S'pore looks past bird flu, cries 'Let's Eat!'

S'pore looks past bird flu, cries 'Let's Eat!'

Jonathan Landreth, Reuters, Singapore

Chop-chop goes the cleaver on the butcher's block at Tian Tian Hainan Chicken Rice, but fear of the bird flu ravaging parts of Asia has cut business in half at this tiny Singapore food stall.

"My birds are from Malaysia where there's no flu, but people are still afraid to eat," said proprietor Madam Foo, who did not give her full name.

The shop sells 50 whole chickens a day when business is good, Madam Foo said. "Business is much, much lower this week."

Dishes are cheap at S$3 (US$1.76), but most plates at the Maxwell Food Centre, where Tian Tian is located, are piled high with pork these days from the 100 or so stalls selling spicy local fare.

Singapore has suspended live chicken imports from all nations hit by bird flu, which has spread rapidly to 10 countries from Japan to Pakistan, killing 15 people and millions of poultry.

With the city state's 2004 economic growth forecast of five percent under threat, poultry farms have been covered with nets to keep out migratory birds, which are thought to be spreading the disease around the region.

And, hoping to recapture the S$700 million tourists spent wining and dining in the city state in 2002, the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) has launched a Let's Makan! drive to promote hawker food.

Makan means "eat" in Bahasa, the language of neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia, and food and beverage sales are Singapore's third largest source of tourist revenue after shopping and accommodation.

"We expect the Let's Makan! drive can grow this revenue," said Joycelyn Ng, assistant director for local fare at the tourism board's food and beverage division.

Health authorities rate Tian Tian for cleanliness, just as they do all of Singapore's 16,000 hawker stalls.

And to assure patrons of that last little bit of protection, traditional Chinese dragon dancers chased off evil spirits in the last days of the Lunar New Year festival.

But a Scottish tourist sitting under the whirring ceiling fans in the open-walled food centre fears a chicken lunch might get her quarantined when she travels on to Australia soon.

"I won't eat chicken at all now unless I cook it myself," said Fiona Allen, 27, as she dipped her chopsticks into noodles with roast pork, a dish she also enjoyed on the last leg of her trip in Vietnam, a country hit hard by avian flu.

A Singaporean friend lunching with Allen said she was unafraid of chicken, but ate roast pork noodles anyway.

"I guess the chicken will be much safer here since the government actually makes stringent checks of everything, especially after last year," said May Tan.

Tan was referring to Singapore's tough measures to control SARS after it killed 33 citizens and more than halved tourist visits to the island last April.

"It's about time Singapore positioned this new icon of tourism called food," said K.F. Seetoh, editor of Makansutra, a 456-page guide to the spectrum of food the island has to offer.

Sutra means guide or lesson in Pali, the ancient language of Buddhists in India.

"We enjoy our food so much we want to share it with the world," said Seetoh, who took a food reviewer from the New York Times on a 16-hour tasting tour of the island last autumn.

In April, Seetoh and the tourism board will offer abbreviated "Food Safaris" charging tourists up to S$65 a head for a hawker center sampling of 10 "must try" dishes, including favorites such as chili crab and fish head curry.

"Maybe the buses will help business, but I hope the tourists from New York aren't scared of our chicken," said Madam Foo, whose specialty dish comes from her ancestral island home of Hainan, off China's southern coast.

Adventuresome eaters had better not expect waiters and tablecloths at the food centers, where dining is nothing if not casual, its origins in pre-independence street carts still apparent in the hawkers' hustle.

The hawkers provide a pan-Asian menu that feeds Singapore's population of four million, mostly Chinese in a city state that has been independent since 1965.

Families in shorts and sandals gather around tables and chairs bolted to cement floors, using disposable chopsticks to eat from plastic bowls.

Many hawkers, cramped in stalls 2.4 meters square, sell a single speciality dish with Malay or Indonesian roots, or flavors from ancestral villages from China or India.

"As a young nation of migrants from different cultures we don't have culture enough of our own, and it really shows in our food," said Joshua Koh, an army man chatting online at website www.makansutra.com.

"I like to try everything, and since nothing in Singapore is that far away, I can," said Koh, who likes to treat visitors to hawker food. "You get more variety for your money."

The island's roving diners have bought about 25,000 copies of each of Makansutra's four S$12 editions, said Seetoh, and a fifth will hit bookstores this year.

In "hunting season", about six months before publication, Seetoh says he dispatches a team of about 40 tasters to sniff out the latest and greatest culinary creations. He pays the tab.

"It's our biggest expense. About forty thousand Singapore bucks ($23,600) on street food. People walk up to me all the time and say, 'Hey, I'd like to be one of your food spies'," Seetoh said.

The Makanmatas, as he calls the group he started with some friends, represent what he calls Singapore's quiet majority.

"Where else can you jump into a taxi and say you're hungry and get good advice from the driver about where to eat?" he asked.

Let's Makan! ends with the Singapore Food Festival in July.