ROGER’S SOAPBOX
■ Roger Crombie
My Faith in Unknown Others
to fix or prepare actual food and
then finding the time to do so. This
process requires that I do not mind
working, and I don’t. After all, I’m a
writer: it’s not real work.
black and white. Risk exposure is not all No two clients are exactly alike. That’s why we’re
committed to truly understanding our clients’ unique
risk exposure, providing specialized solutions based
on industry insights and hands-on experience.
In specialty risk, we’ve got the pedigree.
Reinsurance: Property • Casualty • Catastrophe • Marine • Aerospace
Surety & Other Specialty
Insurance: Property • Casualty • Agriculture • Healthcare Liability
Professional Lines
SINGAPORE SWITZERLAND UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES
Although spuds are a staple of the
British diet, he never had cause to
buy or cook one. His reasons were
different: He moved directly from one
Mrs. Crombie (his mother) to another
(my mother). When the latter died,
he lived on prepared food that he
simply heated up, as I do.
In part, my estrangement from
the tater is due to my not celebrating
Western food. I prefer Chinese-or Indian-style cooking. Plus the
inexorable rise of the microwave
oven, the bachelor’s best friend,
and, since my return to London, the
availability of laughably cheap but
very good food delivered to my front
door in 30 minutes or fewer. As a
heavy smoker, I can’t taste anything
anyway. My enjoyment of food is
mostly textural. Being single makes
cooking a chore. Microwaves and
boxed, prepared food make cooking
essentially unnecessary. In that I
could not be more divorced from
the source of my sustenance, I am a
thoroughly modern man.
This dependence on unknown
others was underlined last summer,
when the British underwent the latest
in an ongoing 1,000-year series of
national riots. The area in which I
live was barely affected but a local
halfwit lobbed a brick at the window
of the only supermarket for a mile in
any direction, where I buy most of
my groceries. The window splintered
but didn’t break. Spooked, one
imagines, the ne’er-do-well made off.
The threat to the food supply was not
to be taken lightly, however. If the
supermarkets went out of business,
I’d be dead inside a week.
Living in a city is an act of faith.
No connection exists between the
farmer and the consumer, other
than the supermarket. I couldn’t
grow a potato if my life depended
on it. I peeled them as a kid in the
days when food was bought as raw
materials and carted home in a
bag my mother carried with her on
shopping expeditions. Plastic bags and
plastic food have replaced all that.
Should I be worried about this,
and should I change my ways? Doing
so would mean acquiring or renting
land, regularly traveling to and from
it, and getting my hands dirty, which
is something else I haven’t done
much as an adult. I have a theory
about manual work. It is cheaper,
quicker and cleaner for me to earn
the money to pay someone else to do
the work, probably much better than
I could do it anyway. Ditto prepared
food: much easier than learning how
ROGER CROMBIE is a London-based
columnist for Risk & Insurance®. He can be
reached at riskletters@lrp.com
At dinner the other night, I realized that I haven’t bought or
cooked a potato in 25 years. Potatoes have been among the
contents of microwaveable food that I have “prepared,” but I
have not, as an adult, handled a raw potato. Then I made the
conclusion that my father was in the same boat all his life.
www.endurance.bm BERMUDA
FINANCIAL STRENGTH
• A (Excellent) from A.M. Best (XV size category)
• A (Strong) from Standard and Poor’s
• Excellent rating from Standard and Poor’s for
Enterprise Risk Management
• Strong balance sheet with high quality assets and
exceptional liquidity
