Food Republic

Book excerpt: Editors: Ann Ang, Daryl Lim Wei Jie and Tse Hao Guang Food Republic is a generous serving of Singapore’s food culture: from the making and eating of food, to the sale and hawking of it, our love and hate of it, and the effects of its consumption and deprivation. Food has always been our safe space, our comfort zone: a place where we could freely engage in heated arguments about the best nasi lemak, the most fragrant cendol and whether the standard of the stall has dropped or not. Yet this anthology, featuring more than one hundred literary explorations of our food and food culture, also shows that when people write about food, they often aren’t just talking about food but usually about something else, closer to the heart. Or the bone. Curated from previously published work and selections from an open call, the poems, fiction and non-fiction in Food Republic range from the passionately realised to tantalisingly surreal. Think of it as a buffet, a banquet, an omakase, a smorgasbord, a nasi padang spread, a thali or a rijsttafel – we hope we’ve assembled one to your taste. Come. Eat.