So what is daily life in the Falkland Islands like? Or more specifically what is daily life in Stanley like – as I can’t speak for life in Camp.

(Camp is the description of everywhere in the Islands that is not Stanley and generally not at Mount Pleasant Camp/Aiport, where the military are.  This ranges from places that are a 30 minute drive from Stanley to West Falkland (there’s an occasional ferry between East and West Falkland) and any of the other 100s of small islands, where the only route off is plane, monthly supply ship or your own boat).

An obvious place to start is food shopping. 

There are now two supermarkets in Stanley – West Store and Chandlery.  Despite its name the Chandlery is not a hardware store for boats but a supermarket – it does include a fine range of workwear though.

Day to day shopping for food has a few idosyncracies:

Limited choice

For example you can get ground coffee but the choice over all the shops is limited to two or three choices.  There are familiar brands – between them  they stock goods from Waitrose,  Iceland, Co-op and Tesco.  However they also have items from South America, South Africa, Saint Helena and others – I think this reflects the diversity of the population.

Not under one roof

Hunt for what you want – you might have to go to more than one shop.

Dates

Don’t look at the date stamps!  Sometimes the products are in date – often they aren’t.  Apparently to keep prices down the supermarkets buy short life stock and then ship it down.  Since no one seems to have food poisoning from this, it suggests that the date stamps on food are a bit of a waste of time for dried, tinned and bottled goods…

Fresh fruit and vegetables

Are limited and expensive – which isn’t really a surprise – there is a market garden that grows some vegetables in the summer and lots of people have well tended vegetable plots, the rest comes in from Chile by plane once a week.

Beef and mutton are incredibly cheap, good and local.  Little lamb on sale as the sheep here are bred for wool rather than meat. 

All of this leads to more cooking from scratch, less food waste and people who are clear about where their food comes from.  Which on the whole feels like a good thing!