Commentary: Singapore food isn’t what it used to be – or is it just me?

SINGAPORE: During my annual visit to Singapore, I caught wind of a long-standing kueh shop’s impending closure. 
On their last day of operations, I woke up at the crack of dawn and got on a bus. A queue had already formed despite the hour and the aunties in line were clearing out entire trays of the kueh on display. I joined the queue and, when my turn came, snagged a variety of the confectionery’s offerings. 
The shop had been operating for decades and was beloved in the neighbourhood, so naturally, I had high hopes. However, what I experienced instead was a heaping helping of disappointment.
The otak-otak had the density of a fish cake rather than being custardy as suggested by its namesake, tasting more of starch rather than of fish or aromatics. The kueh dadar was equally disappointing, each cigar harbouring filling so dry that it might as well have been made with desiccated coconut rather than the freshly grated stuff. The ang ku kueh’s thick skin made it seem coarse, especially against the memory of my grandmother-in-law’s handmade thin-skinned ones.
Even my aunt was let down by how bereft of pandan fragrance her favourite steamed kueh lapis was.
“How can they even sell any of this?” I murmured, to which my aunt replied that commercial food standards have been this way for a long time.
In my childhood, I’ve heard the common refrain of food in the past being much better, but believed it to be my elders’ nostalgia talking. Now, I’m wondering if there’s a grain of truth in the sentiment. 
This apparent decline seems to be symptomatic of the complicated issues that plague the hawker trade as a whole.
With inflation and rental costs, hawkers are finding it increasingly difficult to operate their businesses at the prices, let alone standards, that Singaporeans expect. One hawker reported a 30 per cent decrease in sales after raising prices by S$1. 
Some hawkers are tackling this problem by expanding their stalls into chains. Li Xin Teochew Fishball Noodles, for instance, started as a pushcart stall around 1968. Today, there are 18 outlets across Singapore.
While there are undoubtedly benefits to expanding the business, such as leveraging economies of scale to lower costs, there are also trade-offs.
Sean Kee Duck Rice’s Albert Sng, a second-generation hawker, shared in a 2023 interview that his stall’s beloved chilli condiment alone demands frying 100kg of chillies for up to five hours. 
Expressing fears of outsiders or franchise partners cutting corners and compromising on taste, he said: “I’ll take the family recipe and bury it. I’ve received many offers before, people tell me they want to buy the stall and franchise it. But I don’t want to.”
Hawkers can teach hired hands and partners how to cook their dishes, but they can’t teach them to care. 
According to the National Environment Agency (NEA), the median age of hawkers as at 2021 is 60. This statistic is worrying on two counts: This figure not only hovers close to retirement age, but is also indicative of how unpopular the hawker trade is among younger Singaporeans. 
NEA’s efforts to tackle this problem have seen limited success so far – only seven veteran hawkers have enrolled in the Hawkers Succession Scheme since its launch in 2022. For context, in 2023, there were approximately 13,430 licensed hawker stalls in Singapore. 
Of these seven, only two have been matched with aspiring successors. Handing over one’s lifeblood is an emotional decision for veteran hawkers. It’s often “not about the money”, says Chinatown Complex Hawker Association chair Cornelius Tan, but whether the candidate is the right person who can “let the legacy continue”. 
Even hawkers who have children or younger relatives willing to succeed them face their own set of struggles, such as imparting intangible culinary skills that have become muscle memory through years of mastery. It isn’t as easy as handing someone a written recipe or writing a standard operating procedure, and poses a risk to culinary standards and customer confidence in the brand. 
As I turned my kueh shop disappointment over in my mind, the question that loomed large wasn’t necessarily “Why was it so bad?” After all, the manifold struggles that hawkers face have long been open knowledge. What I couldn’t figure out was why there had been such a long queue that morning. 
The answer came when I dropped by an eatery that has become popular on social media for their kaya toast. The kaya was thick and luscious, propping up the bread for a great Instagram photo. However, when I tasted it, it seemed to have been thickened expediently with cornstarch rather than by the patient coagulation of eggs.
My companions oohed and aahed about how crisp the bread was and how generously filled the toast was, but all I could think about was how much better homemade kaya is: A decadent, pandan-fragrant fudge that drips oozily off the spoon. 
But how many would know the difference? With food standards dipping and fewer and fewer people cooking at home, food vendors are probably also cognisant of a general laxing of customer standards. 
There is no pithy solution that will magically raise standards across the board – but it seems to me that part of the solution is to revive the art of home-cooking. 
It seems a strange suggestion, but inculcating a habit of cooking at home can serve as potent reminders of what heritage foods ought to taste like, when no shortcuts are taken and nothing is skimped on. At the same time, it could offer a sobering understanding of the hard work that goes into what we eat. 
A friend once told me, “You can’t hold ‘outside’ food to the same standards as home-cooked food.” 
Implicit in this statement is that with each purchase of commercially sold food, there is an unspoken, mutual understanding between patron and vendor that taste and quality can be compromised. But does it necessarily have to be the case? 
If Singapore is the food paradise it markets itself to be and if we are the nation of foodies we profess to be, perhaps we should think twice before resigning ourselves to lower food standards as a fact of life.
Pamelia Chia is the author of the cookbooks Wet Market to Table and Plantasia: A Vegetarian Cookbook Through Asia. She also writes Singapore Noodles, a newsletter dedicated to celebrating Asian culinary traditions and food cultures.