Checking In With Both Sides of the Table

From tackling a fear of yeast to zooming into the online dating biosphere, re-plating food memories to creating new ones, we check in with multi-passionate creatives from both sides of the Causeway to find out how they’ve been feeding themselves in isolation. 

/ Article by Dee May

Isolation might have left some of us stirred, shaken and, perhaps, burnt. While envying lives on Instagram that seem to overflow with self-improvement and seemingly laborious culinary endeavours, being stuck at home, for some, has forced us to take stock of, not only the state of our pantry, but the human connections and social eating habits that we might have taken for granted.

As a writer who’s used to gathering stories from the field and hot-desking from locations like the outdoor laundry area of a longhouse in Sarawak or behind a staircase at a durian exhibition, my relationship with food changed from using the act of eating in lieu of a lingua franca with strangers to a default past-time, be it compulsive snacking, bookmarking recipes I didn’t have the ingredients for, or finally harvesting what I sowed (you’ll want to remember this bit for later).  

From tackling a fear of yeast to zooming into the online dating biosphere, re-plating food memories to creating new ones, I jumped on calls and emails to check in with multi-passionate creatives from both sides of the Causeway to find out how they’ve been feeding themselves during the multiple phases of Singapore’s Circuit Breaker and Malaysia’s (continuously extended) Movement Control Order (MCO).

Poet and writer Grace Chia tells me via email: “I was lucky to have a packet of yeast even before the lockdown, before supplies ran out. Also, I live quite close to Phoon Huat (supplier of baking products) so that was my regular place to go to whenever I felt cabin fever. I was able to get all kinds of flour.” 

“And honestly, eating fresh, warm bread that you have just made, with your own hands — it feels very rustic and down-to-earth, but also empowering, because I now know that if I have flour and yeast, I won’t starve,” says the author of Every Moving Thing That Lives Shall Be Food. “I think the first ingredient that I really needed was gochugaru (Korean chili flakes) in order to make kimchi and other Korean dishes. The supermarkets I went to were out of stock but I ordered online and that solved the problem.” 

Like many experimentalists in quarantine, Grace documented a number of her creations, both new and revisited, on Instagram. Think jars of homemade kimchi that recall a story of having to recreate this fermented delicacy while in Madrid. But what we don’t see on Instagram are her homemade yoghurt and buttermilk, soondubu (spicy Korean stew), hot dog buns, chocolate brownies, mango cake, dan dan noodles, claypot noodles, burritos and quesadillas … just to name a few.

In Kuala Lumpur, freelance writer-researcher and photographer Emily Ding made it back in time from Berlin just before the MCO was implemented nationwide. “My favourite stories to write and report are longform stories where I can really tell it from the ground, to meet people and witness events first-hand as much as possible,” she explains. As a result of the movement restrictions, some of her commissioned pieces are now on the backburner and certain media outlets have put a freeze on pitches from freelancers. 

“However, a certain clarity settled in with the limitations. The pandemic necessarily narrows your focus and what you can do,” she says, having to adapt her in-person reporting style to over-the-phone. “It’s everybody’s health you have to think about. Not just for your own safety but also that of your sources,” she reminds me. 

In a lead up to writing a story for The Guardian, about a team of refugee chefs who have been delivering meals to hospital staff in Kuala Lumpur during the outbreak, like many returning Malaysians, she had to undergo self-quarantine. “At the time, it was recommended that anyone coming back from Germany should self-quarantine because of the increasing Coronavirus cases there. I could still just eat whatever my family cooked, though I had to eat alone in my room. It was tricky because I couldn’t freely move around the house for two weeks.”

“I thought about all the things I had said I wanted to try making myself over the years but never did, and one of them was empanadas — one of my favourite snacks picked up from my travels. So, I googled around and found this vegan version of the dish.

“I’m not a baker or anything. We didn’t have a rolling pin at home, and it’s my first time making fresh dough from scratch. And I was using a wine bottle, wrapped in plastic, to roll the dough. Presentation wise, it wasn’t the best, but it tasted really good.” 

Meanwhile, in Singapore, poet and writer Jocelyn Suarez too has picked up a new skill — mixology. In our video call, I spot a healthy stack of bottles in the background. “Yeah, I have quite a number of whiskies. I’m actually starting to put a dent on them, because  the bars close at 10.30pm nowadays,” she says. “Writing at home is a little suffocating for me. So, I like to sit in bars and then write, or cafes—but mostly bars,” she laughs. “I write poetry and prose as well. With first drafts, I don’t know if it’s so cliche, but that saying by Hemingway, ‘Write drunk, edit sober’, I kind of took that to heart, like really took that to heart.”

In addition to making her own limoncello, which was “not bad”, Jocelyn eventually found herself creating a video combining her varied interests: a dark cocktail tutorial mostly inspired by a true story for the Melbourne Spoken Word Online Festival 2020.  

So, which came first, the cocktail or the poem? And how much of it was true? “Oh, the cocktail came first! The poem that was basically about this girl who got stood up by her Zoom date. That experience actually happened to me during lockdown,” she laughs. 

