Eating Together II: Consider the Wok

We created a smaller iteration of Eating Together for the Asian Civilisation Museum earlier this year. It’s called the Museum of Eating, which included a new section about the material culture of hawker tools. Here’s the writeup, and Jovian Lim‘s beautiful photos.

MUSEUM OF EATING
Eating is a universal act. The ways we eat, however, are cultural and personal. Where we consume our meals, who we chat with over lunch, and what we use to put food in our mouths all affect how we think about our food. In the Museum of Eating, we go beyond the typical foodie conversations about chefs, ingredients, and tastes to look at the designs and techniques used to cook, contain, and carry food in Singapore.

Consider the Wok
Kitchen utensils are common across the world, but look closer and you’ll find variations born out of cultural differences. Singapore hawkers have fed many generations with their good, quick meals. These dishes and the tools to prepare them have persisted despite the onset of modern industrial cooking. But to feed a larger and an increasingly time-starved population, hawkers have had to devise better ways to use or even re-design these age-old tools. Whether it is a wok or a scoop, these kitchen utensils have not just enabled faster and better cooking, they also record the craft and considerations these hawkers have put into perfecting their dishes.

PERFORATED SCOOP

Popiah is a spring roll filled with stewed turnip that is delicious when moist but not soggy. Glory Catering is well-known for such mouth-watering popiah, and they can consistently produce them thanks to a perforated scoop designed by the owners, the Chin family. A typical scoop tends to pick up too much turnip juice, and that aluminum tool falls apart when the cook presses down on it to drain out the liquid. The stew cannot be drained beforehand either, because it’s what keeps the turnip juicy and tasty. Glory’s inventive tool comes with more than 400 perforations to drain more quickly, and its trough shape lets the staff scoop the exact portion of filling, in a shape that is easy to fold into a roll. Truly a handy way to capture Glory’s craft in making popiah.

GLORY-5810_WEB2000PX

The back of the scoop fits nicely into the trough – both made of hardy stainless steel – to squeeze out excess juice.

The back of the scoop fits nicely into the trough – both made of hardy stainless steel – to squeeze out excess juice.

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Eating Together: The Design of Sharing Food in a Connected World

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PHOTOS: Clarence Aw

How and what does it mean to eat together today? Last month at Objectifs, my partner and I presented Eating Together: The Design of Sharing Food in a Connected World, an exhibition that examines the objects, systems and spaces that help us share food today.

Commissioned for the inaugural FoodCine.ma 2016, this showcase presented 15 objects, speculative designs and installations that arose out of observations of how design facilitates the ways we eat together in Singapore. Whether it is consuming forever “fresh” food, having meals at our hawker centres, dining in both life and death, or eating with digital devices, we invited visitors to look at eating beyond a mere ingestion of food, but as a consumption of values and cultures.

More about the exhibition, as well as the book we published to document the concepts and our ethnographic research.