an untapped hotbed for anthropological study.

Life Our regular fish and chip and Chinese meal emporium is closed for what looks like a holiday so we had to walk further afield for supper this evening. As ever, there’s a slight apprehension about entering an alien takeaway but little did I realise that we’d be stumbling into what turned out to be an untapped hotbed for anthropological study, particularly in the realm of human adaptation.

Here is the potential area of study:

Our order included a chicken curry. We were told that there would be a fifty minute wait for a meal because of the backlog. Not wanting to wait that long, we asked for the time limit on fish and chips. Ten minutes. We ordered three sets and sat down.

As we watched, the take away only seemed to have two different types of customers:

Type A entered, made a meal order, asked the time it would take to materialise and left. None of them were surprised about the wait. This lengthy waiting time is a regular occurrence. It’s expected.

Type B entered and to a person ordered sausage and chips. Sometimes they would vary the order. More than one sausage. Larger sausages. An extra savoury cake. Tub of gravy, tub of peas. They were all served straight away and all before us.

No one ordered fish and chips.

From the vantage point of the waiting chair, I began to draw a couple of conclusions.

Either that the sausage chips are so gorgeous and the fish so inferior that there was no choice. Good for them, not good for us.

Or that through a process of trial and error, the Type B customers, visitors to what is the only fish and chip and Chinese meal emporium in the very local area have realised that the only way to be served straight away in busy periods, to walk away quickly with a meal, is to ignore the couple of hundred menu choices and order the pig meat and potato.

Which they do, in their droves, the additional extras their way of creating some variety to a meal which could become boring very quickly (assuming they don’t order the same variations each time as well).

There may be other external factors which separate those who patiently wait for a “meal” and those who impatiently want their food straight away. Is there a demographic divide or does it depend on the day’s activities? The “I can’t be bothered waiting, just get us a sausage will you” factor?

As it turned out, there were so many Type B's that a queue developed anyway and our fish and chips took even longer because of the number of sausage dinners being dished out.

As ever it wasn’t as nice as the usual place. I expect you could do an anthropological study about the implications of that too.