One thing that has been a pleasant surprise here has been the food. Not in restaurants or wherever – I have hardly gone out for a meal since I arrived – but the food in the grocery store. For one thing, there are tons of options for vegetarians, and absolutely everything is marked to say whether it’s vegetarian or not (its surprisingly what kinds of things have meat-products in them!). For another, if something is GM, you know, and there will certainly be an organic alternative. With many foods there is only organic on offer. Knowing what the crap we’re eating is a pleasure we deprive ourselves of back home in North America.

However, sometimes this drive for healthy, labelled organic food can go a little too far. The other day my flatmate Shekhar bought a carton of eggs (Mabel Pearman’s Burford Browns) from a local farmer’s market with the following written on the inside of the carton:

Clarence court free range eggs are special, not only for their superior flavour and quality, but because of the poulterer’s attention to the health and welfare of his hens, which are free to range and forage on green pasture from dawn to dusk, leading a natural and happy life. Our birds enjoy a generous helping of sun drenched maize corn in their non-GM vegetarian diet, the privacy of warm secluded nest boxes, trees and shrubs for cover, dust baths — in fact, everything that a normal healthy hen requires for its freedom of expression and fullness of life, to bring you a truly free range fresh farm egg.