Dear Lady Who Works at the Grocery Stand Near My Office,
When I first moved to Zambia, I was very skeptical about Zambian food. I had this preconceived notion that I should never, ever eat any food that is prepared and sold by a street vendor. I think this is the result of hearing one too many stories of people going to Mexico, ordering a beverage with ice, and being sick for their entire trip. My rational was simple. If people get violently ill from ice cubes in Mexico (it’s so close to the United States!), what could possibly happen if I ate a piece of fried chicken that has been sitting in an uncovered aluminum tin for the last three hours, had obviously been reheated from the day before, and was being offered for 1500 kwacha.? Food poisioning? Mad Cow Disease? Ebola? Scurvy? Witchcraft?
Understandably, I decided to make my lunch routine simple. I found bread. I found peanut butter. I even found some pretty decent raspberry jam. PBJ sandwiches were definitely looking promising.
Unfortunately, bread here isn’t sliced. Or, if it is sliced, it already tastes stale and gets moldy in two days. Since I don’t have an electric knife to cut bread, I was resigned to absolutely butchering the loaf with a knife slightly sharper than a butter knife. The end product: sliced bread, but in really thick jagged pieces. This made a true sandwich absolutely impossible; the two pieces would be wayyyyy too thick. It would have to be an opened faced sandwich. Apparently, when you prepare the same plain lunch every day for like four months, people take notice. They especially take notice when you prepare a dish normally reserved for 4th graders and make it seem like its fine cuisine from a 4-star restaurant.
This is where you enter my life. Approximately two months ago, I discovered that you sell ‘fritters’, which are nothing more than balls of dough deep fried every morning. At 500 kwacha, just 100 meters from my office, and not involving me having to wake up 10 minutes early to prepare anything, these doughnut-like pastries sans sugar/frosting quickly became my breakfast of choice.
As my laziness quotient and sense of adventure increased, I started looking to you to provide me two meals a day. I soon discovered that you sold meat pies (sadly, imagine the equivalent of a Hot Pocket), Sausage Rolls (imagine sausage put into one of those McDonald’s apple pies instead of the apple filling. Wow, that sounds absolutely awful.), and samossas (imagine pizza rolls with chicken) for anywhere from 2000 to 5000 kwacha. Since that discovery, you’ve been providing me with a semi-edible lunch at a ridiculously reasonable price almost every day. I am appreciative.
However, I am not appreciative of the fact that you’ve raised the price of sodas from 2000 kwacha to 2500 kwacha. I’m pretty sure you’ve noticed that I no longer purchase my soda from you. I want you to realize that I am just that stubborn to walk an extra 200 meters every day to the other grocery stand on the street to purchase soda from that lady just to save 500 kwacha. I am intentionally flaunting the filled bottles of soda in front of you when I buy my lunch from you. It is my attempt at protesting this absolutely ridiculous increase in soda prices. It will continue until soda prices are returned to their acceptable level.
Best,
Mark
When I first moved to Zambia, I was very skeptical about Zambian food. I had this preconceived notion that I should never, ever eat any food that is prepared and sold by a street vendor. I think this is the result of hearing one too many stories of people going to Mexico, ordering a beverage with ice, and being sick for their entire trip. My rational was simple. If people get violently ill from ice cubes in Mexico (it’s so close to the United States!), what could possibly happen if I ate a piece of fried chicken that has been sitting in an uncovered aluminum tin for the last three hours, had obviously been reheated from the day before, and was being offered for 1500 kwacha.? Food poisioning? Mad Cow Disease? Ebola? Scurvy? Witchcraft?
Understandably, I decided to make my lunch routine simple. I found bread. I found peanut butter. I even found some pretty decent raspberry jam. PBJ sandwiches were definitely looking promising.
Unfortunately, bread here isn’t sliced. Or, if it is sliced, it already tastes stale and gets moldy in two days. Since I don’t have an electric knife to cut bread, I was resigned to absolutely butchering the loaf with a knife slightly sharper than a butter knife. The end product: sliced bread, but in really thick jagged pieces. This made a true sandwich absolutely impossible; the two pieces would be wayyyyy too thick. It would have to be an opened faced sandwich. Apparently, when you prepare the same plain lunch every day for like four months, people take notice. They especially take notice when you prepare a dish normally reserved for 4th graders and make it seem like its fine cuisine from a 4-star restaurant.
This is where you enter my life. Approximately two months ago, I discovered that you sell ‘fritters’, which are nothing more than balls of dough deep fried every morning. At 500 kwacha, just 100 meters from my office, and not involving me having to wake up 10 minutes early to prepare anything, these doughnut-like pastries sans sugar/frosting quickly became my breakfast of choice.
As my laziness quotient and sense of adventure increased, I started looking to you to provide me two meals a day. I soon discovered that you sold meat pies (sadly, imagine the equivalent of a Hot Pocket), Sausage Rolls (imagine sausage put into one of those McDonald’s apple pies instead of the apple filling. Wow, that sounds absolutely awful.), and samossas (imagine pizza rolls with chicken) for anywhere from 2000 to 5000 kwacha. Since that discovery, you’ve been providing me with a semi-edible lunch at a ridiculously reasonable price almost every day. I am appreciative.
However, I am not appreciative of the fact that you’ve raised the price of sodas from 2000 kwacha to 2500 kwacha. I’m pretty sure you’ve noticed that I no longer purchase my soda from you. I want you to realize that I am just that stubborn to walk an extra 200 meters every day to the other grocery stand on the street to purchase soda from that lady just to save 500 kwacha. I am intentionally flaunting the filled bottles of soda in front of you when I buy my lunch from you. It is my attempt at protesting this absolutely ridiculous increase in soda prices. It will continue until soda prices are returned to their acceptable level.
Best,
Mark
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