no. 41: random uses of uppercase
Hullo to readers old and new!
This is a companion piece to something I published back in January, about the cost of hawker food in Singapore.
I promise I don’t only write about hawker food – you can see all the back issues here, and some of them are actually about other things.
Andrew from Family Meal sent me this piece in Eater about “hawkerpreneurs,” and offered a penny for my thoughts. I’d been meaning to write about the government’s efforts to keep the hawker trade alive anyway, and this was the perfect prompt – thanks Andrew!
A brief summary, in case you don’t want to read the original piece in Eater. In it, Jacklin Kwan profiles two “hawkerpreneurs” in Singapore:
“the ambitious young Singaporeans who are using the country’s traditional hawker centers for a very different style of food business… some feel [the hawkerpreneurs’] menus are skewing too far from classic Singaporean cooking, and that important parts of the country’s culture and cuisine are at risk of getting left behind.”
The two “hawkerpreneurs” are quite different – one is the third generation of a hawker family, the other is a young cook-turned-hawker with no prior connection to the trade. Kwan asks whether the “hawkerpreneurs” represent a success for government’s efforts to keep the hawker trade alive, given that they serve non-traditional dishes, and bring “an emphasis on image and branding” (and dreams of franchising) that some see as being at odds with the hawker tradition.
The “hawkerpreneur” phenomenon is impossible to understand without a couple of pieces of context that the Eater piece does not provide.
The first is a discussion of prices, which the Eater piece does not mention at all. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, traditional hawkers are struggling because they don’t charge enough to make what Singaporeans would consider a decent living. Competition keeps prices low, government policy prioritizes keeping hawker food affordable (and has for decades), and Singaporeans have therefore come to view cheap hawker food as a key factor in keeping the standard of living reasonable. I think this view is shared to some extent by hawkers themselves, as lower income Singaporeans depend on hawker centres to a greater degree than households with higher incomes.
Since there is effectively a soft cap on prices of traditional hawker food, one major driver of “hawkerpreneur” behavior is the (almost certainly correct) belief that they can’t charge enough to get by if they’re selling classic hawker dishes in what looks like a classic hawker setting.
One way to get round this problem is to have a globalized menu. Singaporeans are willing to pay much more for “foreign” food than local. Many hawker centers now have a stall serving Japanese-style ramen, which generally sells for around S$10 or more (S$1=US$0.75). People pay that price without blinking, but balk at S$5 for a bowl of bak chor mee. The same applies to pasta, burgers, and sesame lattes in hawker centres. A cup of kopi – Singaporean coffee served in the classic straits style – generally goes from between S$0.8 and S$1.10, but Coffee Break, the coffee stall profiled in the Eater piece, charges S$4.80 for a latte. Similarly, prices for the burgers served at the other stall profiled in the Eater piece start at S$5.9 and rise from there. A related approach is to sell local food with modernised branding, which apparently makes it worth more. Kopi at Coffee Break is $2. It’s very, very hard to see this as anything but the highest grade of internalized colonialist bullshit.
I’m not saying the “hawkerpreneurs” shouldn’t charge these prices – I think it’s a good thing that they’ve done the math on what they need to sustain themselves and their staff. But the public’s willingness to pay these prices contrasts sharply with their complaints about more traditional hawkers attempting to raise their prices. This tension underlies any discussion about whether “innovation” on the menu or in the marketing is a good thing for the hawker trade.
The second piece of context missing from the Eater piece is a considered look at what the “larger government movement to... incentiv[ize] young people to consider becoming hawkers” is actually incentivizing. It’s legitimate to ask whether “hawkerpreneurs” are a welcome addition to hawker culture, but we should also ask if “hawkerpreneurship” is actually the logical outcome of policies that are ostensibly intended to preserve and strengthen the hawker trade as it is today.
As Kwan notes, the government has launched a raft of hawker support programs, and commissioned a Workgroup on sustaining the hawker trade – the most recent in a series of advisory bodies tasked with solving hawkers’ problems.
Remarkably, the Workgroup’s report does not once address the issue of hawker incomes – it’s as though the Workgroup thinks we can sustain the hawker trade without sustaining the hawkers. Members of parliament occasionally mention the need “to ensure... that our hawkers can earn a decent living,” though no one in government has yet proposed what a decent living might be.
Instead, the report focuses on what might be called free-market attempts to attract new hawkers to the trade, such as: “Refresh the Narrative on Hawker Trade to Attract New Entrants,” and “Alleviate Manpower Shortages through Productivity Initiatives and Policy Review.” Basic economic theory tells us that if these efforts to attract a stream of new hawkers succeed, competition will remain fierce, and prices and incomes will remain low.
How then are hawkers to earn a decent living? The support programmes run by the agency in charge of regulating the hawker trade seem to be the government’s template for how hawkers are expected to succeed. One programme subsidizes equipment to improve hawker productivity, another offers existing and aspiring hawkers business management training (4 others promote public consciousness of hawker culture and aim to promote hawker centres as nexuses of community, as though Singaporeans don’t go to hawker centres enough). The business management training is particularly useful because the government also runs an Incubation Stall Programme offering first time hawkers reduced rent on stalls and additional equipment subsidies – provided they first submit a business plan.
The equipment subsidy programme has been a great boon to restaurant equipment suppliers across the island, reimbursing hawkers up to 80% of the cost of labor-saving equipment such as electric fish scalers, vacuum sealers, combi ovens, and automatic noodle boilers. Concerns about whether mechanized hawker food is still real hawker food abound – is this really the stuff of which the intangible cultural heritage of humanity is made? In truth, putting more equipment in the hawker stall is just shifting the locus of automation – faced with impossible commercial pressures, hawkers have increasingly been buying mise en place from large factories anyway.
The management training is presumably offered in the hope that it will teach hawkers how to grow their businesses – but why should hawkers want to try to grow? This seems like either an admission that most hawkers need to bring in more revenue in order to be sustainable, or an attempt to imbue the industry with a particular economic mindset, prioritizing growth and free-market competition. An implicit assumption behind this policy is that the sort of business school thinking which gives “hawkerpreneurs” their name – marketing, differentiation, branding, the building of moats – is the way forward.
But should hawker culture be about marketing or cooking? I think public ambivalence about “hawkerpreneurs” isn’t about whether smoked brisket and pandan lattes belong in a hawker centre. It’s about how different the structures behind “hawkerpreneurship” are from the hawker culture we celebrate today. It’s about being told that the best way to preserve hawker culture – changeless, nameless stalls run by dedicated practitioners selling infinite iterations of a few humble dishes – is for hawkers to “innovate” and create “differentiated” offerings, adopt automation for efficiency, to brand themselves better and allow the free market to work its magic. And it is about the uncomfortable realization that we have allowed this to happen.
This is let them eat cake, a frankly irregular essay about food systems (and also, food). I write about these things because I’ve worked in food for over a decade, mostly as a chef, and am writing a book about how deeply fucked up, and how deeply worthwhile, this whole enterprise of feeding people is. Also, writing is cheaper than therapy.
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best,
tw