In drawing up a list of where I should travel to make this book, I went through my house one day to see where everything came from. It was a shock to find how much of a globalized consumer I have become. When out shopping, I am always the person holding back from a purchase, asking whether I really want it, whether I am being ripped off, or deciding I just can’t be bothered to carry it home. And yet, over a lifetime and a couple of trips to the grocery store, it is amazing how much stuff I have, and from how many places. The food cupboard was an obvious place to start. There were nuts from Brazil and bottles of sparkling water from Scotland; sardines canned in Portugal and anchovies put in a jar in Spain; Italian chopped tomatoes and French mayonnaise; oatmeal from Lancashire and mustard from Dijon; coffee from Tanzania and Marmite from Sussex and soup from a farm in Cambridgeshire. There was mango chutney from India and caster sugar from Mauritius and desiccated coconut from the Philippines.
In some jars at the back, I found dried basil from Egypt and sage from Turkey; arrowroot from Thailand and allspice from Jamaica; lemongrass from Malaysia and alangal from China; mace from Grenada and saffron from Spain. We still haven’t got through the bag of white pepper I bought years ago in the market at Kuching in Borneo. Then there were walnuts from China and papadoms from Mumbai, cloves from Indonesia and oregano from Turkey, vanilla from Madagascar and cardamom and ginger from India. Not to mention Spanish olive oil and Italian pasta; Iranian dates and bay leaves from . . . well, an overgrown bush in our back garden, actually.
In the fruit bowl, I found grapefruit from Florida, mandarins from Argentina, bananas from Costa Rica, nectarines from Spain, and apples from New Zealand. On the counter, I found bread made from Gloucestershire flour, honey made by Mexican bees, and marmalade made by my wife from Seville oranges. There was beer brewed by monks in Belgium, by men in pullovers in Dorset, and by Britain’s oldest brewery, amid the hop fields of Kent. There were several bottles of my favorite peaty malt whiskies from the Hebrides, and some untasted spirit from the Netherlands that we have had for two decades. The fridge contained red peppers from Holland
and Parmesan from Italy, as well as “the world’s largest selling cheese brand,” manufactured on the edge of Bodmin Moor from Cornish
milk; cucumbers from Essex and a lettuce from Cambridgeshire. The butter and margarine could have come from anywhere. In the bathroom, I found clove massage oil from Zanzibar, citronella oil from China, and tea tree oil from trees grown in the Australian outback, plus a lot of bottles of various lotions and medicines from the Body Shop that don’t declare where they came from. In my office, I have a rather nice leather briefcase my wife gave me for Christmas one year. It was made in Chennai, India, by Dilip Kapur, a child of the weird religious eco-city known as Auroville. My computer and printer and phone are all made by Taiwanese companies using cheap labor on mainland China; the printer paper came from Slovakia. A random check of the books on my shelves shows they were printed in England and India, Hong Kong and Denmark, the United States and Italy.
Around the house, there are spoils from many of my previous reporting trips. I have a Panama hat from Ecuador and a Russian silk scarf; a Chinese paper dragon, an Alaskan plastic polar bear, and a caiman made from a Brazilian substance rather like rubber; a tiny metal Buddha from India, a job lot of Soviet Lenin badges, a small warthog made of scrap metal from Tanzania, several Japanese fans, and a hand-carved wooden platypus brought back from Queensland by my daughter. In my wardrobe, I found shirts made in Mauritius and Indonesia, Morocco and Cambodia, the United States and Hong Kong. Not to mention a couple of colorful numbers picked up on travels in China and Ghana that I have never worn. Then I found a rather threadbare pullover hand-knitted by a woman I met in the Falkland Islands, a Japanese kimono, Russian army fatigues—and a hat made out of plastic bags by an old woman in a shantytown in South Africa. In the front room there was an Egyptian mat, an Ashanti stool from Ghana, and a wood spirit carved by a colony of artists in Nigeria. In the back room there was a mat from Jordan, and a mahogany stool we removed from a flat we once rented. A clay recorder and a tambourine are the only survivors of a batch of arty objects I bought for virtually nothing in Mexico in 1984. In the hall I have a cowbell from the Auvergne in France that I use as a dinner gong. Frankly, our furniture is a bit rudimentary, picked up here and there. But we do have a kitchen table that came from a Victorian workhouse somewhere in Battersea, a gate-leg table, possibly even older, that was a wedding present from my father, and a solid beech desk in my office. We also have a piano. It was made in London in the 1890s by a company called Philips, Cambridge & Co., which is absent from contemporary lists of bona fide piano makers. Our piano tuner said it was not worth tuning anymore, but he tuned it anyway. here seems to be some disagreement about whether the wood is rosewood or mahogany. But there is no doubt that the keys are ivory, probably ripped from central Africa at the height of the greatest slaughter of the elephant ever seen. During the 1890s, Britain imported 550 tons of ivory a year, at a cost of some fifteen thousand animals.
There is other stuff whose legality and morality I wonder about. Somewhere in a cupboard I have two small bags made of sealskin, given to me on a trip to Siberia. We own Burmese teak salad bowls and apartheid-era South African salad servers. Some garden furniture is of dubious provenance, though the stone lion on the lawn is a guaranteed chunk of Cotswold limestone, as carved by my wife’s cousin. And the veneer on our kitchen units looks terribly like a piece of illegally logged timber from New Guinea given to me by Greenpeace. I also got to thinking about the stuff that leaves my house. What happens to the contents of my trash can, for instance? Where do our drains empty? Do the things I put in recycling bins really get recycled? I can’t say I was going to track down the source or destination of all these items. It would be a life’s work and I have a life to lead. But I was going in search of some of the most critical to my life—and I hope some of the most interesting. And from the start I was determined to make the journey about people as much as about ecology. Whatever the downsides of globalization, one of the upsides is that it connects us with people from many places. Usually those connections are hidden. But I was off to find them.
Няма коментари:
Публикуване на коментар