchards and farmland running up to its medieval walls. All the produce of garden and field were on sale in the market square and under the shady stone arcades that line the streets. Asolo introduced me to the whole Mediterranean philosophy of food, where most small towns would have one butcher, but a bi-weekly market stuffed to the gunnels with beautiful and delicious veg and fruit. Day after day, under the shopping and cooking guidance of the cook in the house where we stayed, we would eat artichokes, salads, wild greens, chicory, sometimes with bread, sometimes with pasta, sometimes with rice, but rarely with meat. That's been a great inspiration for many of my recipes.

Here on the Guardian food blog for the next three weeks, I'll be posting 21 recipes which come out of this non-meat-dominated culture, some of my favourites from my Garden Cookbook.

Click here for first recipe, to post a comment, or to bookmark for remaining 20 recipes

Mumbai takes a deep breath

The sky makes a spectacle over Mumbai. I stumbled upon this photo entry dated March 8, 2006, by Selma Mirza, at this blog. She writes, "As if Claude Monet himself had come down and painted this beautiful city a sky to calm fast beating hearts and soothe troubled minds."

I guess this city looks really beautiful when most of it is not in the picture!

More rain

Poured on Thursday night, and the thunder sounded like bombs going off! It was breezy this afternoon, became suddenly cloudy and rained again, although not as long, nor with quite as much drama as Thursday night. But looks like the monsoon is here. It may be early, but not a moment too soon, as far as I'm concerned. The weather had become quite unbearable.

Well, usually it stays cloudy in the rainy season, so rainbows are not that common. I guess it's more common to see them in the countryside, on the way to Lonavla or Goa, or something. But if there were one over Mumbai, I doubt anyone would notice, because of smog, hurrying along, being holed up in an office, or ugly buildings in the way. So I thought I'd link this rainbow site and dream about what could be....

Photo: From Mid-Day, but I found it on this blog.

The first rain

3:30 a.m. It's raining.

That smell of wet dirt, which for years heralded the new school year, new books, new pencils...

Monsoon over Mumbai harbor, 2001. Photo by moi.

The foolish Indian middle class

Less than a few kilometres from affluent south Delhi is the sprawling neighbourhood of Sangam Vihar, home to Mukesh, who sells vegetables. He lost half his business in the week that Reliance Fresh opened a supermarket down the street. He has four children and his wife is worried about the future. He doesn't believe he can find other work in Delhi, where even educated people are unemployed. "No, I don't think there's much else to do. If I can't make it here, we just have to go back to our village." Full report.

We're fascinated by refrigeration and airconditioning. We get excited about buying our spinach in supermarkets, branded, suffocated in plastic, labelled "organic" and dated "consume by next week". That way, we believe, we'll know for sure we're getting our money's worth. And it may even be a rupee or two cheaper than our sabziwalla is selling it for.

We're the great Indian middle class. Because we now have dreary outsourcing jobs that pay $1200 a month, we believe we have globalized and arrived. We've invested our life's savings in homes that are not even on the power grid, yet we believe we're smart. We believe we're like the middle class of any other country, and not just because we now wear Gap tees (never mind that cotton jersey feels heavy and stinks in the hot Indian climate, or that we have to hand-wash everything because the generator ran out of diesel mid-way through the rinse cycle), but also because we have begun to resemble our colonizers in ways deeper than the brand-name of the outer husk: we live beyond our means, and we are willing to let peasants die a slow death or simply have our government execute them for resisting.

Oddly enough, little of this might be necessary if only we could recognize the good things about our lives the way they are. The not-so-good things could be resolved with creative local solutions.

The utter lack of refrigeration in storage and transport is the greatest assurance that our "chaotic and unorganized" sabziwallas are selling us truly fresh produce. Not to mention that unrefrigerated produce is more environment-friendly, which reduces other costs in the long run. Are supermarkets the only way to reduce the discomfort and chaos of sabzi shopping? Or perhaps we could ensure home delivery services and designated tree-lined marketplaces in every neighborhood?

For now, here's a taste of the business practices we're so excited to be importing, so that we can become more like our colonizers. BBC reporter Audrey Brown worked undercover at Sainsbury and Tesco, the two leading grocery chains in the UK, and wrote this report. Excerpts are below. The full report is long, but worth reading!

...The benefits are obvious. They are open all hours, offer free parking, have a huge selection and, most importantly, they can be a lot cheaper than the High Street. This is what attracts 16 million customers to Sainsbury's and 20 million to Tesco every week.

...[the] dating system [for merchandise] could easily be changed by staff who would wipe out existing dates and write in other, later dates. It is not illegal to sell food past its sell-by date, but it is store policy at both Sainsbury's and Tesco that once the food has passed that date it should not be sold to customers. Yet, I saw food past its sell-by date on the fresh food counters at both supermarkets...

At Tesco, it was re-packaged and re-labelled with a new date and reduced in price, sometimes days after it should have been sold or removed from the shelves. A lot of the time, the counter staff treated the meat and fish...with indifference...there were times at Tesco when they had no idea what the real sell by date was as they had altered it so many times. Sometimes it was not until the food smelled bad that it was eventually thrown away.

...An ex-supermarket manager told me..."If you want to make food look fresher, you can mix batches....If you take four or five slices of something from one day, you can mix it in with four, five slices of something from the next day."

,,,But I never expected to witness the level of penny-pinching...one employee...at Sainsbury's...cut the end of a brown and drying ham joint so it looked fresher and could be put back on display, thus hopefully be sold to put more pennies in the company's coffers. My boss on the meat counter at Tesco instructed me to use a bin-bag style cover to put over the meat at night, which would have been fine, except he was so intent on saving money that he insisted I use the same one night after night - marked with blood from the food - rather than getting fresh ones.

And all for the sake of saving tiny sums.

During my induction at Sainsbury's, the trainer instructed us to "treat every penny as though it were your own". That sounded fair enough. Nobody wants to waste food unnecessarily.

However, over the course of my investigation I witnessed individuals taking this motto far too literally...Even as a counter assistant, the pressure other staff seemed to feel was almost tangible.

In a bizarre attempt to explain his dates-changes, [one Tesco manager] used the company's commitment to green issues by saying "Tesco doesn't like to throw away anything. That's why we recycle. That meat can be recycled". But I'm not sure a commitment to a green policy quite extends to the unlawful selling of meat.

Spring is here

Not that Mumbai has any discernible spring, but there's Now Ruz, Ugadi, the Equinox, Gudi Paadwa, and all that good stuff. Here are some cherry blossoms in anticipation, for where spring does, in fact, exist.
Image by Declan McCullagh

Buon 8 marzo

From a dear friend, the traditional Italian gift of mimosas, for International Women's Day

Fun song

Qué voy hacer je ne sais pas...

One of the things I love about Mumbai

It's the season again! (already!)

Unseasonal rain

It rained this morning! I felt gleeful, like I'd sneaked into early June for just a morning. The daylight was even and a bit watery, no shadows, and the air was, momentarily at least, washed clean of suspended particulate matter. I felt emboldened to venture on another bus ride, this time from Moshe's at Cuffe Parade, to Churchgate station, although I had barely recovered from Friday's smoggy 45-minute ride (Shrujan at Breach Candy to my office) that made me sick over the weekend.