Quarantine meals: The 2020 food trend no-one predicted

It is now almost laughable, reading back the list of the foods we would all be excited in 2020.

Seacuterie, anyone? Monk fruit syrup reductions, or CBD-infused macaroni? Indeed, the only trend that made it from this list of "foods to watch" compiled by our colleagues late last year is the alternative flours - but that is only because the supermarket shelf were stripped of the regular kind.

However, I can guarantee none of them listed what I consider to be 2020's major food trend: the quarantine meal, eaten by those of us lucky enough to spend two weeks trapped in a hotel room. They were left outside our locked doors three times a day by a person we never saw.

Across the world, people flew into quarantine facilities and were treated to mass catering which provided some truly weird and wonderful combinations - some of it good, some of it edible, and some of it best forgotten at speed.

"It was a positive spin on airplane food," Henry Parham says of the regimen of blueberry muffins, eggs, and quiche which got left outside his room in Melbourne, Australia, after his return for the US earlier this year.

Lukewarm school dinners was the analogy I would have chosen for my own experience of quarantine food here in Singapore.

However, where we were agreed was that the food arriving at the door at least broke up the monotony of 15 days within the same walls.