Festivities and food miles

This week, we demolished about 4 kilograms of baby pork ribs, two whole lamb legs and about another kg of chicken wings. To be fair, we had a lot of help to eat them, and it was over four meals through Christmas Eve, Christmas and Boxing Day.

Even so, the proverbial cold meat sandwiches will be seriously taxing our culinary creativity.

I'm home in Singapore, and this rare occasion alone is reason enough to celebrate, so my son and I are happily bonding in the kitchen, in real time. The rest of the year, we mostly talk through iMessage and WeChat, sharing our culinary triumphs and failures with photos sent over the wonder-apps.

It's good to be home, and one of the first things I did was to visit our neighborhood supermarket.

Its abundance almost overwhelmed me.

There were fresh cranberries direct from the United States, perfect persimmons from Israel, sweet tangerines from China, grain-fed pork from Australia, beef from Japan, and chickens and turkeys from neighboring Malaysia. There was a cornucopia of fruits and nuts for the Christmas table, and little packets of fresh herbs that made me sing out "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme".

It struck me then that Singapore practically imports every bite of food it consumes.

We are a little nation, where economy of scale naturally loses all advantage and we are used to making the best of everything, however poor the resources. I think we have been marginally successful.

The only thing we cannot do is to eat local, according to the principles preached by Carlo Petrini. Each Singaporean consumes probably more food miles than the average world citizen, and there is precious little we can do about it.

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