CORNUCOPIA
If you want to know about traditional ways of keeping food under wraps, Suthon Sukphisit has you covered.
When you buy food, its packaging might be either the standard mass-produced kind used by the manufacturer or something more informal, supplied by the vendor. Once the food is eaten, the wrapping is usually just thrown away. It has done its job and is no longer useful.
But if you take a close look at the packaging you may notice that it has important functions and roles built into it. Some relate to marketing, others to convenience for the buyer. These days most products come in ready-made, commercially-manufactured packaging designed for convenience. It is usually clean, contemporary-looking, inexpensive and attractive to buyers. It keeps being upgraded, too. Packaging, especially for food products, is constantly changing and developing.
Cookies and sweets for children are a good example. In the past, bakeries would package all of them, large or small, in cardboard boxes. Today the containers are made of plastic, specially sized and shaped to suit the items inside. The effect is modern and eye-catching and it makes the product inside look interesting.
Packages for cold beverages, too, have evolved. Drinks that contain ice and cream, like Thai iced tea and iced coffee, for example, have long been sold in plastic cups with snapon lids that have perforations for drinking straws. When carried around, the ice makes them uncomfortable to hold for long periods of time, though, so now there are plastic bags with carrying handles, sized to fit the cups exactly. Improvements of this kind are introduced constantly in food packaging.
But if we look back at the ways in which food was wrapped or packaged in the past, there are some strong differences. Natural materials were used, and the containers were made by hand. These old wrappings may look out of date and worthless now, and the amount of time needed to make them would be considered wasteful today, but they display a kind of folk wisdom in their design that in some cases has not yielded to modernisation. They have qualities that have made it impossible to change their form or the material they were made from, even now.
When buying some vegetable shoots, for example, the tender, mimosa-like new leaves of the cha-om plant, you’ll notice that the grower forms them into bunches that are held together with pieces of banana tree trunk measuring about five centimetres wide. These little slats make the bunches flat rather than round, giving them a fresher and more appealing appearance. The surface of the banana plant pieces is smooth and slippery, but the cha-om shoots do not drop out because they are covered with small thorns that let them pierce and grip the container. To secure the packets, the grower holds the banana tree pieces together with little pins made from bamboo wood.
Another example is the way the shoots of the morning glory-like phak boong vine are packaged for sale in the market. When the shoots have been gathered into a bunch, a strand of coconut palm leaf stalk is threaded through them to hold them together tightly. These are both examples of traditional folk knowledge providing techniques and materials so efficient that they are still in use. It is true that some vendors now hold phak boong shoots together with rubber bands, but they don’t look nearly as attractive as they do when coconut palm leaf fibre is used.
Many Thai sweets are sold in banana leaf packets. Coconut cream-rich khanom sai sai are sold in banana leaves folded into a distinctive pointed square shape, closed at the top and held shut with bamboo pins. Khanom sai sai itself consists of a very soft steamed rice flour batter with a sweet coconut filling, and the square packet allows it to hold its shape. The distinctive square packets are such an important aspect of the sweet’s identity that it would be unrecognisable without them.
Similar but bigger banana leaf wrappings are essential to the identity of haw moke plaa chon (snakehead fish meat steamed with herbs in a curried coconut custard). Almost everyone associates the dish with this kind of packaging, even though there are some shops that serve it in open-topped, square bananaleaf containers, so that the food inside can be seen. Most buyers find this adaptation acceptable, but if a vendor substitutes aluminium foil for the banana leaf, as some do, the basic identity of the dish takes a hit, and it may not sell as well.
However, there is no strict rule dictating that savoury Thai foods and sweets packaged in banana leaves have to be closed up tight in their wrapping so the contents cannot be seen. There are many sweets that are offered with the top exposed to make them look tempting.
Khanom taan, for example, a yellow, cake-like treat made from the husks of sugar palm fruits, is open on top and sprinkled with freshly-shredded coconut.
The combination of the yellow colour of the sweet and the white coconut exert a powerful attraction on buyers.
Another sweet, similar to khanom taan but made with ground corn, is a northern speciality. The method used to identify these khanom khao phote makes a lot of sense. In addition to exposing the top of it, corn husks are used to wrap it instead of the usual banana leaf.
In the South, special packaging is also used to identify the local thurien kuan (a cooked durian preserve). The sweet is wrapped in areca palm leaves in a distinctive way that lets everyone who sees the packets know what is inside.
If we compare the packaging used for food products now with that of the past, the differences are clear. Modern packaging is styled for convenience for the buyer and the seller. It is well-suited for most of the products that people use now.
But for certain kinds of foods, nothing has surpassed the more traditional and distinctive packing methods that people have relied upon for many generations. They are unlikely to change any time soon, so take a moment to appreciate their ingenuity and durability the next time you visit your local market.