[ISL] "The World Is Squared: Episode 7 – Across the Pacific Islands"

[rfmcdonald]

Daniel Davies' Pacific islands travelogue continued late last month with descriptions of life in Tahiti and Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. Acute and entertaining, as always.

The Polynesian islands are about as remote as it gets in terms of the international supermarket supply chain, and that is to say … not really all that remote. The French supermarket giant Carrefour stretches out its long arm – and its astoundingly good own brand of Breton cider – as far as Tahiti without any problems. Pushing my trolley around the supermarket in Moorea, I saw many old friends on the shelves, plus a few lines which had clearly been sent there by a FFE in the Carrefour shipping department who was simply looking to show off (“foie gras in the Pacific? Oh I think that is not so difficult to achieve. But people there will also want apricot conserves and pate de campagne. I can achieve that too”).

Tahiti also gets the benefit of Kiwi ingenuity, coming from the other direction; Silver Fern Farms, a pretty ubiquitous meat processor, boxes up all the bits of the beasts that New Zealanders won’t buy and exports them to its neighbouring developing world populations. So it was that, having locked on the logo and been pleasantly surprised by the cheap price of imported veal, I ended up standing in a kitchen wondering what the hell I was going to do with a box of veal hearts.

The fact that all the imported food seemed to be priced about where I’d expect it to be in an OECD supermarket did make me wonder how the locals managed, given that they didn’t seem to be earning OECD wages. The answer was that they ate a lot of fish, particularly tuna, which was locally caught, absurdly cheap and very good indeed.

Easter Island seemed to be more of a challenge for the shipping industry as it’s considerably further away from anywhere. If you’re allergic to fish, as one of my kids is, you’re going to have a tough time. But even there, it was more a question of things like fresh produce not being available at all, rather than being expensive. It really lets you see how amazingly cheap container shipping is, and even airfreight isn’t so very much as a proportion of the price of anything with any value-added element to it at all.