"Meat is murder!” I would say frequently during my young adulthood. For six years, I was vegan, and like most vegans, I made sure that everyone around me knew that.
This was veganism before social media, where mentioning it as a dietary requirement would get you more than a few raised eyebrows. I was also deep within the halcyon days of a post-adolescence that was extremely individualistic. Accompanied by my interest in the punk subculture, veganism became a religion.
In retrospect, it was an attempt at asserting a sense of self that would not only feel morally superior, but also imply that I possessed a certain willpower in my restriction. Furthermore, its relative newness made me feel special.
The food I ate when I was vegan was unremarkable: canned beans, raw carrot sticks, steamed broccoli and chickpea salads.
The food I ate when I was vegan was unremarkable: canned beans, raw carrot sticks, steamed broccoli and chickpea salads. Overall, I didn't eat very much, and when I did, it was food I deemed “clean” - a Eurocentric and elitist view that often doesn't regard non-western food as “healthy”. Coupled with vegan evangelism that mostly originates from the western world, veganism seemed to me like the model diet, especially as a child of the internet in post-colonial Singapore.
But for all its moral high-horsing, being vegan was also a thinly-veiled attempt at hiding an eating disorder that was eating away inside my mind. Food was eaten clinically and with minimal gusto, with lots of rejection. In particular, the Singaporean and Chinese food that I grew up with became sites of turmoil: slick, fatty Hainanese chicken rice, starchy wonton egg noodles, coconut milk-infused nasi lemak and ghee-laden roti paratha, among many more dishes, were regarded as unpalatable. It was a convenient excuse: in the midst of rejecting meat and animal products, it was easy to simultaneously reject the very core of what made up my connection to culture.
This was compounded by my formative years as an anglophone consumer of western culture in Singapore. I was so enamoured by western cultural products that I was led to believe that it was a hallmark of intellect and taste. It also helped that I was a part of a predominant Chinese majority—its attendant privileges meant that I didn't have to place myself within any kind of distinct cultural context if I didn't want to, other than the fact that I simply existed. I could aspire to whiteness without thinking about it.
"Immigrant food has become a form of cheap tourism, dishes to be “discovered” to gain a sense of cultural capital in a time of globalisation." Source: Supplied
I “broke” my veganism in 2013, after moving to Australia the year before. Living away from Singapore ironically brought an about-turn. While I took up minimum wage line cook jobs to survive, seeking flavours from an old country I'd left behind also became a form of cultural reclamation for me. As soon as I discovered that I could eat anything and everything, it began to open up pathways towards working out who I was in a cultural sense. This proved to be critical when I tried to understand myself within the axis of both privilege and disenfranchisement, as a light-skinned Southeast/East Asian settler-migrant on stolen land.
It was a convenient excuse: in the midst of rejecting meat and animal products, it was easy to simultaneously reject the very core of what made up my connection to culture.
Food is very much a bearer of memory as much as it's a source of nourishment, and it was through craving certain flavours that made me begin to analyse my cultural identity. This was especially palpable as I ate food with friends of colour who were engaging with similar reckonings of the self. Meeting over a meal of bún bò huế or bhatoora, it became a way of reclaiming parts of ourselves that either used to be a cause for shame or like me, made to lay dormant.
Today immigrant food has become a form of cheap tourism, dishes to be “discovered” to gain a sense of cultural capital in a time of globalisation. This is often sought after under the gaze of “authenticity”, a marker of worldliness claimed by white restaurateurs and foodies to evoke romantic ideas surrounding a pure, unsullied Global South. In a study of 20,000 Yelp reviews for restaurants in New York City, researcher Sara Kay found that charges for “authentic” experiences were found more frequently with non-European cuisine, and sometimes with negative implications. But there are many charged connotations that come with declaring one version of a dish to be more “authentic” that the other. It can also, as food studies scholar Krishnendu Ray says, “trap the immigrant cook in very narrow expectations.”
When I make a lup cheong bolognaise, or craft that mouth-watering sesame oil chicken or find the version of char kway teow that most agrees with me, not only is my palate expanding, my sense of self is, too.
Who gets to decide? After all, dishes like laksa have been claimed by both Malaysians and Singaporeans to have originated from each country, even if there are numerous interpretations, just like there are of pizza and biryani. Or as Dale Talde, chef and author of the cookbook Asian-American: Proudly Inauthentic Recipes from the Phillippines to Brooklyn puts it, “It's authentic to me, because it's my life. The real question is, “Does it taste good?”
As I become more comfortable existing within myriad of liminal spaces, I'm refusing external expectations and tastes. In my quest towards discovering my cultural identity, I'm not searching for "authenticity" per se—rather, I'm putting together varied pieces of a puzzle made scattered by colonialism. And when I make a lup cheong bolognaise, or craft that mouth-watering sesame oil chicken or find the version of char kway teow that most agrees with me, it helps it along. Not only is my palate expanding, my sense of self is, too.
Cher Tan is a writer from Birraranga/Melbourne, via Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide and Singapore. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Westerly, The Lifted Brow, Swampland and Overland. She is the author of Cooking The Books, and is Kill Your Darlings' 2019 New Critic. You can follow Cher on Twitter
“
