Films On The Fly

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I only ever watch films when I fly Emirates. This is for two simple reasons. Firstly I'm there anyway so I can't complain at wasting 90 minutes of my life and secondly it's free, so I haven't shelled out 35 hard earned Dirhams (or whatever it is) on sitting around and consuming over an hour's worth of vapid guff dressed up as something I really, really need to watch. Because nine times out of ten, it's nothing more than vapid guff wot's on offer.

Rarely have I found myself driven to such a state of fury by Hollywood as I was this time around - that the crash came on the back of finding - to my consternation - two enjoyable films just made it worse and the impact all the more shocking.

I watched 'Jobs' on the way out, which was interesting. Ashton Kutcher does an impressive Young Jobs and somehow manages to make the transition to Ill Jobs believable. There are just a couple of 'Look, see I can do Steve Jobs' trademark silly walk' scenes too many - okay, you can do the walk. We get it. I've always had the feeling that Jobs was an obsessive egomaniac with a sizeable Jobs fixation and the film certainly reflects that side of the man's nature whilst doing a neat balancing act that avoids alienating the many million iZombies out there who would all too readily cry foul if their icon and obsession were handled too roughly. But generally the film's an engaging and entertaining portrait of Our Steve from his college dropout days through to the internal reveal of the iPod - the film's opening scene.

On the way back I watched 'Rush' which I enjoyed thoroughly. The film tells the story of James Hunt and Niki Lauder's rivalry and for some reason reminded me strongly of Frost vs Nixon (I found out just now this wasn't coincidental - both films were directed by a bloke called Ron Howard). It really is a period piece, all sideburns and flared collars, both title role actors do a fabulous job of portraying their characters and this is by no means a film you have to be a petrol-head to enjoy. It's truly great stuff, gripping and intense, stylish and rarely less than dramatic.

And then I decided to watch Matt Damon in Elysium. Don't ask me why, looking back on it I can't fathom what on earth I thought I was doing. But I did it. And, perhaps more worryingly, I stuck with it rather than being a sensible boy and finishing the Top Gear Marathon I had started on the outbound flight.

It's possibly the worst film I have ever watched. It actually made me angry that someone, somewhere not only picked up the script but made the awful thing. I'm still fuming.

Everyone on earth is poor and sick and we've broken the planet. The rich elite have escaped to an paradisaical toroidal orbital called Elysium where everyone has garden parties and every house has a machine that fixes all known illness. Some of the Elysium people come back to earth in order to run companies that make profits by exploiting the labour of the ill earth people. Some of the earth people try to get up to Elysium but their space jalopies are blown up by secret agents on earth working for Elysium, in particular a nasty South African called (I can't remember) who has lots of wizzbangs and guns and things.

Matt Damon plays (I can't remember), a former criminal gone straight. Everyone except Matt Damon is Hispanic. He works in a factory doing something a great deal more interesting and diverse than most factory workers. We never get to find out quite what, but it involves screwing things and assembling what look like droids. Matt gets fried in a radiation oven when he tries to unblock the door and is sacked. Quite why you would want to bathe droid carcases in a radiation oven is never really resolved. It is explained to him he has received a massive dose of radiation and has suffered massive organ failure and will die massively in five days. This makes him puke up. Massively. Having just had winter vomiting bug, I find myself in sympathy with Matt, although couldn't help questioning quite how extensive organ failure and imminently terminal radiation poisoning makes you puke up but leaves you still able to stagger around.

Matt goes to see (I can't remember), the local hood to offer his services in return for a black market ticket to Elysium where they can cure his terminal illness. The hood laughs at this. What could Matt Damon possibly offer him that would make it worth a ticket on a shuttle to Elysium? Oh hang on, he just thought of something! Phew!

Matt is now too sick to walk and so is fitted with a mechanical exo-skeleton by some black market surgeons who are surprised to find him alive the next morning after they have screwed the whole thing into his bones. Alive he might be, but he's a mess. Strangely, at no point in the film do we get the impression that Matt is a dying man propped up by an exo-skeleton, he's far too dynamic and just damn heroic for all that. He does, however, mop his brow and stagger occasionally - to signify existentially threatening illness, we presume.

