Tag Archives: fish

Proper Spanish Lunch

menu-del-diaThe proper Spanish lunch is no small or fast affair. It can’t be eaten with one hand, nor at your desk, and it isn’t accompanied by a cappuccino. The Proper Spanish Lunch is composed of two main courses, as much bread as you need, a glass of wine, and dessert. If you also need coffee, you can swap your dessert for one or pay the extra, but don’t assume it’ll come with chocolate sprinkles.

The Proper Spanish Lunch is a meal that symbolises an in-between space in my research, and, naturally, in my life. It is eaten with people who have helped me get from one place to another, and with whom I’ve enjoyed the time (moments and years) in between.

You don’t get anywhere without in-between spaces. If you go from a place you know to a place you absolutely don’t understand, you’re lost. But if you have a stepping stone, you can follow the familiar paths into the unknown space. That’s my route for weaving my way from understanding English and Spanish into French. It’s also the route I’ve used to reach Morocco: using what I understand about Spain to help me cross the Euro-African cultural divide. When you start from Spain, that distance is only 8 miles.

Lunch in Spain is quite literally called ‘la comida’ The Food. This is a very accurate description, because if you play the eating times game well, ‘la comida’ will be The Food of your day. Lunch is at about 2pm. For your first course (equal to the second in size) you have something like an enormous salad/lentils/soup, therefore meeting the RDA* for vitamins (hopefully). For your second course you have something of higher protein and prestige accompanied by even more vegetables, and even more bread. An example of this is the magnificent fish my friend effortlessly whipped up for us even just for a hungover Sunday lunch. Follow with dessert: either choose one of many different variations on the theme of ‘custard’, or alternatively a piece of fruit. Finally, coffee, to help you move again after The Food.

After Proper Spanish Lunch you are absolutely free until about 10pm because if you followed the instructions above, you won’t be hungry until then. Hence, if it’s a working day, far from being lazy, you can work until 6, 7 or 8pm, and then go out for a drink afterwards and then get home for 10pm to have dinner. Amazing. This only happens in the UK one day of the year, Christmas Day, when we indulge so much in the accompanying drinks we are good for nothing by the time it gets dark.

So what’s the relation with Morocco? Well this is where Northern Europe meets Northern Africa. Remove the alcohol and Proper Spanish Lunch looks less like Christmas Day in the UK and more like the salad or beans followed by Tagine in Morocco. More importantly, as in Morocco, time is made for eating in Spain. Someone has also made even more time: this is properly cooked food. I have yet to have a Proper Spanish Lunch with boil-in-the-bag rice, a pot noodle or boxed sandwiches.

Finally, the ‘in-between’ role of Spain, not only in my life, but also in my research, came into real relief this past week. It is extremely difficult for a Moroccan to get a UK visa, however, for some, it is not so difficult to get to Spain. Spain is part of the Schengen Area and so the close ties (linguistic, business, educational, family) mean that many Moroccans can get long term visas of several years to travel to countries like France and Spain with whom there have been very long term ties, and therefore the wider Schengen Area.

So although I had said goodbye to Morocco for the time-being following fieldwork, I was able to meet my Moroccan colleagues at a seminar last week in the very fitting, and in-between, Spanish context. So I’ve done a bad job of coming home from Morocco and staying put (the first week of term might have been easier without such opportunities to keep the doors open to research and maybe my sister should have confiscated my passport after all). Yet I can also see that Proper Spanish Lunches, and particularly this time with my Moroccan colleagues, are going to be absolutely key to keeping my research alive, and to keeping me going, perhaps until 10pm.

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*Recommended Daily Allowance

Of Sardines and Stamps, Ethics and Risk

International Sardines

I have been waiting a while to talk about my fieldwork through the prism of the sardine can. It started the day I went to visit my flat for the second time and decided to rent it. I broke one of the main two anti-risk rules, not of the ethics committee, but of my Mum. Number one is ‘don’t go in the park after dark’, and it was the second one that got broken: ‘never get in a car with strangers’. I’ve known these rules since I could talk. They pre-date the commitments I made on the Bristol University risk assessment form by about 28 years.

