Hello! I'm Chris, one of PECT's volunteers. I've been tasked with a blogging challenge - to explore food, packaging and our obsession with buying things! Check out the rest of my posts here...

On the day of the lightning flash that illuminated my spider I e-mailed Nyree Ambarchian in response to information received that she and PECT needed a ‘quirky something’ for a Blog of interest.

I had offered them the reading of packaging; the Harold Pinteresque comments of the twenty first century; the ever changing literature of anti-cultural consumerism. Yum.

I waited for a reply. Hours passed. Still no response. I read the entire outside packaging of ‘Pedigree – Better by Nature’ while I waited and had come to a good bit where the author reveals that Pedigree is ‘Guaranteed to taste significantly better than slippers, socks, pot-plants and the postman,’ when my Netbook pinged.
I couldn’t respond; there were questions here that demanded an answer.

These were amazing claims. I wanted to see the research methods and the reports. I needed to know if any postmen were injured in the experiments. Who taste-tested the slippers? Was there any taste cross-over when sampling pot-plant and sock? What were the medical dangers associated with taste analysis of post-persons? A world of bizarre laboratory experiments was opening in front of me. Was this a postman sustainability issue? Had this been the real underlying factor that sparked the postal strikes?

My Netbook pinged again; it was Nyree. Darn, I hadn’t even tried to establish whether animals did the testing and if they had how did they communicate that the taste was significantly better. Reluctantly I put the mysteries to one side wondering why, when you get a good packet to read that leads to fundamentally important questions, something always interrupts.

Nervously I opened the ‘e’.
It read excitingly, ‘What are you twittering about. Are you a village idiot?’

Obviously I wasn’t on Twitter but was Blogging. A simple slip of the typing finger, no doubt, but it was the ‘what’ that had significance. She/they wanted to know more; the concept had fired an unstoppable curiosity. The request to know my status in the village was one I’d asked of myself, frequently. It had no answer; how do you quantify such things? A thought struck me. They mean I have been stupid in not voicing my packaging discoveries sooner. The people at PECT are perceptive. I knew this would be a success.

They wanted to know what I had found now. With a shaking hand I e-mailed, ‘pedgree are subjecting postmen to torture,’ then altered it to ‘Pedigree’, added ‘thank you and it will be good working with you’, counted to three then pressed send.

I haven’t had a reply yet.

Tags: food | Groovy and green | Chris Lawrence