Sing a song of kek pisang
words and photographs by Gan Chin Lin.
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Sing a Song of Kek Pisang
by Gan Chin Lin / @tumblinbumblincrumblincookie
On the concession stand of New York’s leading movie house, Film Forum, is a tray of thick-cut banana bread slices: each buttery slab lying in state, neatly shellacked in cellophane. The more intriguing packaging detail, though, is the sign in front of them bearing an endorsement by philosopher Jacques Derrida, from his visit in 2002 — an empathetic “I love this banana bread!” According to the Times Magazine, Derrida declined offers of refreshment but changed his mind, eyes “lit up”, when he saw someone else eating a slice. So effusive was the experience, that reporter Joel Stein was ordered to document the (in his words) “electric moment”. “You can write that,” Derrida declared — despite being reticent with all other insights.
If anything bears equivalent banana-based lore as the Derrida banana bread to Singaporeans, it is kek pisang, or the national ‘banana bread’. Stocked in supermarkets and local confectioneries and gifted for big and small occasions, it is a treat whose mundanity rears a bone-deep kinship that a rarefied dish could never achieve. While butter-based banana cakes are sometimes called kek pisang, the name mostly refers to the distinctive egg sponge-based banana cake. It is both visually and texturally distinct: above, an even brown crust; and below, a soft and plush crumb that wobbles under the prod of a fork. Yet the sponge has a certain gravitas to it from the black threads of banana. Absent are the traditional values and hierarchies of Western banana bread: no warming spices, like cinnamon and cardamom; no enrichment of lactic tang through sour cream, yoghurt, or buttermilk. Demoted are calefare like chocolate, nuts, and streusel. It is, fundamentally, a purist cake; shining primarily on the flavour of banana. Not just any banana, but local pisang varieties, with their distinct ambrosial depths of flower and candy. It lingers in a rich film over your fingers, a fragrant postscript trailing something always gone too soon.
I’ve long been bothered with how I would fulfil Derrida’s mission to “write that”, in the context of kek pisang. How to articulate this creature and its culinary thrall? And — both in an age of tangibly eroding heritage, and as a vegan baker concerned with planetary health: how do I make a version that can be sustained into the future?
Up till the late 1920s, most ‘banana cake’ recipes in Western cookbooks called for the incorporation of sliced bananas only, over the top or in between layers. It was only in the 1930s that recipes started familiarising American bakers to the notion of mashing bananas directly into batter. PJ Hamel, food writer at King Arthur Baking, cites two events which precipitate this change: the Great Depression, where frugal mindsets sought to plumb overripe (‘rotting’ bananas) for maximum utility instead of discarding them; and the mass manufacturing, and hence new nationwide availability, of chemical leaveners like baking powder and soda. The earliest found evidence of mashed banana in cake and quickbread, so far, appears in a banana nut bread recipe from the 1933 Pillsbury Balanced Recipes cookbook.
Compared to the economic and industrial context which greatly colours its Western counterpart, the genesis of the kek pisang seems to be mostly out of organic creative whimsy. The first print-disseminated trace of kek pisang I can find, online, is in a 1961 article published in the Malaysian newspaper Berita Harian: a recipe for ‘kek pisang rasa-nya’. True to its name — a celebration banana cake — the recipe for a butter/margarine-based cake appears as part of a page spread of tips and tricks for hosting Hari Raya, with the author suggesting that it can be a switch up from regular or marble cakes. This sentiment of novelty is expanded upon in a 1979 ‘kek pisang kelapa’ recipe, also in Berita Harian: a toasted coconut banana cake that is bright with lemon zest and orange juice. What do you typically do when neighbours and friends gift you pisang? the author says in the headnote. Of course, you would fry it… but, what if this week you try a cake recipe with banana as one of the ingredients?
