before it goes, before i forget: singapore food

feeding someone is a very noble thing to do. do it with your whole heart. - A Malay hawker.

***

i don’t know how to say it. it breaks me to see it happening before my eyes, and yet have no idea how to stop it.

it just fills me with a profound sense of sadness, that our simple way of life is being eroded in favour of more expensive, high-end restaurants and fast food chains and shopping malls.

that our traditional hawker dishes are losing their lustre among the younger generation. that pestle-and-mortar Peranakan dishes, and handmade meatballs, are no match for their ready-made, factory-produced counterparts.

things that once cannot be bought with money are now things that can be bought with money.

that change is happening so fast and so silently that few are noticing it.

the government might try to preserve our food culture at the UNESCO level, but while trying to simultaneously assimilate into the modern copy of itself, such efforts are also getting increasingly plastic. for the modern person who has little time, we know little about the complexity and multiplicity of attached meanings to food, from the people to the memories to family to history. for the modern person, food respect and loyalty boils down to just one variable: taste.

even saying taste itself is debatable. in a health-conscious age you’re inundated with what to eat and what not to eat, there was a time when i saw food as poison, and hated eating. food, i once believed, should serve merely a functional purpose. Get my nutrients and vitamins, no more. “You live to eat, not eat to live,” my Biology teacher used to tell us. I remember being mad when my brother complained about my mother’s food. To desire something more, i understood, was to be greedy and excessively demanding.

but now i realise that if we had looked beyond simply the taste of the food, we would see that food is about people. what is the story of the person who made your food? can we still create community with our fellow patrons? can we bring back the Kampong spirit?

food is not just food. it is the product of generations of artists perfecting their masterpiece. it is the product of decades of hard, back-breaking labour done out of love for the family. when the food does more than sustain but raises the family, the dish becomes embedded with the ethos of the cook. you don’t just taste oyster sauce and salt and sugar in your mother's fried bee hoon. you are consuming her skill that is key to an honest living. you taste love. you taste pride. you taste life.