An Anthropologist Writes

The Office Children™ are wary of eating anything that includes traces of vegetables, fruit, meat or fish and insist on buying their lunches from the chemical waste department of Smallville's dodgy supermarket.
This cess-pit of salmonella and out of date, plastic-wrapped horror is situated next door to an organic food store and right opposite a lovely local bakery but The Children have never dared venture inside either emporium through fear of not knowing what actual food looks like and so accidentally buying a lunch of squid-ink pasta, unbleached flour, rollmop herrings and molasses.

As a result of their unwise purchasing decisions (usually of out of date stuff to save a few pennies) they regularly spend afternoons moaning in pain and running back and forth to the bathroom for sessions of arse-gravy mayhem. This happened to poor Jason yesterday after he ate what the plastic wrapper claimed to be a 'chicken tikka' baguette, and prompted a theory from Mike that rather appealed to me.

The theory posits that the supermarket starts the week with a display of 'chicken and mayonnaise' baguettes, any unsold examples being re-labelled 'chicken tikka' by Wednesday when they've become suitably aromatic, and by Friday the remainder are sold as 'mixed cheese'.

On a slightly more palatable note, Jase brought in a cafetiere last week (a French Press to you Colonials) as he was rightly sick of the powdered 'coffee' the office provides and had been driven crazy by the aroma from my own yummy coffee each morning. He brought in a nice organic fairtrade coffee ('I didn't know what to buy so I asked the lady in the shop, who sold me the most expensive stuff') and followed my directions as to how much to use, then he put the kettle on. Holding up the cafetiere he asked 'Do I put the milk in now?'
After I'd finished laughing I felt quite touched at the innocence of today's 'yoof.' Raised on pre-packaged microwave meals and junk food they panic when confronted with a vegetable, a cut of meat or (God forbid) a fish. In Jason's case, he had only ever known powdered 'instant coffee' and was left helplessly confused by his cafetiere.
Having made his first cup, however, he went coffee crazy, with the result that he spent most of the day running to the bathroom to enjoy the inevitable emetic effect of real coffee on a digestive system that had never encountered it before.

I have decided that the only way I will survive life with The Office Children™ is to regard the experience as anthropological research. I feel not unlike Jane Goodall with her chimps.
The experiment continues.