Food, Supermarkets, & the Occasion-Flecked Designer Tipple.

At the premeditation of Holidays in the tri-Brrr months, we cajole the nerve of the season in our favour.

Or flavour, whatever.

There are things in the supermarket that keep you clued on what month of the year it is - and where you are in the world - even if you choose to burrow as deep as you can below the socials and din of the human terra. The type of potatoes, the kind of packaged meat imported - or displayed at the fresh deli counters - and that are what clues you in to what you can totally work with.

Not only to command your kitchen army of utensils towards, but more importantly, your palate.

In a post-third-world development - developing / emergent market post-colonial Asia, the normal people (who lived and migrated and replicated their kind to three generations since) are partial to eating out. We can’t blame them, the hawker centres and lovely fast-fare above, or beside supermarkets, are dribbling me with anticipation and post-tourist-mongered business. And there are the half-half set, where you might be three paychecks to that dream vacation, your wallets may be dripping but the needs have caught up with it - there’re the outdoor-fare bistros that adhere to your no-longer-lunchbox-meditated-mediocre palate, but accommodate your growing incense to the madness of just eating cup noodles at home, and you need to mingle when your single ideals of pre-momofuku years - versus the settled down to my kitchen island, on a friday night yawndom.

And for those special or “bored with everyday fare” occasion, the fine diners take centre stage to commence a repast that silences the rumble of that tumble that you call “just a stress dysfunction that needs feeding”. With the clickety click of their reservation apps to make that mid-week table a reality, rather than the mere practicality of simply filling up.

In my unique vantage, i know what to eat (availability), or can eat (calorically), but the notion of what i want to eat - is definitely a learned skill. What we know as growth, is actually preened from: where you navigate your olfactory, to where the new stuff lurks, to navigating via where my friends eat - they invited me to this shindig - and before you know it, that now just evolves. All of a sudden, this is how you are able to adjust your sensibilities to the things you consider food, as a practical human gesture, to an actual adventure.

The observed collaboration of your strategic life as a non-mollusc, (grilled and dipped in a spicy parsley beurre blanc, slurrrrp) is to make my way from: where the heck do i eat (location-based triteness of the oops, just-got-here no-tram-card, train-link, no-car life), to how do i eat (in africa, you mash things with your thumb into the flat bread, and then shove in your gob), to in the end (as you climb up the competency and fullness of having spied everything that your 20-year culinary existence has enticed you to), ultimately what i want to.

It is an arguably unique vantage - i will definitely not speak for the vegans - i am mostly just surmising that people have the same premise for having a culinary life - because it was trendy, jamie oliver was seriously the bomb with those blue eyes, or because lunch was a food truck that made me want to cross the street very dangerously. And this explains why we have a 50,000+ count on published books that are not necessarily recipe, but adventure books - that mention, or centre on food and the adventures of the palate more than the adventures of the nano-techniques on roasting a squab in what is the extended living space of the post-kamasutra set. And why we have a past on repast: and having done that, do you really want to eat that innard or liver that was flown here especially just to feed you and your small table of friends even as it private-jet costed another small city-state a meal of a country? (Face it, internet - that’s now the bar to what you need to consciously decide.)

This becomes the bar. (Not when you have the bar cart leftover from the 70s that you thought you could revive with your purchase of an auctioned-off ice bucket from e-bay or wish-listed every year in amazon, and filled it up with grocery-bought ice because you’re a minimalist, and tiny fridges are more hipster - and it’s not politically correct to store your ice trays with your flown-in, weekends-at-sundown langoustines).

When you have a palate, write about it, and definitely want to see, eat, make food, realise the need to share the recipes to green-sourcing a life and living it, and share this success more. Or sell, whatever. Then it’s now left a better planet because of your imprint of, and on, it. (Beat that, zuckerberg.)