How to avoid being poisoned in prison

The news last week that South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius is being released from jail in Pretoria on parole - just 10 months after shooting his girlfriend dead - comes as little surprise given the way the entire saga has been treated by both the courts and the media, with the concept of justice being somewhat severely strained or skewed in the process.

It also has nothing to do with the subject matter of this blog - except, however, that when reading the news online, my attention was drawn to an earlier story in the Related Articles section, with the headline: "Oscar Pistorius living on tinned food after prison poisoning threats".

I hadn't heard about this when it was reported back in March, but allegedly Pistorius had become so worried about threats from inmates that he had taken to eating only tins of 'chakalaka' from the prison tuck shop to avoid the risk of anyone poisoning his food, a diet causing such considerable weight-loss that his prosthetic legs no longer fitted him properly.

For those unfamiliar with the stuff, the article mentions that chakalaka is "a spicy South African vegetable stew", but offers little more information than that. I however had not only heard of but actually already tried it, having found a tin in the reduced section during a relatively recent visit to a South African food shop near Charing Cross Station. The tin was being sold off alongside a number of other items that had already passed their Best Before dates; I'm not entirely sure if shops are allowed to do that, but never mind. Let's just hope they don't kill anyone. Oops, bad choice of phrase...

The tin I purchased was made by a company called Koo, whose motto or slogan is "It's the best you can do". To my ears this is a rather odd phrase; I suspect they mean something along the lines of the tagline for Gilette razors ("the best a man can get"), but I can't help think of someone complaining "Is that the best you can do?", which doesn't fill me with much confidence in the product. Still, it probably is the best that Pistorius can do food-wise, given his current circumstances.

Tins on Display

While you won't find any tins in Tate Modern's The World Goes Pop exhibition, elsewhere in museums across the capital there are plenty of tinned goodies on display.

At the Science Museum, a brilliant new exhibition has recently opened entitled Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age, which tells the fascinating story of the Russian space programme, from the surprisingly prescient predictions of pre-revolution thinkers, via the first satellite, dog, man and woman in space, through to the Mir and International Space Stations towards and after the end of the USSR.

It's well worth a visit, not least as one of the items on display is a 'dining table' from the Mir space station, complete with compartments for various tinned foodstuffs including caviar (who said space travel isn't glamorous?), cheese, chicken in white sauce, and liver stroganoff (hmm...maybe it's not glamorous after all). The table also has a built in vacuum system to suck up food debris, although quite how you open tins or any other kind of food packet in space without at least some of the contents going everywhere I have no idea.