factory food
a wednesday wander
Sometimes you just want a big bowl of mediocre.
For old times’ sake I went to the 24 hour kopitiam near my parents’ place for a late night bowl of bak chor mee. It’s never been a high water mark of hawker food, more a familiar buoy, marking the level of an ebbing tide.
Mediocre seems to get a little worse each time, except when it gets a lot worse.
Some food is so bad it’s funny, some food is so bad it’s just grim.
The meatballs tasted like they were made of something that had started crawling out of the pink slime before deciding it was too much trouble. Whoever assembled the sauce had never tasted bak chor mee, though perhaps they’d read about it, in a foreign language. The noodles had spring, and a distinct whiff of frizzled wiring. The sum of these parts tasted of dourness and depletion, of third-rate soy sauce, central kitchen sambal, and a free hand with the preservatives.
The classic Singaporean complaint about hawker food is that “everything comes from a central kitchen now,” that few hawkers make their own fishballs, or chye tau kueh, or char siew any longer. But this started happening decades ago, and certain ingredients, like noodles, have an even longer history of being manufactured products. This stall, like most others, has been buying most components of its bowl since I started eating there, 20 years ago – one reason it’s my personal gauge of the median in hawker food.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with mass production. It’s as necessary to modernity as sewers. Perhaps the most moving thing I read last year was this paragraph describing microchip production:
An extreme ultraviolet lithography machine is a technological marvel. A generator ejects 50,000 tiny droplets of molten tin per second. A high-powered laser blasts each droplet twice. The first shapes the tiny tin, so the second can vaporize it into plasma. The plasma emits extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation that is focused into a beam and bounced through a series of mirrors. The mirrors are so smooth that if expanded to the size of Germany they would not have a bump higher than a millimeter. Finally, the EUV beam hits a silicon wafer—itself a marvel of materials science—with a precision equivalent to shooting an arrow from Earth to hit an apple placed on the moon. This allows the EUV machine to draw transistors into the wafer with features measuring only five nanometers—approximately the length your fingernail grows in five seconds.
The problem, clearly, is not that we can’t build the right machines, or design the right process – it’s that we have no reason to.