Now technically, it wasn’t me that broke the rule. I was being taken to ‘Thursday’ by an older lady from a charitable association who was helping a local nursery. We were waiting for a taxi and a car drove up – as often happens – and offered to give us a lift for free. Now if I’m on my own, I always say no. I wasn’t on my own though and it was the lady who knew the area well, who decided that the driver was a totally trustworthy individual. So maybe he genuinely did drive up that way once a week and always offer lifts to people going his way, or maybe he wanted to practice his language skills with the foreigner.

In any case, we didn’t get kidnapped, we got free sardines. It turns out that sardines are the global supply chain next door. In the next city along from me there are sardine canning factories and in one of these this multi-lingual middle-manager takes on about 600 women a year. You might have noticed, these sardines speak our language, in fact they say they are from those well-trusted local shops, Sainsbury’s and Tescos. But I don’t have them because I love sardines so much that I brought them here in my suitcase. And thankfully, Tescos hasn’t arrived in Morocco yet. They actually came from the car boot of this complimentary taxi.

There weren’t just sardines packed up and ready for Sainsbury’s and Tescos, there were also some for French supermarkets too. In the local shop I also saw some speaking what looked like Polish and German. So Sainsbury’s might imply that the sardines are theirs, whipped out of a global store cupboard by them, but they weren’t. They were fished out of African waters and packed by Moroccan women. I’m not trying to inspire guilt here, as far as I know sardines are a relatively plentiful fish and not on any blacklists for overfishing as yet. It gives me an opportunity though to think about what things say on the tin. Slight change of topic coming up.

We give a lot of importance in the UK to getting the paperwork in order and the stamps in the right place. I’m part of that. I want to be an ethical researcher and have all the paperwork in order to prove it. These last two weeks I’ve spent a lot of time chasing paper. It’s taken me on an interesting journey of offices, and past flags, in which I donned my suit jacket and got rid of any scarfs at the entrance. I’ve been kindly asked by people willing to help in these offices “Do you have a problem?”. I say, “Well no, not really, I’d just like to know that you are happy that I’m here doing research”. The response is, “you are welcome here, good luck”. So, if in person there seems to be no problem, how much paper is necessary? We decided, on the 10th floor of a government office, that a stamp would be a good start. So I have travelled for 18 hours this week and returned triumphantly with a very small government stamp on my piece of paper marked 12th October 2016.

Where are sardines from? Probably the most truthful answer would be to say ‘the sea’. But in our paper and classification hungry society, I, with my letters and requests, want to brand my work just like Sainsbury’s and Tescos.¹

In reality, the guarantees given by these labels and stamps often end up deceptive or meaningless. The treasured pieces of paper I would really like are not the guarantee of my research being ethical or not. The sardines are, and aren’t, really Sainsbury’s. In the same way, the commitments to ethical procedures and risk aversion are only the beginning of a negotiation of risks and ethics.² Occasionally, not getting in a car with ‘strangers’ isn’t necessarily going to reduce my risk (although I avoid it wherever possible!). Perhaps what we need to develop is the ability to believe or seriously consider what we see and feel and what we are told and experience face to face. Fish really do come from the sea, and in most cases, so long as I keep doing my best to be a good, and ethically aware guest, I really am welcome in Morocco.

Notes

Sorry some photos are stuck on my phone and it isn’t wifi or data connected.

¹ If this were an academic essay rather than a blog, I’d reference Scott, and his argument that we simplify and harm complex realities when we try to ‘see like a state’. JAMES C. SCOTT, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (Yale University Press 1998)

² I read that my approach here is of ethical relativism. This book is really helping me work through dilemmas and practicalities, for anyone about to do fieldwork I recommend it: REGINA SCHEYVENS & DONOVAN STOREY, Development fieldwork: a practical guide. 2nd Edition (Sage 2014).