Later, writing in 1991 for The Straits Times, famed Singaporean culinary author Lee Geok Boi suggests that adding mashed bananas gives a “delightful difference” to “prosaic fare”, referring to the coterie of domestic batters like pancakes, cakes, and muffins. It seems that — at least via the throughline of how it was first presented to the public culinary imagination — the concept of kek pisang was born out of a genuine wish to expand the dexterity of the humble pisang in the home cook’s imagination: something funky fresh, even as we speak of it as canon now.
Hiap Joo bakery in Johor Bahru, founded by Hainanese baker Lim Boon Jan, is the pre-eminent purveyor of kek pisang. Their cake is the sweet object of desire inspiring cross-Causeway pilgrimages to Johor Bahru, humid queues under lasering sun; it is “ours”, insofar that its position is unshakeable in the Singaporean heart. The rectangular loaves are baked in a wood fire-fuelled charcoal oven, which has been operational since 1919 — and is one of the only 2 (from the original 6-7) charcoal ovens of this size and industrial output left in Malaysia. Using a charcoal oven means that bakers bake without temperature gauges — with only the seasoned estimate from decades of practice. Reviews constantly attribute this mode of baking for an addictive, distinctive aroma in the brown crust which elevates it above others — a tender dark patina holding the flavour ghost of char and flames.
Visitors, a large proportion of whom are Singaporeans, form queues out of the tiny blue-framed door daily and leave with bags filled with multistorey trays of cake. The symbiotic feed of Singaporeans and kek pisang enterprise is so established that — as a spokesperson of the bakery told 8World News in 2020 — up to 30-50% of the stores’ sales come from Singaporean visitors: a statistic bearing severe implications, in the context of the year. Over the COVID-19 lockdowns, when the borders shut, sales dropped by half: Hiap Joo earned just enough to scrape by and cover salaries. Yet, despite the physical barrier, the will was so strong that a way paved itself. A groupbuy operation based in the Pioneer neighbourhood, in the West of Singapore, became a tangential Hiap Joo dripfeed in lieu of direct contact. A food importer brought the cakes in and distributed them at almost a threefold hike in price. Still, the informal national virtue of Stomach held an outsize lead over its peers, Stinginess/Spectacle: all slots for purchase sold out, again and again.
In the spirit of DIY which possessed the population en masse under stay home orders, home-bakers took to recreating the cake at home. I talked to two bloggers whose recipes were most popular online. There is Sue, the face of baking blog Casa du Duchess, whose kek pisang recipe has been cited as the definitive twin of Hiap Joo by more recent recipes and attempts at recreation, on blogs and various social media channels. Describing that the Hiap Joo kek pisang is “no less than what a perfect banana cake would be”, Sue explains on her blog that her recipe was created out of a desire to enjoy the cake when she was working in the UK. She tells me, via email, that she usually prefers a denser and richer banana loaf for everyday eating, rather than the “soft taste and cotton texture” of Asian banana cake — but was pretty used to experimenting with recipes as a hobby, and hence didn’t take too long to reach a golden formula.
Then there is Dr Leslie Tay, the face behind the food blogging enterprise ieatishootipost, whose old-school banana cake recipe has amassed over 130 comments on his site, and 200k video views on YouTube. As a self-identified “not an expert” baker, Dr Leslie tells me over the phone that his recipe is the result of over 40 cakes and a litany of woes: too much baking powder caused one to explode, another caved in; many simply didn’t look right. He doggedly tweaked the proportion of bananas and eggs, adding condensed milk, even, to correct the felt dryness of many Western recipes. He is currently sitting on a new formula — his best yet — and is tight-lipped on the exact details of the recipe, other than letting slip that he uses two specific varieties of local pisang (he coyly deflects any prodding as to which, exactly).
It seems irrefutable that the kek pisang, most prominently represented in the Hiap Joo kek pisang, is magnetic — with such a potent, almost Proustian impact upon the lives it has touched, inspiring both queues and kitchen quests. But how to locate the genesis of this singular cake, combining Western baking with local fruit?
