I turned up on Saturday ready for work, I met Nawaz Ali who I had met the week before, he introduced me to another employee called Faisal who works on the grocers section and straight away I was unpacking boxes and stocking the shelves with Maggi seasoning cubes. Come 10am the shop started to pick up pace and it got really busy, I had customers constantly asking me where certain foods were and of course not only could I hardly understand them but I also had no clue of what food they were after and where it was stocked.

After an hour of re-stocking the shelves and speaking to the employees they gave me a bit more responsibility; Faisal handed me the ticket gun, told me to price each item and make sure I stick the label away from the sell by date. We then got talking about all different food they stock and the amount of ethnicities they cater for. I asked him ‘where does all the food come from?’ he told me ‘each foods comes from many countries’, he pointed out some examples to reveal them coming from: China, Nigeria, Jamaica, Turkey, Norway and more… I asked him about the cow’s feet, turns out they’re sourced from Ireland. He explained to me that they don’t import all the food, but that they source it from many different companies and cash and carries.

By 11:30am Faisal had cooked a lamb curry upstairs in the stock room area, he then brought it down and all the employees took turns eating it on shop floor. By now I had gained their trust so he called me over, put some in a container and told me to choose a drink, took me upstairs to the kitchen and gave me some pitta bread to eat with it. I was very grateful, it was probably the best curry I’ve ever had, no knifes and forks business – hands only. After lunch I continued to work with them in the grocery section, I could tell the other employees wouldn’t have been too happy with me working in the butchers area or the fruit/veg area as they all had their own responsibilities which I didn’t want to intrude on.

Later on quite a loud argument broke out between one of the butchers and a customer, I remember seeing him pick up the meat he had just cut and bagged for her, slammed it down on the table and they both started shouting abuse at each other. I think she had changed her mind or meant for him to cut a different part of the meat. This is where things get difficult, there’s a lot of dialect and culture clashes, often the two different races find it hard to understand each other and sometimes it can escalade into larger issues. Don’t get me wrong it’s not all bad, for most of the day the customers and staff get on extremely well and you can tell there’s a great sense of community. The next day I focused on collecting more research, finding out where all the food comes from, what ethnicities buy certain foods and learnt some general business knowledge about they operate. There are many aspects I could focus on, so I might have to drop or ignore other factors later on. I’m currently working my way through 983 photos as well as hours of voice recordings and video…