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   Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:12:13 JST Adrianna Tan

   Other favorite food in Singapore schools:

   I ate nasi pattaya almost daily from the Muslim food stall in high school (a different school). I liked that they served it with a lot of papads. She also liked to draw funny faces on top of the egg (it’s kind of like omu-rice but with Malay style spices in the fried rice), with chilli sauce and ketchup.

   By the time I was leaving high school we started to get more international cuisines in our school cafeterias. There was a Korean and Japanese stall as well. This was 2003?

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:15:40 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     The way food works in Singapore schools is that they are run like little markets, but the food is subsidized. So a bowl of noodles that might be $3 outside of school, in the real world, might be $0.50 or $1. I think there were food subsidy like meal coupons and subsidized meals (delivered through crediting the students’ transit card, like a clipper card) for lower income kids.

     The main reason why this wasn’t ‘free’ and ‘the same’ for all is that everyone has different dietary requirements. Some kids needed halal food, others didn’t eat beef for religious reasons. Also, we were used to having great variety and choice of food outside in the real world it would have broken me to have someone tell me what to eat. Even at 7 years old

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:17:40 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     In line with the ‘people eat out’ practice, I can’t think of a time when I saw significant no of kids with meals
     brought from home. Except for when I had a few seventh day adventist classmates, they couldn’t eat any of the food because of their no garlic / onion thing so they brought food. Everyone else mostly had food at the canteen just like going to the hawker centre / market to get food.

     Also, most of our families were double income families and I don’t think food prep was done very much at the time.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:23:05 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     In fact I would bet that the kids today who bring nutritious, homecooked food from home instead of buying food at the school canteen are probably upper class people with domestic help, because nobody’s got time for that if you’re not.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:29:54 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     I remember when I met American / British / Aussie expats for the first time and they were perplexed at why in Singapore work culture, most people went out to get food. And we were perplexed at why they didn’t.

   • Embed this notice
     Phil Wolff (evanwolf@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:37:56 JST Phil Wolff

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte Oakland had a food truck revival for a while, and monthly street fairs with food stands. How did that compare to street food culture?

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:37:56 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Phil Wolff

     @evanwolf not remotely close but better than not having it

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:39:13 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Carsten

     @EvilCartyen I remember when I was in Denmark / Finland I definitely ate out more in a week than most people did in a year..

   • Embed this notice
     Carsten (evilcartyen@mstdn.dk)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:39:15 JST Carsten

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte it's interesting, because I love eating out but Denmark is a definite eating in country. If I ate out as much as I'd like I would be bankrupt. Instead, I cook almost every day, which I also enjoy.

     But when I've traveled in Asia I eat out as much as I can and almost exclusively in food stalls, and I love it. As many times per day as I can force myself to digest 😂

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:46:42 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     I got into a fight with a guy who I thought was extremely culturally ignorant about this. He was the ‘bring a a salad or a sandwich every day’ type of guy. He made a comment about how locals were so bad at cooking if we ate out all the time, and how he was surprised by that.

     I was trying to make the point that it just worked differently there. Many lunch dishes were things we would never make at home. Take a bowl of Singapore chicken rice for example. Prob the most common lunch meal. It cost US$3 for the rice, the chicken, vegetables and the soup. This guy was confused at why we couldn’t just make it ourselves.

     To make that, I would have to poach a chicken, hang it up overnight, butcher it, cook the rice with a lot of aromatics and chicken fat, boil the soup for at least a few hours. It would also cost more than that. And it wouldn’t even be half as good as the one I can buy. I’ve been working on my chicken rice for a decade and it isn’t remotely in the same quality group, and I’m a good cook.

     Hawkers and street food sellers there have decades of experience, and economies of scale. They don’t sell anything else beyond the one thing! And also, it is super fun to be able to try hundreds of different things.

     Not having that as my present daily food culture really kills me in some ways.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:49:37 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     I also thought it was funny that he ate a sandwich or a salad every day. I can’t possibly conceive of eating the repeating the same food, or even the same cuisine, in a week in that part of the world. It was important to me.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 04:54:38 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     There’s also an essential moralistic / cultural element.

     Food means so many different things in different places. People have different relationships not just to what you eat but how you do it.

     For example, a person who likes simple food and eats the same thing every day and is not fussy, is NOT perceived positively in my food culture.

     They would be perceived as being something of a simpleton, someone with no life skills, who doesn’t know how to feed themselves well. Very, very different.

     I’m always very thankful because I know I would be perceived as inordinately picky and impossible and difficult in an Anglo or Nordic setting, but in my food culture, my elders were very proud of me for ‘having good taste’ and ‘having opinions about food’.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:03:21 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Carsten

     @EvilCartyen I had good food! Mostly cured stuff and seafood. Cold food for lunch is very hard for me. I can do it sometimes

   • Embed this notice
     Carsten (evilcartyen@mstdn.dk)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:03:22 JST Carsten

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte one reason for not eating out is the weather and the general lack of fresh produce back in the day before globalization.

     People would stay in and cook with salted or pickled or brined produce for the majority of the year. Personally, I feel like that's where we have something to offer to the world cuisine, our traditional lunch buffet is wonderful but it's cold food, not hot food. I hope you ate well in Denmark.

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:13:56 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     Another option for people who don’t cook daily there: you don’t even have to eat out! We have ‘tingkat’ services where you can pay a company or a person X dollars a week. You can define the frequency (only bring me dinner, only on Tues and Thurs, or lunch and dinner every day for the next 2 months while I’m recovering from surgery), and someone will come drop off a canister with 3-4 compartments comprising cooked rice, a meat, a veg and a soup. They change up the items daily so you never get the same thing twice.