Kek pisang, or Asian-style banana cake, uses what is broadly known as the “whole egg direct method” (全蛋直接法) to Chinese bakers, where eggs are whipped into foam. But Hiap Joo approaches this in a deeply striking way. Mountains of whole peeled pisang berangan — a local variety of bananas — are tossed into a glistening yolk-stippled pool of whole, cracked eggs, like some kind of clickbait omelette. Pisang berangan, also known as ang bak jio (“red-fleshed bananas” in the Hokkien dialect), are slightly tart with a floral sweetness, almost pineapple-y, and have a jellied bite. These are the traditional go-to for cakes: favoured for their fragrance, low water content, and the nuanced acidity behind the sugar, which sets them apart from others. Industrial sized whisk attachments briskly whip the egg and banana mixture until they revolve in an ethereal, mousse-like foam. When the whisk is lifted, the frothy whipped egg pours from the spokes like double cream; this volumization is, in itself, a miraculous feat.
Overripe bananas are usually called for in banana cake recipes, suggesting a fruit with well-spotted (if not fully black) skins: more a bruised crescent of near-fermenting pulp, than distinct yellow flesh. However, the Hiap Joo bakers noticed that the soggy bananas actually hindered the rise of the cake — hence, they switched to “just ripe” fruit, as recounted in a Our Grandfather Story video.
To help make sense of this banana-egg foam, I approached heritage baking authority, teacher, and cookbook author Christopher Tan. He suggests that the Hiap Joo kek pisang is akin to a “modified genoise”. The genoise is a sponge cake reliant on whipping whole eggs to ribbon stage: a foam less stiff than what pure egg whites would achieve, compared to say, a chiffon — another Asian favourite. But the genoise receives two boons from the higher proportion of yolk: a richer crumb from the fat, and added strength from the emulsification properties of the yolk lecithin, which enforces the structural integrity of the egg foam. Christopher explains that the fibre and polysaccharide fractions of the banana further thicken and stabilise the eggs, on top of adding sweetness.
In my hunting down of similar batters, I came across only one other that could be kin to our kek pisang: the old-school banana cake from Chimei Bakery (吉美蛋糕), in the Qishan district of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Videos online show massive whisks beating basins of whole eggs into foam, before whole bananas are added; though slightly extended, the method is essentially the same. The cake looks almost identical to Hiap Joo’s, foamy and evenly brown, albeit baked in a tube mould.
Digging further, I found that Chimei Bakery’s banana cake lauds what is local, much like the kek pisang; but its history belies a specific strategic thrust. Founded in 1968, the bakery started making banana cakes as a way of promoting the local bananas grown in Qishan, which are a Cavendish Pei-Chiao variety (a modified strain of the Cavendish) – marketing it as a natural way to have a healthier (lower sugar, lower oil) cake, and touting the inherent nutritional benisons of the fruit, under the larger purview of developing the local banana industry. This runs in contrast to loftier national aims for the banana, which is Taiwan’s most economically significant export fruit. The Taiwan Banana Research Institute, aiming to market the banana as a premium item for which consumers will pay a commensurate price, believes that a luxury product would encourage banana consumption: modelled after how the famous Taiwanese pineapple cakes proved to be so lucrative for the pineapple industry. Chimei Bakery’s banana cake, however, professes nothing highfalutin and exclusive; it exists as a humble icon of regional pride.
The case of Taiwan’s ‘kek pisang’ is a microcosm which reveals a wider chasm plaguing the banana industry all over the globe: that of local communities versus larger economic ambition. This dominant tension haunts the banana at every step of the way, and left me wondering: how interchangeable are local pisang with a generic Cavendish banana from the supermarket in kek pisang, if at all?
