This year’s Gawai Bazaar at MBKS had a new buzz. Sarawak’s most famous indigenous dish, ayam pansuh, has been given a makeover. This time it comes in a tin, made from Sarawak most free-range kampung chickens, but also neatly stackable, each printed with a segment of bamboo so they sit together in a long stick. Social media has seen several reviews since it made its debut, adjudging this latest effort at Sarawak heritage recipe preservation to be a great success, both in flavour and in creativity. Now, it seems, Sarawak people can enjoy this pansuh without going to the trouble of preparing it.
Pansuh was invented for its portability and ease of preparation. It was entirely suited to a jungle setting, designed to be cooked up on trails, on pebble beaches by the river’s edge, or even outside the longhouse as the community prepared for a feast, using the most accessible of equipment – bamboo, a parang and an open flame. But urban indigenous people, and indeed everyone else in Sarawak, have only the concrete jungle to forage from and this new product takes the original ethos for pansuh and reinvents it for the modern world.
This is not the first time pansuh has been packaged. Borneo Delight and several others do a version vacuum packed. But pansuh in a tin is a new departure. It follows Yeo’s Kari ayam and all the other ‘meals ready to eat’, a staple now of longhouse food and treks through the forest. This technique makes pansuh portable and exportable, a taste of Sarawak sealed in a tin and ready to eat.
Pansuh in a can, however, is also part of a larger project. It is the product of LifeSpanTree, a social enterprise which is turning technology to Kuching’s most beloved heritage dishes and Sarawak’s most iconic ingredients. Midin, dabai, ciku, nangka seeds; all receive the freeze-drying or dehydration treatment, transforming every seasonal glut into a year-round staple. Meanwhile a series of heritage recipes – ayam masak merah, bubur pedas, rebung rebus, to name a few – are being crafted by heirloom cooks and then sealed in a can at the peak of their powers.
For LifeSpanTree, preservation is the key. It seeks to smooth the food chain across the seasonal round, recognising that rural to urban migration and supply chain pressures have meant that the usual gluts which kampung folk took in their stride now mean, in the modern world, that produce is not reaching the people who most need it. The Hantu Rua (Spirit of Waste) has returned in a new form. But LifeSpanTree aims to make sure that everyone can enjoy paku whenever they want, regardless of whether they have access to a riverbank.
LifeSpanTree began under a grant from Yayasan Hasanah at the height of the pandemic. Part of its remit was to provide a proportion of its goods to low-income households during lockdown, distributed through a network of NGOs. This has been at the heart of the project ever since; its expansion just a basis to provide better for the under privileged. Its driving force is Food Security and Justice, providing access not just to nutritious and sufficient, but also culturally appropriate food, entirely in line with the goals of the Creative Cities of Gastronomy under UNESCO.
LifeSpanTree has grown from KINO magazine, documenting Kuching culinary heritage since 2013, and from its series of KINO Life Heritage Kitchens. This publication recognised that much of Kuching culinary heritage remained undocumented, its heirloom recipes unrecorded. This impetus has led directly to other events, including Culinary Heirlooms during the What About Kuching Festival, described as a ‘curated 7-course odyssey paying homage to 100-year-old recipes.’
All this has come from the brain of Marian Chin, who has taken a lifetime of knowledge and experience in New York and Europe with the magazine industry and brought it home to apply to her own culture and heritage. She is now the mastermind of the Food over Fire Festival, which debuted in December last year. Marian describes this as ‘The Hearth Brought to Light’, storytelling and performances from Sarawak told around the communal fireside, accompanied by food cooked over the open flame.
But, despite the fanfare and the festivities, the LifeSpanTree project focuses ultimately on Food Security – less sexy perhaps but entirely more fundamental. This is something that the gastronomy sub-cluster of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network has prioritised, part of its Memorandum of Agreement on 11 priority areas of collaboration. With climate change looming and the lessons of the pandemic still ringing loud, feeding the world’s people adequately with culturally appropriate foods is an ever more pressing concern for all cities.
It is also a major policy concern for Sarawak which only meets 38% of its food security needs. More horrifying, our rice-subsistence level has hovered between 40-50% over the last decade, according to the Khazanah Research Institute’s study on the status and potential of the Paddy and Rice Industry of Sabah and Sarawak, and the planted area continues to decline. But the Sarawak government has put this key concern on its agenda and is developing policy to promote the agriculture industry specifically in this direction.
Meanwhile, the creatives of Kuching, including Marian Chin, will continue to look for new ways to promote and innovate this ideal – sufficient nutritious and culturally appropriate food for all. Whether it is through narratives for our rice industry, festivals for greater awareness or pansuh in a tin, it all amounts to the same thing: the preservation of Kuching’s food chain and greater security for our culinary heritage.
