Perhaps nothing expresses the indiscriminate, viral, porous, and dynamic nature of popular culture more than food. The multi-directional influences, the obliviousness to cultural, political and geographical boundaries and to appropriation, reveal the true, organic nature of how ideas and influences circulate among different people. The problem only arises when this dynamic gets drawn into the dialectics of identity, ownership, ethnicity, nationality, anti-colonialism, and other issues.

Singapore as the latest iteration of the grand port city in Southeast Asia, is the heir to a culinary history that predates its establishment by several centuries.

Consequently, the city has an array of dishes, with complex, hybrid histories, that connect it to port cities in the region. These dishes represent the divergence, convergence, and integration of peoples in the region over several centuries, resulting in diverse cultural networks that transgress and blur national, racial and ethnic boundaries. The terms for many cooked items also have etymologies that reveal old and unexpected origins. Singapore’s varied cuisine therefore signifies links with that of every southeast Asian country, as well as of India, China, Portugal, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

For example, kaya, the steamed coconut egg jam consumed as a breakfast favourite with butter on toasted commercial white bread in Singapore and the region (already a hybrid concoction), is considered a national delicacy in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Its ingredients (with an excessive amount of egg yolk) and cooking method betray Portuguese mestiza origins, but its name has Sanskrit roots, probably coined in the Malay world. The old term for it is srikaya, and as sericaia it is part of the culinary heritage of Portugal and Brazil, and as chiricaya, jericaya and jericalla, of Central America. Another dessert, the “traditional” small Malay cake known as kuih bahulu, is in fact derived from an old-fashioned Portuguese cake, akin to a madeleine. The two words that make up the term originate from the generic Chinese Fujianese (kueh, 粿) and Portuguese (bolo) terms for cake. Both words were integrated into the Malay vocabulary centuries ago.

Compounding the complexity of this food history, is the diversity of the cuisines of each official category of race in Singapore. What is termed Malay for example, might include the heritage of the Minangkabau, the Malays of Riau, the Javanese, the Baweanese, and the Bugis of Sulawesi, among others. The same complexity exists for the wide range of regional traditions from China and India. The varied ways these regional cuisines evolved and influenced each other outside of their motherlands also provide more nuances to the spectrum of cuisine traditions. Many items associated with certain communities in Singapore are not known in their country or region of origin. With all these diverse lineages influencing each other for centuries, it sometimes becomes impossible to disentangle the origins and “ownership” of many dishes. It becomes evident that the idea of the culturally pure is a myth and articulated primarily for political and other reasons.

Global food culture in the twentieth century has churned out dishes like the Hawaiian pizza, the California roll (sushi), the teriyaki burger, among other hybrid concoctions.

In Singapore, this dynamic experimentation and multidirectional borrowing, which is a tradition that is several centuries old, has seen many cross-over dishes, such as the Danish meatball frikadeller, which first became the Dutch colonial frikadel (croquette) before becoming the Javanese and Malay bergedel. Then, there are also Chinese stalls selling Malay nasi lemak (coconut milk rice), Malay stalls selling Chinese chicken rice, Indian stalls selling mee goreng (fried Chinese noodles), among many other exuberantly mixed-up outcomes.

However, recent controversies concerning the cultural boundaries of food highlight how the mindset about fixed national and racial divisions, a legacy of the colonial era, stubbornly lingers, and what we eat and how we describe our dishes have been dragged into this contested arena. The British footballer Rio Ferdinand’s 2016 Twitter post from Singapore where he described nasi goreng (fried rice) as ‘local’, created a social media storm, with many laying claim to the dish as an Indonesian original. More recently the Singapore restaurateur Violet Oon’s presentation in her menu of a Peranakan version of nasi ambeng (a local Javanese rice dish), elicited angry responses from the Singapore Javanese and Malay communities which accused her of cultural appropriation.

Yet the effervescent mayhem that represents Singapore’s connection to the region’s early embrace of the hybrid and the global, tenaciously goes on today with even more varied outcomes, now that the city has become an important culinary centre, attracting top chefs and restauranteurs from all over the world.

The word that best sums up this exuberant hybridity is in fact a popular regional dish.
The rojak is a fruit and vegetable salad served differently with a variety of sauces according to location and ethnic styles (rujak in Malay and Indonesian), and sometimes has a combination of Malay, Chinese and Indian ingredients. These days it has also come to mean an arbitrary mixture of things in Malay and Singapore English, a term used most memorably by a minister who said the opposition would only be able to form a “rojak government” making “rojak policies”. Although the term suggests chaos and disorder, it is time to rehabilitate and celebrate the rojak in culture as something creative, entrepreneurial and egalitarian. With a long history in the region, the conceptual rojak is therefore both utterly Singaporean and Southeast Asian.