In July 2023, I found myself back in my family kitchen for the first time in nearly 2 years: freshly arrived from England on a trip home, with the task of making a vegan kek pisang ahead of me. I have my reservations with aquafaba — the liquid in the cooking of white beans such as chickpeas and cannellini, able to be attained by draining tins of those legumes — as a wholesale vegan egg substitute in baking: it has no flavour, no structure under the duress of heat, and cannot be a straightforward translation for the qualities of an egg. But it seemed inevitable that I would need to rely on at least some of its propensity for holding air, if I were to recreate the foamy sponge.
The pisang berangan, when I mash it, is the familiar gorgeous golden I associate with local bananas. I waited till the fruit is nicely leoparded, but still firm under a finger’s prod; a little beyond what Hiap Joo would call for. It smelled of honey, and in a quick taste to gauge sweetness has the slight acidity like you would get in an apple or apricot, but in a more verdant tenor. The fruit, when pulped with a fork, has a fibrous substance to it: a satiny, syrupy stretch, instead of the soft and formless mash of applesauce.
My first try, using all vegetable oil for fat, actually exceeded expectations: it rose tall, with a nice deep brown top. It bounced so well, for aquafaba, that I excitedly took a video. My family and I ate it ponderously over the next few days: the banana flavour was good, and it was a delicious cake; but my mother said it reminded her of huat kueh (Chinese steamed cakes). I agreed: not inherently a bad thing, but there was a thinness to the flavour, the wheat and neutral oil too forward. The cake was also not mixed very well, so careful was I to avoid knocking out the precious air in my whipped aquafaba: a little streaky, though indiscernible through taste.
I tried another attempt, using cake flour like some of the conventional recipes for kek pisang mandate; and switched to melted vegan butter, with slightly tweaked ratios. I incorporated another technique: reverse creaming, to help hold a seamless crumb, and aid the incorporation of everything into a smooth batter. This was encouragingly better, though denser a crumb than I would like — my family comments on the improvement in taste, aided by the milkiness of the vegan butter.
Thinking that success would be third time charmed, I managed to put in one last trial the day before my flight. I used a combination of fat, a mix of pisang at different stages of ripeness, and reverted to all purpose flour for better structure. The cake, in the oven, rose the tallest it ever had, with the most beautiful browning complexion. To my horror — at the end — the power for the small box oven malfunctioned for a while. I scrambled to open the oven door — a poor move — and although I managed to cook the cake through, there is an unforgivable line of density at the base. My heart sunk at the fragrant, failed square. But it was time to go: I left home, and its pisang berangan, unfulfilled.
Back in the UK, I debated whether I should even try a kek pisang, without access to pisang berangan. But when I chanced upon a bunch of deeply spotted bananas, priced for 45p, in the last chance bin of my local grocer, I decided that I should give it a go.
This particular batch of Cavendish, when I mashed it, was simultaneously powdery and watery, nearly white instead of the brassy yellow of pisang. Sweet, yet in a thin, marshy way. There was a tannic quality to the taste, and I felt a pang of foreboding at how the sadness of the fruit had become almost a coagulant, a furred miasma in my mouth. I mixed everything as per my latest formula. The cake took a whopping 90 minutes to cook through. When I sliced it open, I was not expecting a winner, but was stunned at how the fine cake crumb around the sides just baulked into a pure uncooperation of grey stodge in the middle. Almost cartoonishly cementlike, like the Staedtler erasers in my pencil box; looking at the piece in my hand, I was reminded of Dr Leslie’s 40 cake trials by fire. The only element I had changed was the move from pisang berangan to Cavendish.
The 2022 FAOSTAT states that Singapore remains the top importer of Cavendish bananas in the ASEAN region, a title it has claimed for years. This statistic says less about our consumption of bananas as a whole but rather how outsized our Cavendish dependency is, outweighing far larger neighbours. If we are to look at the dominance of supermarket inventory over our tastes and preferences, an article in Today reported that many people preferred to “shop at modern supermarkets” over the “traditional wet markets [which had] lost their popularity and patronage”, greatly slimming our encounters with a non-Cavendish banana. In a recent trip back home, browsing the chilly aisles across the supermarket chains, I could find pisang berangan only occasionally at Sheng Siong, once at Fairprice; other than that, there were only small boughs of pisang nangka for goreng pisang, and some premium priced Thai nam wa bananas (pisang awak), amidst an overwhelming sea of imported Cavendish.
