SINGAPORE – In a country governed by appetite, it is a delicious irony to find food hiding in plain sight.
Nature’s covert store is hardly “exotic”, he said. Its deep roots in the region extend to a pre-metropolitan Singapore, when Malays foraged for food, with a fondness forand the Chinese scavenged for medicine, prizing the leaves of the cat whisker plant, he added. “That’s what fascinates people most, the weeds,” he said, “because they recognise them and say they hate them but after learning they can be eaten or used for healing, they get excited.”
The work of a forager is often solitary - by design, Mr Yeo and Mr Luo say, after upwards of 10 years in the scene without ever crossing paths. Still, both guides say the sudden tide of interest stem from a concern with food security. Years ago, he boiled wild yam to neutralise its numbing effect only to have it sear his mouth with “pins and needles”, he said. The “poison” was mild but he had to stop eating.The risk and reward are part of the fun, said Mr Luo, whose biggest success has been fermenting the “unbearably sour”fruit into a delicious wine, which his friends say tastes like umeshu, a Japanese liquer.For him, the pleasure of discovery is at the heart of his quest.
Though they no longer forage for subsistence, Mr Firdaus said the practice is essential to his family life and is the chief means by which wisdom is passed down. “I learn everything from my mother.” As a child, Mr Firdaus was once so absorbed in gathering clams from the beach, that his family drove off without him. “I was caught up in the heat of the moment,” he said, “and ended up crying on the beach alone.” It was an early lesson against greed.
The story is much the same on the mainland, where Mr Syazwan Majid, 27, whose family lived on Pulau Ubin, forages with his mother.in the mangroves of Admiralty, Seletar and Jurong, each a muddy sensorium. “I’ll always remember the smell of the mud, salty from the sea, mixed with the freshwater scent of the river. I would always lose a pair of shoes,” he said.
Mr Esmonde Luo ferments the “unbearably sour” rukam masam fruit into a delicious wine, which his friends say tastes like umeshu. PHOTO: ESMONDE LUOwhen hordes of first-time harvesters descended on the beach at low tide to yank anemone, crab and jellyfish from the sea.The plunder prompted the National Parks Board to institute patrols and put up signs that read in black-and-red letters “no catching of marine creatures”, to preserve the health of the intertidal zone.
Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)
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