Eat Your Way to Knowledge

If you want to understand Singapore, the Food Centers are a good place to start. As the country is still young, one of the government’s most important (and delicate) tasks is fostering a national identity that both celebrates and transcends its parent cultures. One of the ways it does this is by taking advantage of the fact that Indian, Chinese and Malaysian communities all enjoy food from street vendors. Rather than letting the vendors hawk their wares in the streets, the government built open air structures in which they could operate. It provided utilities, subsidized the rent and organized hygiene inspections. Anyone could open a stall in a Food Center, but to stay open you had to be clean and good.

When I visited the Amoy Food Center our guide had a series of short, friendly chats with some stall owners, and by the time we sat down they had covered the table with amorphous, multihued, coconut covered confections, each of them very, very tender. Some housed purees of durian, some red bean and some black sesame paste. Others were made only of the soft covering, the consistency of which was 80 percent cake, 20 percent Jell-O. Some were savory, some sweet, but each made its way down the palette in a different way. "Taste it here," our guide said of the durian pastry while gesturing to the back of his throat, "not at the front of your mouth." On our way out we passed a stand that served only char kway teoh, but we didn’t stop to eat; our guide only stopped long enough to make known his thoughts on the noodle dish: "Look at this,” he said while pointing, “this is a bowl of sin." He repeated with a tone and a smile that betrayed his true feelings, "a bowl of sin.”

The Centers have become showpieces for Singapore’s blend of central planning and free market competition. The tight quarters mean that each stall has to focus on only a few products, and this focus yields fantastic results. This illustrates one of Singapore’s national tenets: by necessity, the country must turn limited space into an advantage. At the same time the centers literally bring everyone together to eat. Chinese, Western, Malaysian and Indian diners can buy food at stalls catering to their particular tastes and dietary laws, and then sit at the same table as everyone else. Culinary traditions are both preserved and shared with others. They may be built of dull concrete, but the food centers are some of the most impressive buildings Singapore has constructed.