From ‘Food fight over yusheng’, 5 Feb 2012, article in Lifestyle, Sunday Times
The auspicious yusheng or raw fish salad is meant to bring harmony and unite people during Chinese New Year. But the popular festive dish has instead triggered a food fight in the media in Malaysia and Singapore.
For the past week, a controversy has been cooking in the Malaysian media with newspapers saying that the dish originated in Malaysia, not Singapore.
…Food consultant Violet Oon, 62, likens the current debate over the origins of the dish to similar debates in countries with a mixed culinary heritage.
She says: ‘Spaghetti is from Italy, but spaghetti and meatballs is an American tradition. Likewise in the United Kingdom, chicken tikka is found everywhere in Britain, but can they claim it’s theirs? Immigrants have come and made something different and there’s nothing wrong with that.’
Member of Parliament Baey Yam Keng, who talked about yusheng in his recent column on Chinese New Year customs in the Chinese section of My Paper, says: ‘I don’t think Singapore needs to lay claim to yusheng. The dish has clearly evolved over the years, and even if it is made a local trademark, does it mean anything? What matters is that this custom is still practised and people love it.’
Can any one culture even ‘invent’ a dish and call it its own? What humans have been doing since the ‘invention’ of cooking is just mashing up variations of common raw ingredients which everyone else in the world uses in their cuisine. Nobody lumps some raw fish slices and shredded veggies together and announces to the world jubilantly that a discovery has been made as if a new subatomic particle had been created in a pan. Like the evolution of animal species, the history of food is peppered with incidences of ‘convergent evolution’, which explains why you can have similar foods across distinct cultures like satay and kebabs, spaghetti and noodles, pad thai and char kway teow, or yusheng and sashimi. One shouldn’t ignore the effect of INFLUENCE, which is the nicer alternative to ‘copying’, and because there are more people who prepare food for a living than Nobel-prize winning scientists, the chances of clashing recipes or methods of cooking are pretty high if you think about it.
In fact, one can’t even lay claim to salads containing raw fish and vegetables as a strictly Asian tradition. In Hawaii, a dish known as ‘poke’ consists of ‘a simple mixture of raw fish, Hawaiian salt, seaweed and chopped kukui nuts’. In Fiji, ‘Kokoda’ is ‘cubed fish steeped in lemon/lime juice then squeezed and garnished with onions, chillies, shallots, grated carrots, tomatoes and combined with thick coconut cream’. In Latin America, the birthplace of ‘ceviche’ has been disputed between Peru and Ecuador, when it’s likely that it was conceived by the ancient Incas who once ruled both lands, a similar situation faced by Singaporeans/Malaysians when it comes to yusheng, a dish agreed by both sides to have Canton origins, but diversified regionally into the several varieties that we’ve come to ‘lo hei’ to death today.
Of course every place has its myths and legends on how its people have come to appreciate uncooked fish, which suggests that no single person or country discovered this independently. Who is to say our cavemen ancestors hadn’t thought of ‘prehistoric yusheng’ as well, when weather conditions weren’t conducive for a pit roast? Perhaps early man, without the benefit of fire, already feasted on a combination of raw fish slices, berries, herbs and roots out of expediency. Who’s to say they didn’t involve their salad in rituals like we do today, praying for good harvests and weather instead of our rhythmic wishes for good fortune and success?
So let’s leave the petty quarrels behind and appreciate yusheng for what it means, and how it TASTES, to us today, as a fishy vessel for a messy, noisy ritual not just to mark ‘everybody’s birthday’, but a diplomatic icebreaker for foreigners and business partners over the New Year. Incidentally the pun surrounding yusheng is how ‘fish’ sounds similar to ‘excess’ in Chinese, and excessive is exactly what this fuss over ‘who invented yusheng first’ is.
Filed under: 2012, Chinese New Year, Festivals, Local food Tagged: | Chinese New Year, cny, festivals, local food