This provides possibly the only interesting aspect to this film - the brand collision between Matt Damon and his role. He's supposed to play a man dying of acute radiation poisoning, but he's Matt Damon, man of action! How can he possibly play a man weakened by illness? Simple! Be Matt Damon with an exo-skeleton!

Matt and a gang of hoods set out on a heist to capture the mind-state of a top Elysium official who has come to earth to run a factory. This is his price onto a shuttle, it seems. Oh, lookie! It's the same official who ran Matt's factory where he got sick. Luckily, Elysium Man (I don't remember his name) is involved in a plot to launch a coup in Elysium hatched by the wicked Minister for Defence, who is a nasty lady in a natty suit. So when Matt downloads the chap's mind state, he receives the code to reboot Elysium's servers.

For some reason, Elysium's server farm requires green screen pages of code overlaid with a knifey-looking graphical logo thing that says 'DANGER THIS IS THE SERVER REBOOT CODE WE DON'T WANT YOU TO HAVE' or something like that. I can't quite remember. While we're on the subject, writing a reference to 'the cloud' in the script doesn't make your film sound technical and futuristic, it makes you sound stupid. And if we ever (and I doubt this very much) evolve to the stage where we can build toroidal earth orbiting paradises, I don't think we'll still be using server farms, let alone keyboard based computers. Do please feel free to laugh at me from your toroidal earth orbiting paradise when you are searching the earth archives on your laptop PC in a few hundred years' time and find this.

This code is now in Matt's head, so the South African bloke wants to capture him. There's a hot looking Hispanic doctor chick Matt knew as a child and she has a daughter with terminal leukemia who also wants to go to Elysium. The kid is cute. Who'd have known?

The South African baddie captures the hot Hispanic chick, whose name I don't remember, and her cute kid. He also captures Matt and takes them all to Elysium. The hood and his henchmen also go to Elysium because they've figured if Matt has the code to reboot Elysium's servers in his head then they have a chance of resetting the place and making it accept all humanity as members of the The Elysium Club. This will cure everyone, heal earth and make everything right again, apparently.

There are a lot of fights. The hood uses his laptop computer to break all the door locks. Matt kills the South African guy. The kid gets to an Elysium machine and is cured. Matt is plugged into the servers and they reboot. He dies. All of humanity is accepted into Elysium. Yay.

It's the biggest pile of wombat doo I have ever seen in my life. The write-up in the ICE brochure thingy said it touched on important issues, but if there are important issues in here I certainly didn't find them. Unless you're talking about the blindingly obvious and egregiously simplified haves and have-nots thing going down amongst the witless action and lamentable, drooling dialogue.

I had to watch three hours of Top Gear to calm down. I'm still not right, even now. Look on the bright side - I've taken a 109 minute one for the team so you don't have to.

Book Post - Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy On Da Radio

From 11am tomorrow, Dubai Eye Radio's regular Saturday book programme, Talking of Books, will be featuring Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy in its 'Book Champion' slot, in which one of the team proposes a book they think the world should go out and buy and read right now.

I mean, you can only agree with such exquisite taste, can't you?

I'll be joining them on the 'phone at around 11.40am to talk about the book and answer questions. Coming on the back of a 'red eye' flight home, the slot may well feature a sleep deprived maniac babbling absolute rubbish about books, spies and the like and so should at least be entertaining from that point of view.

If you haven't got around to buying your copy yet, here's a handy link to the various online stores who'll sell you an ebook or printed copy.

It'll be my first real public grilling about the book (the Twitter Book Club meeting on the 18th will be a chance for a real eyeball to eyeball encounter with readers) by people wot has read it, so I'm looking forward to finding out what they thought and what questions it left 'em with. I bet we'll be talking about MECAS and George Blake, Kim Philby and the like but you never know. There's plenty else to chat about, from the Lebanese Civil War through Aleppo's destroyed souk to driving across the frozen Baltic.

If you're not UAE based, you can catch the interview streaming online (about 7am onwards UK time, about 9am Beirut time) on this here handy link. Alternatively, you can use this information to neatly avoid the encounter.

