To start off with, the image of people helping themselves to bruised and overripe vegetables and fruit is not one we immediately associate with a cosmopolitan city in a wealthy western country. Moreover the picture which is created of people grabbing what they can (stuffing food ‘as quickly as lightning’ in plastic bags and ‘rummaging through the garbage dump’), combined with the sounds of ‘noise and clatter’, yelling and cursing remind us of scenes or descriptions we may have seen in films about Victorian slums or images from ‘third world’ countries.
Even if this image is perhaps not immediately in our mind when we read the first paragraph, these associations become stronger in the second, and especially the third paragraph. Words like: ‘a skinny, half-naked boy wearing shorts was eating a piece of raw fish over a garbage bin’ seem to be lifted out of a description of a slum city in a developing country.
In the third paragraph this image becomes even stronger with phrases as: ‘filthy and unkempt’, ‘trudging behind the garbage trucks’ and ‘hobbling along in their rags, sometimes on bare feet’.