On Food, Diaspora and change

“When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor... 

We rode here in their minds, and we took root. 

We traveled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean...” 

(Neil Gaiman, ‘American Gods’)

As Globalisation unfurled, it spilled forth people of all creeds and cultures across the world. These people brought with them their gods; their memories, their rituals; and their food. 

Memories are the architecture of our identity, and unlike our gods - who are intangible, immutable and speak in faint whispers and signs - our food is alive and visceral and real. Our food speaks to us in colours and textures and smells. It speaks in the richness of freshly squeezed coconut cream, in the delicate wobble of perfectly steamed eggs, in the dragons’ breath emanating from a stationary wok and in the gentle bubbling of chicken curry over a flickering flame. 

Our food also has the ability to change. It has the ability to adapt. It can take on different shapes and forms, surprising us in a multitude of unexpected ways. The food that we know and love changes in response to hardship and lack, to excess, to experimentation and substitution, and to the availability of new and exciting ingredients.

A vast majority of the Singaporean food we love has been the result of innovation in a new land. The different types of laksa that have resulted across the Malaysian Peninsula as Chinese people incorporated local spices and aromats with their noodles is a prime example. 

Another example is Hainanese Chicken Rice. The dish originated in Wenchang, Hainan, and as the Hainanese people left and settled across Southeast Asia, different iterations emerged. 

In Vietnam, it’s served with Vietnamese mint and the rice is sometimes tinged yellow with tumeric. In Thailand, it’s served with a sweeter chilli sauce. In Singapore we have it with ginger, scallions and a tangy chilli sauce flavoured with a squeeze of calamansi. In Malacca, some use glutinous rice instead of jasmine.

As our food migrates with us, it doesn’t stay static. It is alive and it interacts with other cultures and lands in the same way that we do, sometimes (but not always) becoming a new thing entirely.

There is, as a result, an unmistakable tension between wanting to maintain what is original - what is ‘authentic’ - and wanting to evolve by taking the essence of what we love and pushing the boundaries. 

Right in the middle of this tension is where culinary preservation and continuity emerge - where we create recognisable iterations of the classics that we know and love, while expanding to embrace the new worlds and lands that we’ve come to inhabit.