In a survey conducted by the NEA in 2018, 39 percent of Singaporeans had not visited any wet markets in a year, a number which has surely continued its trend of steady increase in these 6 years. All this only further limits our chances of encountering local pisang and centres the Cavendish in our culinary imagination; the singularity of the word “banana” has made our index of native “pisang” alien, by slowly boxing its meaning to one particular cultivar. In Singapore, if a recipe called for bananas, how many of us think of the catfish whiskers of the pisang berangan, the stiff plantain-like girth of the pisang tanduk, or the delicate outstretched pinkies of pisang emas? Do you, instead, think of the crisp Cavendish in the supermarket chill, little vinyl name badges of DOLE and CHIQUITA and SUMIFRU?
And it isn’t entirely our fault; the inflexibility in, and homogenous image of, the word banana is calculated. When the banana fruit started integrating into the Western diet as part of continental breakfasts, there was such demand that it resulted in the “banana republic”, a pejorative specifically coined to describe the colonial mechanism whereby massive swathes of Caribbean and Central America land were bought by exploitative US companies to meet Western demand. The fruit companies, as major landowners, used local governments as political pawns; and local communities suffered under low pay. There were bloody uprisings, such as the 1928 banana massacre, where striking workers were killed en masse to preserve US economic interests — and this would be only the beginning of the labour woes and deep human cost which would plague the banana into modernity.
The interpolation of Western economic interest, forcibly cohering the banana to a commodifying cycle of profit-maximisation, also spelled ecological disaster. There is, of course, the carbon footprint of air miles taken to transport so many bananas that it is a staple fruit in just about every continent. But the practice itself is fundamentally corrosive: banana corporations grow a single variety on massive scapes of land, a deeply extractive practice called monocropping which rendered the banana plants susceptible to breed disease, and did — to grievous result. The first strain of Panama disease (TR4), a fungal ‘banana cancer’, functionally wiped out the first mass-imported banana, the Gros Michel, by 1960; a later mutation now threatens the Cavendish.
In a Vice video filmed in the Philippines, from where most of Southeast Asia import the Cavendish, author of the groundbreaking Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World Dan Koeppel stands with the Vice reporter amidst massive rashes of ashen land. These are the strangulated ‘banana factories’, destroyed by rice hull fires used to kill infected Cavendish banana plants en masse; the charcoal earth gory with bright purple disinfectant, in a desperate yet futile attempt to quarantine the cancer.
The Philippine government first opened up uncultivated areas for banana plantations such as Mindanao Island under the 1930s land reform program by President Quezon1. In a publication by Food First, a worker in Mindanao describes the environmental devastation occurred by the intrusion of monocropping onto the landscape. Before, was a forest full of marang, jackfruit, mango and pomelo trees; plenty of monkeys, wild boars, birds, carabaos. “Now, there are none. Even frogs cannot survive the banana farms,” he says. Just as it has eradicated the flora and fauna in the area, the program has also displaced the indigenous population from their ancestral lands; the tension between settlers from the North and the Moro and Lumad populations was one of the roots of the major Moro conflict in Mindanao, with political unrest which persists even today.
It is true that there are successful cakes made with the Cavendish; I have no doubt that they are delicious. But I think of how PJ Hamel wrote, in his banana bread article, that the typical recipe for each decade reflected its era in some way – bulking wheat bran for Depression-era thrift; the austere single egg loaf in the 40s for wartime rationing. In this era, when climate change has become unignorable in our daily lives, I would love to imagine the kek pisang as a small step in embodying a more equitable, planetary health-centric way of life. And perhaps this would be fundamentally impossible with a Cavendish; even a rescued one would carry the flavour of all its environmental and social baggage.
