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The Musubi Moment

“Now here is a real local favourite.” This is Keira of Hawaii Food Tours speaking, and we’re deep into what she and her partner, Matthew, call their Hole-in-the-Wall Tour: four hours of eating far off the tourist grid. No tiki lounges or poolside hors d’oeuvres. Instead: market stalls and takeout joints, tiny bakeries and noodle factories. We’ve had manapua sticky buns and fish fritters, coco puffs and pineapple dusted with plum powder. But Keira is now giving us the real inside scoop: something invented right here. A foodstuff truly of this place.

“Takes me right back to my childhood,” says the born-and-raised Hawaiian – who has Japanese and Polynesian ancestry herself – opening a box and giving each of us a fat sushi roll stuffed with Spam.

Flavour aside – you like Spam or you don’t – the moment is crucial here as we sample this lodestone of true Hawaiian locality, which once tasted, I then notice everywhere in Oahu, sweating next to cash registers in convenience stores and gas stations from Diamond Head to Haleiwa. Spam musubi: an ersatz futomaki roll full of tinned pork shoulder shipped over 6,400 kilometres from the Hormel Foods Corporation in Austin, Minnesota.

That crucial moment is me realizing how the most authentic local idea somehow seems always to spring from a global brain.

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