Ethnorêma (Dec 2018)
Taking the Street Out of Street Food: the Singapore Case
Abstract
Street food is by definition found along the streets. In the particular case of the island-state of Singapore, the government goal towards modernization caused a radical change in the production, sale, purchase and consumption of street food products, with the creation of the open-air food markets called hawker centres, and the consequent elimination of any form of itinerant sale. Through the description of the historical changes, which led to the creation of this new type of covered-street food space, marked by a strong emphasis upon cleanliness and order by the ruling class, the main features of the hawker centres will be analysed to understand why they became a symbol of national identity. I will argue how changes in the urban landscape run in parallel with changes in people’s habits, especially in a context so linked to the everyday life as the purchase and consumption of food. In the brief history of the city-State from its foundation in 1965, besides the rapid modernization affecting people’s everyday patterns, another element that made difficult the consolidation of a Singaporean communal identity is the extraordinary social heterogeneity. Hawker food, once sold on the streets and nowadays found exclusively in the hawker centres, not only reflects the urban changes of the country, but it also holds elements of ethnic categorization, caused by the Singaporean tendency to think in ‘multi-racial’ terms. A multi-level approach has been implemented in the active observation of the hawker centres’ daily life and cultural role. Through a first hand experience of the physical space, the sensorial landscape, the variety of foods, the technical gestures, and the relational dynamics within a selected neighbourhood market, I perceived a strong local pride in valuing these places as the last example of Singapore’s past, as well as the concrete representation of a shared cultural identity, albeit in extreme social differences, of one of the most globalized and cosmopolitan countries in the world.
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