Allow me to kick off this episode of “Edibles & Potables” by paraphrasing the late, great Frank Zappa:
You can’t be a real country unless you have a salmon ATM and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a salmon ATM.
Because: If it’s 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning and you desperately need accompaniment for a bagel, tinned kippers just won’t do. Salmon from the ATM might not be lox, strictly speaking, but it’s far easier to pretend (as opposed to pickled herring).
At Gastro Obscura:
In January of 2019, a new ATM was unveiled in Singapore’s Wisteria shopping mall. Instead of cash, however, this machine dispenses 200-gram fillets of frozen salmon from the fjords of Norway. Today, dozens of salmon ATMs dot the island city-state.
Why Singapore? The city-state is a hotbed of vending machine culture, and its citizens crave Norwegian salmon.
By cutting out the cost of storefronts, staff, and distributors, he’s able to sell his fillets for S$5.90 ($4.25). And by holding them under -4 degrees F in each vending machine, the fish stays fresh for up to two years.
Norwegian Salmon – Producers & Wholesale Distributors has a Facebook page; the photo and video credits go to Bonafide Ltd.