“Online Zoom dating was useful for the most part, because it’s all about talking and having that emotional connection with the other person. Sometimes people get swept up in the physicality of it all, which is fair, if that’s what you’re seeking then that’s perfectly valid.” 

“And he (the reality Zoom date) did actually reschedule. So, I guess there was a happy ending there.” 

Sharing Jocelyn’s appreciation for the art of conversation and connection is author, translator and educator Dr Anitha Devi Pillai, who also had her food-themed virtual debut during the Circuit Breaker: a live online reading of her story “How do you want your dumplings?” as part of the online book launch of Food Republic. While Anitha’s plate was full going through the final proofs for her translation of the novel Sembawang (originally written in Tamil by Kamaladevi Aravindan), the act of eating together proved to be a silver lining to the Circuit Breaker. 

“I don’t really cook! But because I was working from home and my son was studying from home — he just started junior college — what was wonderful was, for the first time in both our lives, I think, we got to sit and have lunch together. He’s the only child. It’s just me and him.” 

“It wasn’t about the food. It’s the mealtime, and the fact that I got to have lunch with my son, for two months at a stretch. I don’t know whether I’ll ever get that opportunity again in the future because he’ll go off to the army, he’ll go off to uni, he’ll go off to work... The fact that we had lunch together every day was so precious. I’ve never had that with my parents because my dad was working — and it’s always just dinner right? But I had both lunch and dinner with my son Theijes. It was lovely and I’m really glad for that time,” she beams, her voice filled with such warmth and a hint of melancholy. 

Although initial conversations with creatives in the neighbourhood started off with food, community and connection were recurring themes throughout nearly all (video) calls. In the end, I found myself returning to the beginning.

*

Many plants have died under my care. I don’t discriminate. Edible or trendy, decorative or ‘easy’, you name it, I’ve killed it — basil, rosemary, fiddle-leaf fig and all. 

A few months ago, I got a handful of four-angle bean and ulam raja seeds from Eats, Shoots & Roots, an urban farming movement based in Kuala Lumpur. I only killed one of the two in its infancy.

With every additional week of the MCO, with food security anxieties in mind, I planted more ulam raja — until I had enough to make pesto. Subbing pine nuts with cheaper cashews, parmesan with processed cheese, I pounded the ulam raja together with garlic and olive oil in a pestle and mortar, on a newspaper-lined section of the kitchen floor (because a food processor was too much effort to clean). The only things missing from the scene were perhaps a sarong and red wooden clogs. 

Little Nyonya scene aside, I owe my one-hit green-thumb wonder to my gardening workshop tutor, Low Shao-Lyn, design director of Studio ESR and co-founder of Eats, Shoots & Roots. 

“Learning to grow our own food, the driver was always, ‘Okay, if one day something happens in the world and we’re cut off, at least we know how to grow our own food.’ When Covid happened, we were like — okay. This is our time. Our time is now,” says Shao-Lyn candidly over Google Meet.

It was during the MCO that her team saw an overnight surge in demand for their planting kits. She soon found herself pivoting from in-person workshops to live online workshops for up to 400 participants at a time and even doing virtual site visits. “With Covid, we saw a lot of newbies. People started questioning their food security, out of fear, of course. Where to eat? What to eat?” It was also a time when she began tending to her balcony garden, planting spring onion, basil and Chinese celery. “I don’t even have a real balcony — it’s just a laundry area — but I managed to hang planter boxes on the grill.”

“But this time, because it was MCO, you have no access, you may not be able to buy soil. So you make do with what you have. Like repurposing baking trays. And I documented that process and shared those stories. I had a lot of friends who said, ‘Yeah, this is the kind of information I need.’ Because previously on ESR, it’s very serious — oh, you need to get this seed box, this and that, it was very detailed.” 

“All these years, yes, we were pushing for gardening. The reality is, not everyone can garden, because you may not have the space, you may not have the sunlight, but everyone can compost. It’s a bit impossible to expect the government to service households for food waste just yet. So we wanted to do something in our own capacity.”

“There are a lot of composting bins in the market already. But we felt there wasn’t any that was pretty enough to put in the house.” Thus, an apartment compost bin hack-design was born. 

“What we’ve learned over the years is that community is very important, you can’t just start your own farm and say goodbye to the world.”

“At the end of the day, people think, the end of the world will have zombies, or a financial collapse. But what is actually going to help us, or save us, or bring us through this period, is the sense of community or the ability to help each other out. To be able to communicate with everybody to coordinate stuff together. And I thought, during MCO, that was very uplifting, because you could see people coming together, coordinating, communicating very well, things were happening very quickly.”

“Food security is one thing, but we have to jaga the community first, so that we can actually work together, to grow food. Because to grow food, as one person, there’s no point.” 

/ Dee May is the founder/director of Plates, a biannual print publication that uses food as a conversation starter for meatier issues. She seeks out underreported human stories—in everyday ingredients—that speak to a niche global audience, who crave alternative narratives and believe in the value of sharing our plates. You may find her on Instagram (@deemaytan / @platesmagazine) or on Facebook.