33 Epiphanies

A (not especially) Happy Meal

On Friday I went to a meeting of the NUS student group Food4All at Food #03. I was thoroughly under-whelmed by the food, but, to be fair, the chef was ill. Interestingly enough, on my way there, I was listening to a podcast by The Restaurant Guys, in which they criticized a NYTimes review of a restaurant when there was only a temporary chef working there. However, I do want to point out that the place charges over $12 for tofu pizzas and tempeh burgers while being surrounded by Indian restaurants serving full South Indian vegetarian meal sets for less than half that price.

The meeting was organized as a way for all the food-related student groups in Singapore to get to know each other. Despite the glamour of Singapore as a foodie paradise, this was an occasion to learn about the dark side of the island. Some elderly people starve alone in their apartments unless they receive food rations from welfare organizations. A huge number of foreign domestic workers literally never get a day off. The FAQ written by one of the organizations designed to fight this problem was quite shocking. There were questions like: Won't my maid start doing drugs and get pregnant as soon as she leaves the house? These people came here to work, not to enjoy life, so why should they ever get a break? Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of construction and port workers from South India live in cramped, on-site quarter (or end up homeless). They work almost seven days a week, with their only break at 5 pm on Sunday, after which they all seem to congregate in Little India. A large amount of food leftover from hawker centers and restaurants simply ends up in the garbage due to hygiene regulations. Moreover, the food that is donated is often "culturally inappropriate," such as expired pastries and processed foods, instead of staples like rice. These were all rather sobering thoughts for a gathering advertised as a "happy meal."

Inspired by Heidi

After a Saturday afternoon group meeting, I desperately needed to give my brain a break from thinking about DNA and microspheres. Heidi Swanson, the author of the 101 Cookbooks blog came to my rescue, in the form of an amazing lentil soup recipe. I raced back from lab to try it out and the resulting dish was spectacular. My photo didn't turn out nearly as appetite-inducing as Heidi's (I tried using a drizzle of soy milk instead of saffron yogurt), but I am still proud to have made a meal from scratch instead of submitting to the canteens:

Cooking Club

At the risk of seeming like an Anthony Bourdain fan site, I'll start this post with an excerpt from his essay Name Dropping Down Under, from the collection The Nasty Bits. The piece explores possible reasons for the sudden rise in popularity of celebrity chefs in countries like Australia and the US:

As you sit in your lonely apartment, you feel a yearning, a longing for a sense of family, or belonging. Disconnected as you are from roots you still feel ambivalent about, those big family meals in movies are looking strangely good. A vestigial "nesting" impulse takes hold and you find yourself watching Rick or Nigella, thinking "Gee, I wish he were my older brother, or dad, and he was cooking for me." Or "I wish Nigella were my sister, or mom, cooking me that slow-roasted ham..."

This quote resonates with me for several reasons:
1) I am sitting in my lonely apartment.
2) I do feel a longing for a sense of family, or belonging.
3) After my trip to India, I finally started living in my apartment, although I had been sleeping there for over four months. With my parents' help (they accompanied me on my epiphany-inducing journey), I rearranged the furniture, so that a rack of drying laundry no longer blocks the incredible ocean view and a place to sit is available in front of the widescreen TV. I also gave the kitchen a thorough cleaning, so that the stove no longer serves as an appetite suppressant.

The point of this post isn't to whine about sitting alone in my apartment. Instead, I want to announce my goal of starting some type of cooking club on the island. I am not a foodie in the purely hedonistic sense, but rather since I see food as a window into other cultures. In America, I observed how food was often driven by a desire by corporations to maximize profits and a public obsession with minimizing the time, effort, and money required to prepare a meal. In India, I saw the entire cycle of a meal as I rode past farms on the train, accompanied my uncle to the local market, and watched my aunt prepare six-course meals, starting with grinding whole spices into pastes for the curries. In Singapore, I've obtained numerous glimpses into other cultures, such as:
+ eating a home-cooked Chinese meal from one of my coworkers and his apartment-mates (every single Chinese grad student complains about the Singaporean version of their cuisine)
+ going on an "organic tour" of Singapore to visit local farms and eco-friendly eateries (in Mandarin, unfortunately for me)
+ conversing with food bloggers about the local cuisine (which helped inspire me to start this blog)
+ enjoying an exquisite Japanese meal with the head waiter at the nearby Shin Kushiya.
During my last summer at Stanford, a group of six friends and I would cook dinner together every weeknight and I would love to do what I can to start to revive that tradition here in Singapore.