What larks!

Norovirus, or Winter Vomiting Disease. Oh, Yummy!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Warning. This post contains zombie vampire-like scenes.

Sarah's class was depleted by a nasty bug towards the end of term and it seems to be pretty much universal - The Niece From Heaven went down suddenly and spectacularly, just managing to get word out in time for her parents to be rushing her into the bathroom as the powerful primary reaction to Norovirus struck - you don't want to know more than that, believe me.

There are few things more tragic than a very ill four year old. Running a nasty fever and feeling woebegone, she was nevertheless stoic to a tee. We got a sign of things to come when her mum went down a couple of days later, just as she was recovering.

And then it was my turn. I woke up feeling God Awful, immediately doing an audit of the previous night's revels and discounting the results of stepping far and wide. It couldn't be the dreaded 'Winter Vomiting Bug'. No way. I hate being sick. I haven't thrown up since I was a student. It feels like 'flu or the after effects of a typhus shot. I lay feeling achey, crampy and generally suffering from a compelling lassitude. The impulse came from absolutely nowhere. One minute I was convincing myself I could get through this without fwowing up*, the next I was in the grip of powerful and inescapably certain impulses. I just made it to the bathroom myself.

You know when you puke so hard it goes through your nose? The upper part of your body just opens up and the lower part tenses. It's like you're a tube of particularly bilious toothpaste and someone's just stamped on you. I swear having your head down a toilet bowl is the most pleasant aspect of the whole experience. Streaming eyes, burning throat and sobbing, dry retches to follow with a side of stench, please.

And I was one of the luckier ones - I only did one trip to the lavabo - other sufferers endure multiple occurrences and even double-ended symptoms. Well, hang on - what did you think a post titled Winter Vomiting Disease was going to read like? A walk on the beach? Stop moaning.

Then the fever sets in, I have never felt cold like it. My fingers were seizing up they were so cold. Blankets and water bottles, a stoked up fire and constant glasses of water started to alleviate the symptoms. Then you're hot, burning up and yet others swear you're clammy.

It's over after a day and night, leaving me doddery and feeling utterly wasted.

Believe me, you don't want to get this sucker. A little Googling reveals the virus survives quite happily on hard surfaces for a week and more, in infected water for six months. It's spread through sneezing and other more icky exchanges of bodily output and is particularly prevalent in hospitals, where they have a devil of a job trying to get rid of it. It closes whole wards. And it's highly contagious. It's not dangerous, just very, very unpleasant.

Worryingly, I found myself using the experience to map to the description I'd put together of Jason Hartmoor getting sick in Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and judged my memories good. What a time to be thinking of books...

*The entertainingly vicious Dorothy Parker reviewed, in her 'Constant Reader' book review column, AA Milne's House At Pooh Corner with the remarkable conclusion, 'Tonstant Weeder Fwowed Up.'

Book Post: The Displaced Nation

It's quite a neat title for an expat blog, isn't it? The Displaced Nation is a blog that ties together people from all over the world who have decided to live, well, all over the world. It shares the experiences and tales of people who have decided to leave the comfort of hearth and home and live somewhere alien, foreign and different.

I can imagine nothing more fun than alien, foreign and different.

Anyway, DN has been a great supporter of my book publishing endeavours over the years (They're +Displaced Nation or @displacednation) and I love 'em for it - which is why now that we have three books in the Levant Cycle, officially a 'trilogy' since I gave in to popular opinion, it falls to the Displaced Nation team to reveal details of the fantastic, limited time offer that's about to take place globally and in glorious Technicolour.

I'm going to put Olives - A Violent Romance, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy up for sale at $0.99 each for a couple of days before Christmas. This is clearly an ebook only kind of deal, so if you're wedded to print there's no bonanza - but if you've got a Kindle, Sony, Kobo, Nook or iPad and want to get three decent thrillers based in the mystical and majestic Middle East for under $3, this is your perfect opportunity.

For accountants and others inclined to autism, that's about $0.00001 a word.

