Why a leftovers sandwich is like Singapore

I think the best eco­nom­ic recipes come from the will­ing­ness to mix ingre­di­ents in uncon­ven­tion­al ways. So in that regard the best exam­ple of a left­overs sand­wich would be Sin­ga­pore. When you hear about Sin­ga­pore you think about these free-trade poli­cies, the wel­com­ing atti­tude to for­eign invest­ment, but you nev­er hear that nine­ty per cent of land is owned by the gov­ern­ment and 85% of hous­ing is sup­plied by gov­ern­ment-owned hous­ing cor­po­ra­tions. Or that a stag­ger­ing 22% of nation­al out­put is pro­duced by what’s called GLCs — gov­ern­ment-linked cor­po­ra­tions which the Sin­ga­pore gov­ern­ment have at least 20% own­er­ship in.

I open­ly chal­lenge my stu­dents to give me one eco­nom­ic the­o­ry that can explain Sin­ga­pore. It doesn’t mat­ter what school of eco­nom­ics it is, there’s no such the­o­ry because Sin­ga­pore is a prod­uct of very prag­mat­ic deci­sion-mak­ing on the basis of their assess­ment of the sit­u­a­tion and address­ing their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties like land short­age. You can­not just leave it to pri­vate devel­op­ers. So a good left­over sand­wich is like that — what do you have in your cup­board?

Ide­al­ly you might want to make a Reuben sand­wich, or cheese and pick­le but you’ll often lack the ingre­di­ents so you have to find a way to cre­ate some­thing with what you have. You have to be a bit adven­tur­ous with your com­bi­na­tions because you have to put togeth­er a sand­wich with ingre­di­ents that you might not have used togeth­er before. So what is this semi-dry piece of turkey going to go with? Will it go with may­on­naise or Sriracha sauce? You’ll put things in an unusu­al way and some­times it doesn’t work but some­times it works well.

I think a lot of good eco­nom­ic poli­cies have been invent­ed by that route. Just like the Sin­ga­pore gov­ern­ment real­is­ing that in gen­er­al they want to have a less reg­u­lat­ed econ­o­my but when it comes to land they are so con­strained that there’s no way they can let the pri­vate sec­tor decide on it. They lack the local entre­pre­neur­ial skills so they’ll invite mul­ti-nation­al com­pa­nies but don’t have to com­plete­ly cede con­trol of their econ­o­my so they’ll set up state-owned enter­pris­es in key sec­tors – even though they are not a social­ist country. 

When we look at any cul­ture for main hol­i­days or birth­days then you have a lot of left­overs. And a lot of recipes have been devel­oped to take advan­tage of those things. I think a lot of cul­tures have that left­over tra­di­tion, but in Britain and Amer­i­ca and I’m sure some Euro­pean coun­tries they have devel­oped this cul­ture of using the Thanks­giv­ing or Christ­mas left­overs to make sand­wich­es which I think is a great idea because you don’t want to eat the same thing all the time. Peo­ple make soup and cur­ries and sand­wich­es out of turkey. Per­son­al­ly I don’t like turkey but at Christ­mas time I’d cook roast pork or chick­en. Very often after Christ­mas there’s meat and pota­to left and a long time ago I picked up this roast chick­en recipe from one of Nigel Slater’s cook books – it’s a sim­ple thing, you basi­cal­ly use the chick­en fat and but­ter to fry diced pota­toes in the pan and it becomes real­ly crispy. I refry the chick­en with gar­lic – Korean’s are mad about gar­lic – and put some may­on­naise and chick­en along with some pota­toes if there are any left. Then maybe some rock­et leaves and it’s one of my favourite sand­wich­es.

So with ran­dom ingre­di­ents and some imag­i­na­tion, expe­ri­ence and what it takes to make this com­bi­na­tion work, you make do with what you have. Singapore’s an extreme exam­ple but if you look at oth­er coun­tries they all have unex­pect­ed com­bi­na­tions and unusu­al arrange­ments. For me mak­ing sand­wich­es is to make do with what you have. That’s the spir­it of it.

The world is real­ly com­plex and each eco­nom­ic the­o­ry is based on often hid­den the­o­ries of human nature, eth­i­cal val­ues, polit­i­cal val­ues and dif­fer­ent under­stand­ings of how eco­nom­ics works. Neo-clas­si­cal eco­nom­ic the­o­ries, which is the dom­i­nant school of eco­nom­ics, is main­ly inter­est­ed in the mar­ket exchange, oth­er schools like Key­ne­sian are inter­est­ed in the so called macro econ­o­my. Rather than look­ing at how peo­ple buy and sell elec­tric­i­ty in the mar­ket, they are look­ing at the aggre­gate val­ues like infla­tion or unem­ploy­ment. There are also schools like the devel­op­men­tal­ist school, which is more inter­est­ed in how to raise pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and how to indus­tri­alise the poor economies.

Giv­en all these, no the­o­ry can cov­er every­thing. Of course, com­bin­ing dif­fer­ent things doesn’t always work, but if you com­bine them well, then you can have a bet­ter under­stand­ing and a tasti­er meal. 

I have been writ­ing these eco­nom­ics books for the gen­er­al pub­lic for the last 15 years – my very first mass mar­ket book was called Bad Samar­i­tans and it was basi­cal­ly try­ing to explain how the glob­al eco­nom­ic order was set up by the rich and pow­er­ful coun­tries and how the advice that these coun­tries gave the devel­op­ing nations didn’t help.

