Char Kuay Teow

Recently, I ate a plate of Char Kuay Teow at Buangkok. It was fried by a FT and at a cost of S$3. The noodle was pre-fried to speed up the process of cooking. Yeah, commercialism had set in. The plate of Char Kuay Teow tasted bad because the black sauce which enhanced the food sweetness was insufficient. While eating, I remembered a few weeks ago while in camp, a group of fellow camp mate was devouring plates of black carrot cake which also uses the black sauce. It was so good that we had been eating consecutive for the last 4 days. We had been reminding ourselves that the training would probably be our last ICT. The carrot cake was cooked by an old lady who told us that she had been in the camp for the past 20 years. The carrot cake was tasty because of the right proportion of black sauce and the quantity of egg. Guess what, it costs only S$1.50, half the price of the commercial one. It keeps me wondering whether we have lost the spirit of Singapore even in the local food. This spirit refers to the ability to truly appreciate the finess of cooking including understanding the taste bud of true Singaporean. The authenticity could have been lost even in a heartland coffee shop. In the name of commercialism, it has been replaced by an efficient system that creates productivity at the expense of quality. Will we lose more?......