The kicker is you have to subscribe to the Displaced Despatch to find out when the promotion is taking place. It's linked here for your listening pleasure. The Despatch is a weekly summary of book reviews, recipes and posts from the DN blog and actually a decent enough sprinkling of international fun and games in its own right.

As you're in the mood to go signing up to newsletters, you can also sign up to mine (link on the right hand side there - it's a bit more random than weekly. Let's call it 'occasional'...) which gets you a copy of Olives - A Violent Romance for FREE! So then you could get your jammy paws on a whole trilogy for just $1.98!

Oh, the BARGAINS to be had around here! It's enough to make your head spin!

The Passing Of 'Lawrence Of Arabia'

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He was 'Lawrence of Arabia' to so many people, the brilliant Peter O'Toole made the role his own in David Lean's stunning epic. Of course you'll know by now he is dead - here's Alex Ritman's excellent obituary in today's The National.

I've long been a big fan of the film. It's bunkum, of course. Lawrence didn't say lots of the things the film has him say, including that glorious, "small people, silly people" line. And the whole thing with the two boys was outrageous. But O'Toole neatly nailed the enigmatic persona, the aloof yet ambitious 'Little Lawrence'. And Lean, wow, what a job.

I had Paul Stokes re-enact the scene in Wadi Rumm where Lawrence danced in his Sherifian robes, in the original MS of Olives - A Violent Romance. It was all part of Paul's assimilation, his growing 'Arabness' as he faces precisely the dilemma Lawrence faced as he betrayed 'his' Arabs to the mendacious Sykes-Picot Treaty. Paul was created purposefully in Lawrence's role as betrayer and friend, a foreigner who offers help and is not to be trusted.

The scene didn't make it through into the final novel, I guess I thought it was all a little too much. Anyway, I've got the Director's Cut of Lawrence of Arabia. And now I'm going to watch it...

Book Review: Waiting For Sunrise (William Boyd)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I hate to do this. I have long been an admirer of William Boyd's stuff, but this book was one I had to force myself through, often finding myself skimming. It's always such a disappointment to approach a book by an author whose work you've enjoyed and admired (A Good Man in Africa and An Ice Cream War, his first two novels, had me hooked and I've enjoyed his other work since) and then find yourself increasingly alienated as you realise this just isn't, well, 'doing it' for you.

Waiting for Sunrise is set in the period just prior to, and during, the First World War. Lysander Rief is sexually dysfunctional. He visits his psychologist and is entranced by a society beauty he meets there and then joins up when war breaks out. He enters the intelligence service and has to save Britain by discovering a code.

The main character, Rief struck me as being all over the place - I often found myself drawn up to ponder why on earth would he do that or say this? I suppose part of that is because little personality shines through that isn't self-obsessed and obnoxious. A sexual predator with little love for women, Rief is half Austrian but not interred or even interviewed as war breaks out, in fact he is recruited by military intelligence.

There doesn't seem to be much structure on offer here, it reads as if it was made up as we went along. Rief in Austria, Rief the sexual failure, Rief the actor, Rief the upper class twit, Rief the soldier, Rief the spy, Rief the lover, Rief the boozer. They none of them appear to be going anywhere cohesive that follows a growing narrative, they just wander around in Brownian patterns. And they all become a tad exhausting.

There are echoes of TE Lawrence in Rief - his superiority, his drawling insolence at a senior officer over whom he has a hold, his decision to become a private rather than take the commission he could so easily have achieved. And yet they are only echoes - and it's David Lean's Lawrence, not the man himself - there's nothing of the complexity and conflict that make either the real Lawrence or O'Toole's portrayal interesting. Rief isn't, well, driven to anything. He just muddles through.

I liked the setting and I liked the language, Boyd manages to capture the clipped accents of upper class schoolboy amateur spies nicely. There are elements of this book that are brilliant and reflect the talent and experience a much-loved novelist with a stellar career behind him.

But the thing as a whole rambled and just didn't come together for me. I came out of it feeling a little tired and perhaps a tad puzzled. For dark wartime espionage you can't better Alan Furst...

Three stars, then.

You can find the book here.

Book Post - Pills, Skulls and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. The Cover.