They were rec­om­mend­ing poli­cies that are not suit­able for them. Things like free trade, which is good in the short run but meant these nations were for­ev­er stuck as pro­duc­ers of soy beans or bird guano etc. They could nev­er diver­si­fy. The colo­nial­ist view, even though they’ll nev­er say it, is, in essence ​“we have the best recipes, and you have to fol­low it.” Like gov­ern­ments try­ing to impose pota­to-based diets in coun­tries that are based on rice. I like pota­to but if I had to eat it as my sta­ple that would be a prob­lem for me. That ​“we know bet­ter” idea is very much left­over think­ing. When I fin­ished writ­ing Bad Samar­i­tans I had this brain­wave of mak­ing eco­nom­ics even more acces­si­ble by ​‘brib­ing’ the read­ers with inter­est­ing sto­ries about food, which is my oth­er pas­sion.

For one rea­son or anoth­er I didn’t get to write Edi­ble Eco­nom­ics for 15 years. In a way I’m glad I got to write it now because between 2006 and the present I’ve had lit­er­al­ly tens of thou­sands more meals and I’ve vis­it­ed hun­dreds more restau­rants and a dozen or so coun­tries! On a more seri­ous note, I wrote the book in this way because my view is in a cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my, with­out peo­ple know­ing at least some eco­nom­ics, democ­ra­cy is mean­ing­less. There are so many deci­sions made through the lens of eco­nom­ics – it’s not just stan­dard things like inter­est rates or gov­ern­ment spend­ing but cul­ture, edu­ca­tion and nation­al her­itage. Peo­ple need to think about and learn eco­nom­ics but the sub­ject is famous­ly dry and bor­ing. I want­ed to find a way to entice peo­ple to it. Even if peo­ple just read one or two of the sto­ries in the 18 chap­ters of the book at least they will have become more inter­est­ed in these issues.

One of the first chap­ters I wrote is called ​‘Acorn’. Most peo­ple don’t con­sid­er it as a human food but Kore­ans eat a lot of acorns. We make it into a veg­etable jel­ly, it’s an earthy basic food, it’s not a del­i­ca­cy real­ly. But there is a way to make a del­i­ca­cy out of acorns and that is to feed it to Span­ish pigs called ​’pata negra’ and then turn it into Iberi­co ham. Ham is so impor­tant to Span­ish cul­ture – what oth­er coun­try could have come up with a movie with Javier Bar­dem and Pené­lope Cruz called Ham Ham? My the­o­ry is ham and pork in gen­er­al is so impor­tant to Span­ish cul­ture because they arguably built a nation fight­ing peo­ple who don’t eat pork. I go into a dis­cus­sion about stereo­typ­ing cul­tures and how Mus­lim coun­tries are near­ly always por­trayed in a neg­a­tive light. I con­trast it with the stereo­typ­i­cal view of the East Asian cul­ture, which is usu­al­ly cast in a pos­i­tive light and por­trayed with a focus on edu­ca­tion and hard work­ing. But there’s a lot of neg­a­tive ele­ments in this cul­ture — it’s very con­formist, which is bad for inno­va­tion and in tra­di­tion­al hier­ar­chies the mer­chants and arti­sans were at the bot­tom of the social castes. We need to get rid of stereo­types to tru­ly under­stand how cul­ture and eco­nom­ics inter­act and can ben­e­fit each other.

There’s a chap­ter in the book called ​‘Banana’ and it starts with The Elvis Sand­wich. Some of the sto­ries are more per­son­al to me – The Elvis is one of my wife’s favourite break­fast items. It’s peanut but­ter, banana, hon­ey driz­zled on top — we rarely put bacon on it like many peo­ple do. But it starts with that and talks about how hav­ing a banana as a sand­wich fill­ing is rather unusu­al because most peo­ple eat it as a fruit. But that’s only the case in coun­tries where they don’t actu­al­ly pro­duce bananas.

In the coun­tries where they do pro­duce it, the banana is a main car­bo­hy­drate – it’s like the pota­to in the UK. We nev­er think of oth­er ways to eat it but in oth­er cul­tures they always have dif­fer­ent ways. The main theme of the chap­ter is how the food was adopt­ed as a food for slaves by the Por­tuguese and Span­ish invaders and then lat­er Britain and France as well. It was encour­aged by these plan­ta­tion own­ers for the slaves to plant banana trees on the small plots they were giv­en. Because in the right cli­mate con­di­tion it just grows – you don’t need to tend to it, and the slave own­ers want­ed the slaves to spend the least amount of time on their own plots. The banana becomes anoth­er vehi­cle of exploita­tion in what’s known as banana republics around the basin of the Caribbean and Cen­tral and South Amer­i­can coun­tries. There’s a dark his­to­ry to the banana but on the oth­er hand all these sto­ries about the banana and mul­ti-nation­al com­pa­nies show that these com­pa­nies can be very use­ful and pro­duc­tive if you use the right poli­cies and encour­age them to invest in their work­ers. It’s a kind of con­vo­lut­ed sto­ry to go from the Elvis Sand­wich to mul­ti-nation­al com­pa­nies but it’s that kind of a book, you don’t know where you’re going to end up.

As told to Josh Jones. 

Edi­ble Eco­nom­ics is avail­able in paper­back from 28^th Sep­tem­ber.

A ver­sion of this sto­ry was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Sand­wich Mag­a­zine Issue 6: The Left­overs Issue. You can buy the lat­est issue here or fol­low Sand­wich on Insta­gram.