Can a ‘Singaporean’ food culture be defined?
Hawker centres are a good example of a foodway to discuss in the context of culture. Singaporeans are proud of their food, which reflects their ancestral cuisines, with the Chinese, Malay and Indians dishes co-existing and preserving their food heritage identities. Yet, through time, ingredients and techniques have been exchanged and the hybridisation of these cultures have created brand new multi-ethnic dishes. These ethnic and evolving dishes merge into a cuisine that is solely unique to Singapore (Chaney and Ryan, 2012).
Globalisation in a dish
An example of a multicultural Singaporean dish is Katong Laksa. An adaptation from an original Peranakan (Straits Malaysian/Chinese) recipe with shorter noodle types, so that you’re able to be eat it with a spoon, and it has more accessible seafood ingredients like cockles, prawns and fishcakes (YourSingapore, 2016a). The name ‘Katong’ refers to a suburb of Singapore, where the dish was popularised in 1963 (Duruz, 2011). It is now considered to be a local dish. The hawker families making these recipes are now so well known that Singaporeans are happy to travel longer distances and wait in queues to feast on a Katong. (Chew et al., [no date])
Source: InSing through YouTube.com
Gordon Ramsay visits 328 Katong Laksa to challenge a local hawker at a uniquely Singaporean dish. This was an initiative by the government and Singtel (Singapore's largest telecommunications company) aiming to hero local hawkers and Singapore's heritage dishes.
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Gastronomic tourists seeking an ‘authentic’ Singaporean dining experience may instead get a hybridisation of pan-Asian cuisine (Henderson, 2004). Although the food maybe taken from different countries, tourists appreciate the part a hawker centre has in Singapore’s history (Tung, 2016). Hawker centres allow tourists to be in the same environment as locals and experience the way they eat and behave.
Sims (2010) states that foodways can actually be strengthened by exposure to outside cultures, and the Singapore Tourism Board also saw this as an opportunity, developing a concept of ‘New Asia Cuisine’ (NAC) in 1996. NAC was designed to show off the best of Asia, but made with western tastes in mind, which also tied into the ‘fusion’ food trend at the time (Scarpato and Daniele, 2003). It also highlighted that the produce available in Singapore (given less than 1% of the island is used for agriculture) arrives from all areas of Asia and that hybridisation made the country unique to the rest of the continent - and gave it a food identity.