Yours Toothfully by Dr Chan Joon Yee

I almost choked on my chilli crab.

“We cannot continue to let other countries hijack our food. Chilli crab is Malaysian. Hainanese chicken rice is Malaysian. We have to lay claim to our food.” says Datuk Seri Dr Ng Yen Yen.

Alamak! Does it mean that I can’t go to a zer char stall and order chilli crab anymore? Sorry, Malaysian food. Cannot sell in Singapore. Want to eat must go to Malaysia. But the cook is Malaysian, isn’t he? Well, maybe he can cook chilli crab in Singapore as long as he is licenced by the Malaysian government. Or do we have to pay chilli crab royalty to the new Ministry of Malaysian Food every time we serve chilli crab? What’s going to happen to our laksa and nasi lemak. Royalty to the Malaysian government as well? Let’s not even think about what the Indians would say about our roti prata. But knowing Singaporeans, they’ll probably just pay up and eat up.

What the heck. Let’s just eat up and pay up as long as the royalty doesn’t cost as much as GST. But those who have a bit of time on their hands towards the long weekend may want to think about it a little. We can’t argue when it comes to which airline belongs to who. But a problem may arise if somebody claims that SIA’s uniform is not really “Singaporean”. The Indonesians may come to claim it. The Malaysians may come to claim it and eventually, SIA may need to pay royalty for their kebayas too.

You see, if you keep going in that direction, more and more issues are going to crop up. One of the most curious claims in Thailand is that curry noodles or khao soi, is actually a Burmese dish. Just take a look at the kiam chye (preserved vegetables) and the mee pok. The coconut milk based curry is decidedly Malay if you ask me.

So what is all this cultural theft and and gourmet hijacking all about? There are Burmese and Khmer temples in Thailand. Can the Burmese or Cambodians accuse the Thais of hijacking their culture if Thailand calls these Thai temples? Should all these “foreign” artifacts be destroyed like the Buddhas at Bamiyan so that we can all start off on a “clean” slate?

And what about food that have exotic names which are actually misnomers invented by creative chefs to fool their customers. Hongkong (Singaporean by birth) film-maker Cai Lan once wrote that Yangzhou fried rice was a dish created by a desperate Cantonese chef who wanted to treat his bored customers to something exotic. Apparently, not many people in Hongkong had been to Yangzhou back then, so nobody knew that the chef’s Yangzhou fried rice was really created without any inspiration from Yangzhou whatsoever. The chef’s trick was discovered when people went to Yangzhou and got strange stares when they ordered Yangzhou fried rice. If Dr Ng Yen Yen were running Yangzhou, I’m not sure how she would handle the matter. Would this be a case of Yangzhou hijacking Yangzhou fried rice from the Cantonese?

One thing’s for sure, she can no longer say: “We do not want the problem of these ‘little dragon ladies’ to escalate. These women are enticing local married men into having affairs with them and are causing family disharmony.”

Singapore is a land of immigrants. If every “parent” culture claims ownership of any part of what we regard as uniquely Singapore (a stupid slogan if you ask me), there is very little we can do to defend our “uniqueness”. Even our mee siam is Siamese noodles, but our PM has tried very hard to build our Singaporean identity around it.

I thought I had died and gone to food heaven when my classmate Chin Leong invited me to stay at his home in Penang. Every day I was there, we went on a walk, stop and eat tour of the island. We went to Penang Hill. We went to the snake temple and many other tourist spots and at the end of each day, I would have eaten at least 3 bowls of laksa, a few pieces of grilled cuttlefish, 2 plates of char kway teow and a bowl or 2 of Hokkien mee for supper - all at roadside stalls, all of which couldn’t have gotten a D grading from our world class NEA.

Someone once joked that in Singapore, the standard of a hawker’s food is inversely proportional to the hygiene grading. I prefer to judge food quality by the rudeness of the hawker. But food hygiene is definitely no joking matter nowadays. Two people have died after eating some contaminated Indian rojak. Unlike anti-suicide barriers at MRT stations, the response to food poisoning deaths was swift.

Yes, the heat is on at hawker centres. Food hygiene is a major issue these days. To show how major it is, 80 out of 83 stalls in Geylang Serai had their hawker hygiene grading downgraded to C.

That’s interesting. But why C? Why not D? Why only 80/83 stalls? Why not all 83 stalls? Regardless of whether the stalls are “downgraded” to C or D overnight, people still need to eat and they are certainly smart enough to know that their chances of getting food poisoning at these familiar but “downgraded” stalls would not be any higher than before. The only “effective” thing about this downgrading exercise is that if anyone gets food poisoning at Geyland Serai, he can’t blame the NEA for being mistaken about the standard of stall cleanliness there.

What next? Compulsory continuing education on food hygiene for our hawkers? That’s easy to implement. What’s not so easy is for the hawkers themselves to take time off to attend these courses and keep their prices low. They may need to start looking for locums too. What’s even more difficult, is for the governing body to vouch for a hawker who has completed all his hygiene courses, judiciously implemented state of the art hygiene measures at his stall and still ends up with customers in hospital. It’s not wrong to make the hawkers take ultimate responsibilty for the safety of their own food, but if I were a hawker, I would feel a stab in my back if my stall’s cleanliness is instantly downgraded when something happens nearby.

The most reputable brand of electronics can explode. The most skillful surgeon can make mistakes on or off the operating table. Athletic people collapse and die for no apparent reason. Self-sacrificing monks can lend $50,000 in charity funds to their boyfriends. A stall that has been doing brisk business for decades may have a fatal food poisoning case. We live in an imperfect world. Accidents will happen no matter how careful you are. While it’s only right that we mourn the unfortunate people who died, taking drastic measures to prevent such things from ever happening again will not only be futile, but will make Singapore even more uniquely dull, sterile and unforgiving. I’m not a foolhardy person (and I certainly won’t tolerate a cockroach in my har gow), but I still need to live on and enjoy life. Bring on the good stuff.