I want to do for field rations what Jamie Oliver did for school dinners

Hell’s Kitchen

My ambition to open a fish and chip shop in Mogadishu has not happened yet, though I remain optimistic. Food, I’ve decided, is the thing to go for on my next entrepreneurial adventure. For a while I dreamed of going into the chicken trade, importing refrigerated containers full of wings and drumsticks from Brazil for sale up the furthest reaches of the Congo. Fortunes have been made in brokering African chicken deals. But so far my forays into the food business have not gone very well. I tried, for example, to sell pots of honey with my friend Tom at various local fêtes. We branded our product rather esoterically as ‘Honey For Your Sexy’ (this was Tom’s idea) and we ended up with hundreds of unsold jars of the stuff, which I dumped in a friend’s attic. Now what I know is that food is big business in disaster zones. In Somalia I remember an eccentric Antipodean called Morris, who won the contracts to feed all peacekeeping forces in Cambodia and Somalia. He used to race around Mogadishu in a Saracen armoured personnel carrier emblazoned with his company symbol, a crossed fork and spoon. Morris was like a character in a Bond movie and he was minting it. All went well until he rashly entered the lobster business, at which point Islamists keen to maintain their monopoly over marine crustacean exports assassinated him. Food and disasters got me thinking and now I have launched an enterprise with my chum Ken, a Scottish adventurer and entrepreneur. Many years ago he appeared in Africa selling heavy dub and roots vinyl records. He wound up doing logistics for Norwegian People’s Aid in South Sudan, where he saved countless thousands of civilian lives during the war against Khartoum. Ken has done food airdrops and convoys into the most remote parts of the Equatorial belt.