no. 52: sounds in the forest
Hullo to readers old and new!
Thank you, first of all, to everyone who became a paid subscriber as soon as paid subs launched. Last week’s Wednesday Wander was one result of my spending more time writing, and there are more to come.
I received a bagful of questions – many were too complex to fit easily into an AMA, but they're all super interesting, so they’re getting their own issues instead.
Sophia asked if I knew of ethical, community-centered options for feeding someone who can neither cook for themselves nor venture out to restaurants.
As she sees it, her options in the US are:
Have a caregiver cook for them, which requires a substantial investment of either time or money that’s impractical for many households.
Use delivery services like Grubhub. Extractive business models aside, this is tantamount to eating 100% of your meals in restaurants, which is expensive and nutritionally challenging.
Rely on meal kits or grocery delivery services, which still require a caregiver to cook, and raise many of the same ethical concerns as Grubhub.
Purchase pre-made meals from supermarkets, which is much more expensive than buying ingredients, and also serves to direct money to large corporations, including the largest one of all.
One element missing from Sophia’s list is hawkers, and by this I don’t just mean the kind you see in travel shows about Singapore. The hawkers in hawker centers are really only the most visible, regimented end of the spectrum of informal food businesses that you can find in Singapore, and throughout most of Asia. Their predecessors cooked in their homes and then hawked on the streets, from the back of a bicycle, a trishaw, or a pole balanced across their shoulders. This mode of operation is still current in much of Asia today. Another group cooks at home, to order. In the 80s and 90s you could call someone up and pick up anything from nasi lemak to chocolate cake on a few days’ notice. Even in Singapore, no one would call these folks hawkers, but everyone knows the practice.
We don’t think of the US as having a hawker culture, but it does – we just don’t acknowledge it as such. The most visible hawkers are the tamale ladies with their coolers on the New York subway, who you see throughout Brooklyn and Queens. Some of them have carts outside the subway stations, but all of them are cooking at home.
They’re the very tip of the iceberg. Sometimes you’ll see a woman in Chinatown with a basket of crullers, tucked among the piles of greens on a sidewalk produce display. She probably made the crullers at home before bringing them out to sell, and she’s either renting the spot from the folks who own the stall, or they’re doing her a favor. Other hawkers can only be found if you know where to look, and when, like the abuelas who set out folding tables in the suburbs of San Jose. Other times you need to know their phone numbers (there’s a Malaysian woman near Boston who’ll make you satay if you call her), or know which door of the apartment complex to knock on. And when, in coronatime, cooks and bakers bereft of restaurants start making food in their homes, they were doing the same thing.1
The narrative about hawking often focuses on necessity (certainly this is how Singapore tells the story about its hawkers): hawkers take up the trade because they have few other options for employment; low income laborers need cheap nourishment. The poorer the country, the more likely it is to have a lively informal economy. Witness the prevalence of hawkers in Asia and their invisibility in North America and Europe – but also witness the cottage industry of pasta making in Italy, Europe’s perpetual poor cousin. Just as these networks sprout in enclaves of immigrants who are shut out of formal economies, they thrive in regions that globalization has emptied out.
But the emphasis on need downplays the importance of the unwritten social contracts that allow these alternative economies to function. They work because everyone involved acknowledges the interdependency between the sellers and the buyers – acknowledging, essentially, the importance of each others’ humanity and goodwill.
I remember going to Russia in 2008. Every second car on the road was a pirate taxi. They weren’t labeled, or even understood as such. Instead, it was simply convention that if you stood by the road and stuck out a hand, drivers would stop and ask where you were going. If your destinations aligned, they’d take you there for a crumpling of rubles. Some drivers did this only when they were going somewhere themselves. For others it was their main source of income. Somehow the system was safe enough that people did this. A few years later, Uber arrived, but it’s really hard to see what Uber could possibly have added. If anything, Uber brought this market structure to the mainstream US – they essentially taught American consumers how to take pirate taxis, but with additional layers of surveillance and profiteering.
Silicon Valley recently realized there are hawkers in the United States. Of course, some fundraising ensued. It’s hard to see these “home chef platforms” as anything but purely parasitic, what with the gig economy rhetoric and the dumping of all risk and liability onto the cooks they claim to benefit. The founders argue that they’re enabling people to “start businesses” in coronatime – but people have been hawking since before the pandemic, before these platforms existed, and even before the internet consisted of someone staring at a rotary telephone. The folks who occasionally made 200 packets of nasi lemak on demand seemed to do just fine without the “help” of internet platforms, but now the first bulldozers are in the rainforest.
I think the press called these informal coronatime operations popups because this use of the word “hawk” is unfamiliar here, and is, in British usage, somewhat negative. It’s an activity altogether too desperate-sounding for cooks from Michelin-starred kitchens.