Gerrard King's Memento Mori

The search for a cover image for Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy was a long one. It was always going to be a mission to follow on from Jessy Shoucair's 'Lipstick Bullet' on the cover of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

The image had to be strong, stark and striking and somehow representative of the book itself. I spent long hours playing with various ideas, eventually settling on skulls and pills, an occlusion of the 'deadly' nature of the story and the dependency of protagonist, dying diplomat Jason Hartmoor, on painkillers and enzymes. There's also quite a lot of heroin in the book. If you're gonna do drugs, I reckon you might as well go all out, see?

I found one stock shot that seemed to go down that road, a skull and crossbones made from pills that I shared with the nice people on my mailer (Look! To the right! You can sign up too and get occasional updates, freebies and answer silly questions about book covers!), asking them what they thought. The answer duly came back and it boiled down to 'get what you're doing there but meh.'

A few more frustrated hours of playing with ideas and Googling followed before I stumbled across an image that leapt out of the screen, stuck its fingers up my nostrils and smacked my head on the keyboard. It was one of a series created by Australian artist Gerrard King, called 'Memento Mori'. I hit Gerrard up on Facebook and we quickly agreed a license for me to use his image on the book and in promotional work for Shemlan. Oddly enough, it turned out he had some history with Dubai - for a time he had been a 'trolly dolly' on Emirates. Seven points of separation and all that, see?

Gerrard's art is startling, surreal and bold stuff - you can follow the links below to explore more of his wild forays into gibbering insanity. In the meantime, I took the opportunity to interview 'Mr Pill Skull'...

What started your fascination with skulls as canvases? 
My thing for the skull has really incubated since youth. From the very first one adorning my school bag in '88 (I think it was Guns n Roses) to what you see now. The skull to me, is a perfect sculptural form with an ever-changing mood. It can be classical one minute and hair metal the next!

Why the pill/skull occlusion. What made you think of the image? 
The Memento Mori series really is about juxtaposing elements of pop, fashion and western culture with the classic skull, echoing the deep-rooted tradition of skull ornamentation prevalent in other cultures. The pill design harks to a classic '70s fabric design by Marimekko, which takes on a sense of irony when combined with the skull. I kept thinking of the song 'Mother's Little Helper' by The Rolling Stones while doing this piece.

Your work splits into pop, surrealism, realism and skulls. Will there be a fifth category? 
It's true that I do not like to be pigeon-holed with a particular style, preferring to float between whichever means serve the end. I couldn't say what I may do next, so yes, I will probably add another arrow to my quiver somewhere along the line.

Where do you sell most of your work - do you generally feel 'understood'? 
I sell my artwork at events, self-organised exhibitions and markets, as well as online. Living in a tourist area, one can easily feel misunderstood by throngs of holiday-makers looking for beach scenes and cutesy mementos. I have developed a bit of a support crew where I live who continually support my endeavours and drink free wine at my exhibitions!

Is this your first book cover? Do you see Gerrard King placemats or biscuit tins looming over the horizon? 
Ha ha! Yes this is my first cover image on an intelligent publication. I draw the line at prints and tee shirts for now, but if they were damn fine biscuits, well...!

Here's Gerrard's website with galleries and the like or you can see what he's getting up to here on Facebook.

And here, of course, is the handy link to buy Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy  complete with its scary cover in paperback, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Android tablet or iPad formats!

Red/Dead Gets Go Ahead

Lynch smiled. ‘Do you actually like her? She doesn’t seem your type.’
‘That’s none of your business.’
He leaned forward, his smile fading fast.‘We need your help. Dajani’s confirmed to a journalist from one of the Arabic rags he’s going to be bidding for the water privatisation and he’s claiming he has the solution to Jordan and the West Bank’s water supply problems. We’re deeply concerned about what he’s up to, Paul. The West Bank’s none of his business and it isn’t part of the privatisation as far as we are aware. The Izzies are screaming blue murder already and asking the Jordanians for clarification – and they’re saying nothing, not confirming, not denying. Your Minister has clammed up tighter than a shark’s arse at fifty fathoms.’
From Olives - A Violent Romance

It's been on what Gulf News likes to call 'the anvil' for something like 20 years now, but the infamous Red/Dead Canal is now set to commence. The problem is the Dead Sea has been shrinking at an incredible pace, its level dropping by up to a metre a year. Maps of the sea's outline over the past five decades look like maps of the Palestinian territories since 1948. It's inexorable and the scale of the great sea's decline is mind-boggling.