In a Straits Times article called “Dissertation on Malayan Fruits. A Woman’s Note-Book”, from July 1936, a writer called Amy Nedd passionately demystifies all kinds of local fruit, addressing the British citizens settling into new homes across the region. “And why stick to the common “market” varieties of banana such as the “Embon”, “Mas”, etc., when there are many other equally good or even better kinds?” she demands. Nedd tells her audience to “Ask for the "Pisang Rasa","Pinang","Susu" or "Rajah"” which are available in the villages and kampongs, prodding them to beyond the zones of immediate comfortable inhabitation. She tells them not to forget the cooking bananas like “Tandok” and “Abu”; suggests frying bananas instead of eating them raw; roasting them in the embers of a fire, “like a potato in its "jacket"”. Christopher tells me that in times past, cooks got their pisang from the wet market or their kampung backyard, which would mean that they had to use whatever was available —making them especially sensitive to how different pisang types behaved differently, in the kitchen. How much of that has been lost in the slippage of fluid multiple pisang into fraught singular banana; how much do we resemble the British settlers to whom Nedd addressed her missive, instead of people who proclaim belonging to the land?
We who call ourselves Singaporeans — who proclaim an identity binding us in mutual community and stewardship — would do well to inhabit the spirit of curiosity Nedd championed to foreigners, in her time. The Latin root of the word curious, after all, is cura, meaning care. To witness the destruction caused by banana monocropping is to be full of grief. To then care about it, instead of shying away, is to be curious about what else there is; is to break ourselves out of the increasingly chokehold of supermarket hegemony. To care, we must be curious, and by doing so, take up the responsibility of protection. Care means valuing people and planet welfare, over a long costly chain of labour and land struggle.
What did banana mean to local bakers and cooks, years ago? It was the entire pokok pisang, the tree growing in your full view in your backyard, with its wave-lipped leaves: the branch enjoining fruit to the daun pisang, irreplaceably essential to local kitchens as a vessel for presentation or to imbue flavour, through smoking and steaming. We knew, and used, the whole plant well. The word pisang never lives in the singular: like the plant it branches outwards, extends to abundance. It is uniquely yoked to the anatomy of the plant, the intangible family tree of cultivars; an intersecting tessellation embedded in our local cooking and eating heritage. To move in it fluently is to allow us to be freer in our modes of kitchen expression.
In the modern world, thinking through the word pisang allows us to begin where the word banana falters. In the word pisang, we inherit an entire vocabulary of culinary memory. The distinct apple-honey flavour and custardy bite in jemput-jemput, the banana fritters also called cekedok pisang and kuih kudok. The pisang merah in their rust-coloured coats, the green-gloved pisang muda. How the pisang jari buaya – ‘crocodile’s fingers’ in Malay – was termed thus due to the snout-like nibbed ends which identified it in a heartbeat, used in gulai pisang for its plantain-like starchiness. The pisang lemak manis and pisang emas, both little ladyfingers distinguishable only through a tactile proficiency of the fruit: in his book The Way of Kueh, Christopher suggests measuring it against your index finger as a way to differentiate lemak manis (about 8.5cm on average) from emas (about 6cm). The fruit is literally anatomical to our national understanding: the pisang is as intimate as a palm.
And even before the kek pisang, we already had our own ‘banana cakes’ — the recipes within the multicultural fabric of kuih-muih. Christopher shares with me pisang-centred recipes from cookbooks in his personal collection, noting that — across the books and from his own reading — authors took care to specify the kinds of local bananas they used, and their condition. A recipe for kue pisang ketan from the 1991 edition of “Semarak Kue-kue Tradisional” by Indonesia’s Femina magazine, for instance, asked for “pisang kepok/pisang raja yang matang sekali”, the ‘sekali’ (very) emphasising the advanced stage of maturity and ripeness. Another, for an Acehnese kue called timpan, calls for “pisang raja yang tua dan matang”, meaning “big and ripe”. Christopher even tells me of a Western-style 'banana bread’ recipe from a 1958 YWCA recipe book, which called for “3 bananas (1 cup mashed)”: the “bananas” must have been local pisang, as even small Cavendishes have measured far more.
