parable

[dementist_xer0x]

There was one evening I was on office duty. I was sitting at the bench outside the ops room eating the food I had just collected from the cookhouse and thinking about what Hongyu had written about cookhouse food, about eating one inedible meal after another. I looked at the food I was eating. There was a strange dish of chicken, cooked with raisins and long beans. The raisins looked and tasted like fat, grey grubs. The long beans resembled segments cut from a worm or snake - the insides of the bean were dyed blue-black. I pushed them into my mouth and chewed slowly, thinking over ‘the relief to be able to choose your meals’, as he had said. I choose my meals every day, from the canteen at HQ NCC or NUS Science, but often (oh, ingrate) I think there is relief in not having to choose at all. There is relief in not having to decide between one poor choice and another, in not having to decide for the umpteenth time whether to have claypot rice (never filling, insubstantial) or chicken rice (consistently mediocre) or curry (oily, spicy, disgusting), in being able to just walk to the cookhouse server and have your meal for the day dictated to you.

Back on Pulau Tekong or back in SISPEC I had never complained about bad food, or about food at all; now I expect more from my food, I expect it to taste good and make me happy. Invariably I am never satisfied. I always finish my lunch in a few minutes, almost as if it were an obstacle to efficiency and work and other daily routines, and I always feel vaguely cheated by the experience. As I chewed on my chicken unthinkingly, I thought to myself: if food is merely functional, choice is no longer relevant.