There simply isn't enough water to go around - I looked at the regional water crisis in my first serious novel, Olives - A Violent Romance because it's such a big (and unexplored) topic in the region. Israel and Lebanon almost went to war over Lebanese plans to dam the Litani river and there have been squabbles aplenty between Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria as everyone tries to get more out of a well that is near dry. The River Jordan, which feeds into the Dead Sea, has been reduced to a sad trickle. You can stand on the shores of the great gloopy body of ultra-saline water and look up the shore-side cliff to see hooks let into the stone that were used to tether boats forty years ago. It's an unnerving sight.

The Red/Dead Conduit (or even the "Two Seas Canal") aims to address the problem by piping water from the Red Sea up to the Dead Sea. It's all part of a multi-billion dollar project involving water desalination at Aqaba to feed the Israeli city of Eilat and the Jordanian capital Amman. Alongside this, 100 million cubic metres (MCM) of saline water will be diverted to feed into the Dead Sea. The deal's a complex one and involves Israel selling water to the Palestinian Authority as well as releasing more water from Lake Tiberias (The Sea of Galilee if you prefer) to Jordan. Israeli opponents of the scheme have criticised it as a water swapping deal dressed up as an environmental deal.

Part of the problem is that this all represents, literally, a drop in the ocean. Back in the 1960s, the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers used to push some 1900 MCM into the Dead Sea. Today that flow has reduced to something like 2-500 MCM depending on the season. Another 100 MCM is unlikely to make a huge difference. The original Red/Dead project called for two billion MCM to be pumped into the Dead Sea. Worse, the companies extracting potash and other minerals from the Dead Sea are themselves evaporating anything up to an estimated 350 MCM. The World Bank's feasibility study into the whole project estimated an inflow of a billion MCM per annum would stabilise the Dead Sea. So 100 MCM ain't looking like 'the solution'...

Alongside that are concerns about the environmental impact, as well as quite where all the power to feed the huge pumping stations the project demands - water is being pushed 230 metres uphill before flowing down to the Dead Sea - and the pipeline to Amman is an incredible 178 kilometres long. Part of the project plan includes hydro-electric power plants, but it's not known how much these will offset the overall consumption of the pumping stations and the project's two desalination plants.

What is clear is that it's likely going to be a mess. Few of the news stories covering the project agree on the numbers - and there are so many of them it's hard to work out quite what's what here. It's not yet been clarified how the project (which appears to be a scaled back version of what the World Bank's $16 million feasibility study called for) will be funded. And the concerns of environmentalists - both at what feeding seawater into the Dead Sea will do and at how pumping large volumes from Aqaba will affect flows around the sensitive Red Sea coral reefs - appear to have been largely sidelined.

What's sort of cute is how the water scarcity that drives Olives has remained relevant. It was all a huge mess when I first sat down to write the book in 2004 and it's no less of a mess almost ten years later, despite the Wadi Disi project being completed and the Red/Dead Project finally being agreed...

The UAE's Fat Problem - The Super Sized Soda Ban

(Photo credit: marsmet491)

The UAE's Federal National Council has announced steps to ban super-sized sodas in the country. The decision comes as part of a two-day session in which representatives discussed and brainstormed ideas in the educational and healthcare sectors, a discussion that took place alongside a much-publicised public consultation over social media.

The move is a fantastic idea and to be lauded - others have tried but failed to implement the measure. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has spearheaded a long legal battle to implement a super-sized soda ban, a fight that continues even as I write this.

It's a step in the right direction, but when you look at the journey ahead, even so big a step seems like a very small thing indeed. The UAE has a problem - and at its core is one small word. It's actually what I do as a day job and so I get a tad frustrated by it all.

It's awareness. Nothing more, nothing less.