In the Philippines, there thrives an indigenous world of saging, with its own vibrant vocabulary — which, in mentions of “banana”, often gets lost behind its homogeneous repute of being the largest production ground for the Cavendish. John Sherwin S. Felix runs a Filipino agriculture-focused Instagram @lokalpediaph, which archives endangered, artisanal and heirloom Philippine ingredients; from his page, I have been learning about saging. The Saging Morado, a dessert banana variety with maroon and sunset-hued skin; the Saging na Bungulan, a dessert banana variety which stays green even when ripe, only produced in smallhold backyard plantings. The Saging Mudo, a dwarf variety of Saba bananas native to the region of Visayas, is listed under the Ark of Taste's catalogue of endangered heritage foods — best eaten when barely ripe, it is typically boiled and eaten with fermented fish, native chillies and citrus as a snack. This stage of ripeness is so intimate to eating life, that it has been codified in language: each mouthful is maligat, the sappy stickiness and glutinous bite residing between chewy and firm.
I think about what it meant for someone to come up with maligat, the need to codify that repeated experience of eating through language, so they could fluently pass around these shared memories in mutual understanding. Like how maligat exists in the nexus of Tagalog, our love for food can never find full articulation, be expressed in that full animation of life, until we rehome it (and ourselves) in the ecosystem of life it belongs to. Like how we should fight to recenter – literally rehome – the world and culinary meaning of pisang, in the word banana; for it has slipped behind the mask of Cavendish.
“Since we are in SEA, among so many varieties, we should be king!” Dr Leslie says. “In the West, there’s only Cavendish; we have so many kinds, and should make a better banana cake. Eat the pisang raja alongside the normal Cavendish — it will blow you away!” Shiva and Dr Leslie are on the same page: abundance is already within reach — it can be cultivated by re-learning how to eat and cook with nature, not against it.
How to write about kek pisang, to preserve that pleasure? If, like Derrida, we “love this banana bread” and claim it for ourselves, then surely it must involve a reclamation of the fruit as a whole: to be uncompromising on valuing the pisang, so as to liberate the banana, and all who are yoked under the cancerous homogeneity of monoculture. It may take more time to seek out local fruit, since society is increasingly arranged this way; some might talk of privilege. But surely there is no moment, as seen in the TR4 ticking time-bomb, for self-flagellation or succumbing with a hapless shrug to the reality of conventional food production models. We should instead be cheered by the incentive to create a standard of communal luxury that is available to everyone. If local food is increasingly inaccessible to people, then let us push against the system which robs workers of their labour and land, by investing in community food production which nourishes both its people and the planet. In his book ‘Slow Food’, Geoff Andrews writes that preserving biodiversity is crucial for any future at all, but it is “also crucial for the preservation of pleasure”. It is not sacrifice but pleasure, sweet like Hiap Joo kek pisang — a singular banana cake — which can buoy us into the future.
You have always tasted this tree; you grew up in the shadow of its leaves. Let us plant more of it, take refuge in the shade. It has gotten so hot in the afternoon, these few years.
Lin is a Singaporean writer and home baker, who specialises in alternate baking. She currently resides in York, England. You can find her on Instagram at @tumblinbumblincrumblincookie, and her recipes through her newsletter on Patreon.
Guardian, E.A. (2003). “Impact of access to land on food security and poverty: the case of Philippine agrarian reform.”. Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives - Réforme agraire, colonisation et coopératives agricoles - Reforma agraria, colonización y cooperativas. Retrieved from https://www.fao.org/4/j0415t/j0415t08.htm#fn11