FESTIVE FOODS • Heritage Celebrations GTWHI • George Town • MALAYSIA
Channel: Oxlaey
Date: 14/09/2015

Learning to cook Chinese, Muslim and Hindu religious food during Penang's 2015 food festival!

FESTIVE FOODS is part of the OXLAEY mygeorgetown film project, made possible by a grant from Think City (www.thinkcity.com.my). 

Dan Wojahn was the Sound Editor. Listen to more at: www.soundcloud.com/dajahn 

Thanks also to Team 108 in Singapore (www.team108.com) for loaning equipment for the production and audio mastering. A big thanks also to Canon Malaysia (www.canon.com.my) for supporting the screening of the mygeorgetown films by providing a 5000 lumen projector during the 2015 George Town Festival.

"I'm Chung Wei, the project manager for the Heritage Celebrations. This year is Eat Rite. Its basically ritual foods of George Town. Its not street food. We have different types of ritual foods from different races - multiracial festival food. Make it yourself. DYI. The committees themselves will actually demonstrate how this festival food is being presented and by observing you can learn how to make this type of festival food. For example Mombu Kanji is basically a porridge  that they make for people to break fast.  So I think it has more than 30 ingredient and quite a number of spices as well. and it takes about 3 hours just to make this porridge. Besides cooking workshop and cooking demonstration we actually have cooking classes. You can join in for more complete classes. We also have pubic talks to tell people about the different communities or different races and what are their ritual foods. Interactive games where people can pick up one bottle and smell it and what kind of spice is that. Of course Penang is famous for its street food like Nasi Kandar or Laksa. But street food aside in George Town itself, almost everyday there is some sort of community celebration going on and because of that, because any celebration wouldn't be complete without food. Thats why I would say that George Town is rich in that sense that you have different communities, different type of cultures, mixtures of cultures and foods and languages and - people!

I like the idea of people coming together, eating together and the whole idea of sharing. For a non-Muslim like me to be able to go into the Mosque and try their ritual food that is something very caring. I like the idea of sharing our different cultures with different people."