Oodles of noodles for the poodles

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Now you see it, now you don’t!

Now you see it, now you don’t!

A FAVOURITE topic for school debates during my day, some 60 years ago, was “If the goods are good why advertise?”

It was chosen by the teachers because it has a good range of pros and cons – plenty of juicy ingredients like those found in a good bowl of Sarawak Laksa. Like the pudding, the proof of the noodles is in the eating. The “from-mouth-to-mouth” advertisement is much cheaper than a full-blown advertisement in colour in a newspaper.

At the end of last month, an enormous bowl, measuring 1.3 metres deep and 1.3 metres wide, ‘crawling’ with oodles of noodles, produced by a local shopping mall, was intended as an additional spice to the publicity of their product, their new business premises.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; for every new business owner must tell people where he is located and what he can offer to the consumers.

The money spent on advertisements of a product is considered to be an investment. Big companies with deep pockets allocate extra funds for expensive advertisements. Any newspaper company would lap it up if it is chosen to publish them.

However, that is not the point here. It’s the choice of product for advertising which is the subject of query by the general public. In this particular case, the intention of the organisers to do their part “to put our iconic Sarawakian dish ‘The Sarawak Laksa’ on the Malaysian and international map” was not the point of contention at all; rather the issue is the throwing away of perfectly good food after all the trouble of producing it.

It had taken 18 long hours for 15 professional cooks to complete the whole project before the dish was fit for an honourable entry in the Malaysia Book of Records.

To the Laksa freaks, me included, this wasting of food does not make sense at all.  They kicked up a fuss when they read or heard about the unceremonious discarding of the bowl containing some 100kg of laksa paste, 225kg of rice noodles, 1,008 chicken eggs, 80kg of shredded chicken meat, 90kg of prawns and 90kg of bean sprouts.

Now you see it, now you don’t!

An appeal

As the issue pertains to the bad habit among people in this country, I wish to appeal to event managers who care to take note. In future, please advise your clients not to use any food as part of a project which is intended for the book of records.

We Malaysians must not copycat others. Let the Thais throw away tonnes of water during their Songkran festival or the Spanish their tomatoes. In the United Kingdom, some £15 billion worth of food, including fresh fruits and vegetables, is thrown away annually.

In Sarawak, we threw away food that was unfit for human consumption. Had it not been for the rancid coconut milk, some 1,500 bowls of noodles should have been consumed.

Let this be the first and the last. It is a record of sorts – the infamy of which we can do without. Don’t try it with the Kolo Mee.

Apologies acceptable

After a few days of furore about the throwing away of the laksa, the organisers of the project have profusely apologised to the public for their “oversight and misjudgement” on the issue of food wastage.

That’s what I’d call a sensible thing to do, in the circumstances. The biggest bowl of laksa case is now closed.

A blessing in disguise?

The santan (coconut milk) may have gone rancid but the subject at issue was still fresh for the next few days. Even big international media networks carried news about it. Sarawak Laksa was on the international map all right, albeit for the wrong reasons.

Thinking back, however, the big story about our laksa that went viral may not be necessarily bad. Nothing wrong with the dish as such. Nothing sells better like a good book being banned. So it may be with our beloved laksa.

More people may demand for the noodles now, never mind about the sour side of the story.

A report said that some four million Chinese nationals are potential tourists heading our way. Many of them may have read on the Net about our famous laksa and are dying to try it when they come over here. Once they get hooked on it, they will buy lots of the paste. And before we know it, we will import ‘Made in China’ laksa paste in packets.

Have you thought of this possibility?  

I read another report that said that out of 15,000 tonnes of food thrown away by Malaysians every day, some 3,000 tonnes are in fact edible. That big amount of nice food can feed many hungry people in this country. Don’t you believe for a moment that no one is hungry in Malaysia.

For the moment, there’s no need for us to claim to be the producer of the greatest, the longest, and the largest in anything else; already we have a bowlful of juicy scandals.

Comments can reach the writer via [email protected].