How one couple is making Singapore food heritage part of everyday life

This includes making multiple visits and tours around local pasars in Geylang, Chong Pang, Bukit Gombak and Tekka Market, treating these places not as relics of a romanticised, bygone Singapore but as living parts of the city where people still shop for ingredients, eat all kinds of dishes and gather with friends and family.

“These markets aren’t places of the past; they shouldn’t be overly romanticised because they exist now and many people – regardless of generations – still see value in them,” Aqid said. “So we often involve visits to these spaces as part of our programmes, for both the seasoned and those who want to start making visits to pasars a regular thing.”

Their workshops similarly focus less on teaching people a “correct” way of making a dish, and more on giving them the context and confidence to engage with it themselves.

“For our nasi ulam or sambal workshop, we don’t really teach people how to make the nasi ulam or sambal,” Aqid said. “We bring the ingredients together, but one table’s product can be entirely different from another group’s because each participant’s experience and stories can be distinct from the other.”

Running workshops grounded in dishes such as nasi ulam also feels like a particularly fitting example of how food heritage can be made more accessible, precisely because of the amount of labour traditionally involved in preparing it.

“We often tell audiences that if someone makes nasi ulam for you, they must really, really love you,” Aqid said. “Why else go through all that trouble of preparing so many ulams and slicing them so finely?”

And rather than romanticising that labour, the workshop will also cover what it can take to make the process easier and more accessible for people with little time and resources on their hands.