The UAE is a young country, sometimes still painfully young. Its people have grown up in one of the most dynamic, fast-changing and evolving environments in the world. It's one of the most diverse collections of humans on earth - I'm shocked we aren't surrounded by thousands of anthropologists studying the place - with probably the world's wackiest demographics and societal challenges so great even trying to think about them deeply provokes brain skitter. One of the many, many products of that youth is an almost complete lack of food education and a culture of enjoying the plenty we have today - because within living memory there wasn't plenty, but scarcity here.

It's not helped by food producers and importers. Crisps fried in palm oil are the norm here, usually sprinkled liberally with MSG and 'Sunset yellow' - and other egregious dyes. The market leading brand of potato chip is fried in palm oil, a saturated fat. You can't throw a stone without hitting a fast food joint - each worse than the last. These have evolved very nicely to suit local culture and provide fun evening environments for the whole family - which of course gorges itself on processed meats fried in cheap fats (more palm oil!) and then slapped in highly processed buns to be served with processed french fries, flavouring coated onion rings or *shudder* curly marinated potato chips. Let alone the super-sweet sodas, shakes, doughnuts and ice cream sundaes on offer.

And, as anyone who read yesterday's post (or any of my posts passim on the topic of what's in our food) will know, being aware of what you're eating isn't always easy because food producers can be obfuscatory and even mendacious in the way they present foods to us.

The Khaleeji palate is fond of creamy cheeses, fried foods, dry biscuits and sweets. Cake shops sell highly processed confections slathered in artificial colourings and pumped with polyfilla-like artificial creams. And most of the locally sold brands of those dry biscuits are baked using, wait for it, palm oil.

Alongside this, we have a love of cookery and entertainment. The consumption of cooking oil by the average Emirati family is something to be seen to be believed - you can see the trolleys being lugged around Carrefours and the Co-Op. Demijohns of oil, pot noodles and worse things than that lurk in there.

I'm not being holier-than-thou here - I'm not saying anyone else is better. The UK in the 1970s and 80s was a paradise of processed foods, sweeteners and fats. It's not even particularly healthy there in these at least marginally more enlightened days. And the States. Oh, wow, the States. In any case, I'd probably know more about eating habits here than there these days.

But I am being realistic. There's a problem here - and at its heart is the fact the average consumer is totally unaware of what they are eating and there's nobody interested in making them aware because they are making a great deal of money by feeding the appetites of the nation. There are relatively few healthy alternatives - and when people don't know they're paying an insidious price for those burger meals, fried treats and creamy sauces zinging with 'E's, they're hardly going to opt for those 'no fun' healthy choices in any case.

So yes, great step FNC. But someone needs to get serious about letting consumers make more informed choices for themselves and, crucially, for their children.

I, for one, would be only too happy to help...

(PS Yes, I know there are expats who eat unhealthily too.)

(PPS The UAE can take some solace in the fact it isn't the world's fattest nation. Strangely enough that gong doesn't belong to America, but our next door neighbours, Qatar.)

Fancy A Quick Tumble, Chicken?

(Photo credit: @Doug88888)

Tumbling is the process whereby water is added to chicken breasts, typically with the addition of phosphates and hydrolised protein to 'bind' the water into the chicken so it doesn't deflate and become a puddle when you cook it. They also add salt - and then dextrose to re-sweeten the salty mix. I'd recommend a read of this excellent piece in The Guardian, which points out that consumers are paying something like 65p a kilo for water.

In the UK this meat is typically sold frozen in discount or bargain lines. Here in the UAE you can find a similar product as 'frozen' or 'marinated' chicken breast. It's not a marinade I'd choose to consume, I can tell you. These pumped breasts can contain anything up to 50% water. Bargain!

Hydrolised meat protein is extracted from bones, skins and other scraps of cows and, where permissible, pigs. This is accomplished using acid to break the meat down into its component amino acids. When it comes into contact with food, hydrolised protein naturally forms MSG or monosodium glutamate - so that watery chicken breast also packs an (unlabelled!) MSG punch.

So there's horse in your beef and beef in your chicken! Yum!