     It’s similar to the ‘dabba’ system in India except it is made either commercially by a company or by an expert cook in their home kitchen.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:17:51 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • FoolishOwl

     @foolishowl heh, my simple foods are very complex by nose Anglo standards, and my complex foods are multi day prep events.

   • Embed this notice
     FoolishOwl (foolishowl@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:17:52 JST FoolishOwl

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte For me, complex foods are like social gatherings: it can be fun, once in a while, but I need to recover from it.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:26:34 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     Example of the tingkat service

     For US$4.50 per person per meal, you get a wide variety of foods delivered to you

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:27:41 JST Adrianna Tan

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     • ClaraBlackInk

     @clarablackink yeah, i am struggling to understand the different food cultures here. not so bad in the bay area because i still get a lot of chinese immigrants.

   • Embed this notice
     ClaraBlackInk (clarablackink@writing.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:27:43 JST ClaraBlackInk

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte But then you'll encounter folks who really believe these things and you see how poisoned food is in the US.

     Which...again...we need food to live so it is extremely strange and I don't know if there's anywhere else where people are as extreme about it.

   • Embed this notice
     ClaraBlackInk (clarablackink@writing.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:27:44 JST ClaraBlackInk

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte Some of the food culture in the US is also part of our weird as fuck class issues where we see people who handle food as subhuman, unskilled and unworthy of pay. And yet...I mean...you need food to live so there's a deep self hatred within our food culture.

     Not everyone treats food workers like this but I think it also ties into home cooked food being "woman's work" while dining out or growing food is largely "nonwhite".

     It still baffles me because it isn't always as obvious...

   • Embed this notice
     Alexandra Magin 🏳️‍🌈 (recursive@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:29:31 JST Alexandra Magin 🏳️‍🌈

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte oh wow, I wish we had stuff like that here

   • Embed this notice
     Carolyn (cstamp@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:29:32 JST Carolyn

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte I hope delivery is on top of that, as it doesn’t seem a great business model unless next door.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:29:32 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Carolyn

     @CStamp they have geographical pools in a very dense area so usually they are dropping off for at least 20 families per area

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:30:42 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Alexandra Magin 🏳️‍🌈

     @recursive I guess Shef does that but they don’t have the volume and density

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     Alexandra Magin 🏳️‍🌈 (recursive@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:34:07 JST Alexandra Magin 🏳️‍🌈

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte And their customer service made me rage quit before I could do a order. And it's only weekly service

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:34:29 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Alexandra Magin 🏳️‍🌈

     @recursive oh :/ yeah

   • Embed this notice
     D2 (cascheranno@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 05:52:43 JST D2

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte an anthropologist friend always pushes back on this as 17th-20th century euro-colonial nonsense: ‘a kitchen for yourself’ is not how several thousand years of human architecture worked.

   • Embed this notice
     Denis (constantorbit@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 06:15:46 JST Denis

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte That's wild that you can get tingkat online (I mean, of course you can!). But I fondly remember seeing those multi-part canisters everywhere in Jakarta.

   • Embed this notice
     Luke Kanies (lkanies@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 06:36:07 JST Luke Kanies

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte I would so love this.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 06:37:15 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Luke Kanies

     @lkanies they now have full menus for veg and vegan and allergies too!

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     Luke Kanies (lkanies@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 06:52:57 JST Luke Kanies

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte even better.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 07:06:52 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Carsten

     @EvilCartyen I take pics of all of that and then I ask people online to identify it for me :)

   • Embed this notice
     Carsten (evilcartyen@mstdn.dk)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 07:06:54 JST Carsten

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte the only bad thing about this approach is that if you get something amazing you don't know what it is. I've had some truly stellar meals I have no idea how to look up so I can cook them at home.

   • Embed this notice
     Carsten (evilcartyen@mstdn.dk)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 07:06:55 JST Carsten

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte I was in China once with some students, in Shanghai and Beijing, and they would mainly eat in wester fast food restaurants and it seems so pointless to me to travel that way.

     I would demonstrably just walk down a back alley to find some lady serving soup or fried rice or noodles to local workers and eat there and it was delicious. We could not communicate, but I mean.. Pointing and smiling will get you everywhere with a food stall, right?

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 07:07:44 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Nick Schiwy

     @nick having eaten extensively in Thailand and Vietnam and Myanmar have been the highlights of my life.

   • Embed this notice
     Nick Schiwy (nick@schiwy.co)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 07:07:45 JST Nick Schiwy

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte when I and my wife visited Thailand earlier this year we went on a tour with a local of Bangkok (it was an entire day and we barely scratched the surface but it was really cool). She told us that a lot of apartments in Bangkok don't have a full kitchen because most people just eat out most of the time. And to your point being able to eat street food all the time just seems so much more enjoyable than eating a salad

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     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 09:47:53 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Darth Osler

     @autolycos ooh ill prob line the salted cod thing

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     Darth Osler (autolycos@med-mastodon.com)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 09:47:54 JST Darth Osler

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte I had a wonderful set of experiences living in the Caribbean when I deeply befriended a local and just opened myself to the differences

     The only thing I really couldn't get behind was a salted cod and boiled potato baked in a yeasted wheat flour dough

     He's the guy that taught me about boiled egg and sardine sandwiches

   • Embed this notice
     Adrianna Tan (skinnylatte@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 09:58:47 JST Adrianna Tan

     in reply to

     • Darth Osler

     @autolycos I’ve had it before. Very similar to some Goan and Macanese dishes I’ve had. Anywhere the Portuguese or Spanish went there were salt cod dishes I guess

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     Darth Osler (autolycos@med-mastodon.com)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Dec-2025 09:58:49 JST Darth Osler

     in reply to

     @skinnylatte here's a representative recipe

     https://www.alicaspepperpot.com/bake-and-saltfish-a-classic-caribbean-breakfast/