Monique Devereux, former chief reporter at the Herald and now Christchurch correspondent for Radio New Zealand, is at the Cricket World Cup. She brings nzherald.co.nz regular news and views from the West Indies
KEY POINTS:
If cricket is the Caribbean's favoured sport, fried chicken is its favoured food.
In every one of the islands I've been to so far, the menus all look the same. Fried chicken, creole chicken, jerk chicken. Would you like chicken with that?
Obviously there are logical reasons forthis. Chickens are cheap to produce and plentiful, crucial elements for survival in countries with lots of poverty.
Beef isn't too scarce but a lot of it comes from America. All the rack of lamb dishes I've seen advertised in the hotel restaurants come from New Zealand. As does lots of the butter and cheese.
The chicken is definitely local and they grow them mighty big here.
In St Lucia we bought Jerk Chicken from a roadside stall, and the leg I ate had me wondering if it wasn't really a dodo bird that escaped extinction to be bred as "chicken" in St Lucia's rugged back of beyond.
KFC is a mainstay everywhere. Like Starbucks on Queen St, KFC has a branch every 20 paces or so, especially in Barbados.
And the slogan is hilarious. Forget "A meal so good". Here it's "We do chicken right".
There are others who do it wrong. Like the café we tried for lunch today.
The chicken skin was crispy and the spicy coating smelled so great, but my fork couldn't penetrate the icy raw meat surrounding the bone just below the skin.
Grenada is known as the Isle of Spice. The glossy brochure tells me there are more spices grown here per square mile than anywhere else in the world.
Cloves, cinnamon, ginger, tumeric, cocoa and nutmeg grow in abundance and on our drive to the cricket ground today I saw three different places claiming to the island's best spice market.
I'm hoping to explore them all. Maybe I'll find a new flavouring for my next large leg of chicken.
