A day at the hawker centre

We frequent a particular hawker centre for lunch. The place is never crowded and it has enough variety of food stalls to keep us coming back.

Today, as has always been our habit, we sat at one end of a bench table that is in the outer aisle of the food centre. Today, as is usually the case, we watch strange people doing strange and oftentimes disgusting things.

Today I watched with revulsion the man at the next bench table spit prawn tails and what-not on the table as he plowed through his plate piled high with food. He then got up and left the table littered with food leftovers. A small flock of sparrows immediately descended upon the exposed detritus of his lunch.

A woman soon came along and plonked herself and her huge plate of food at the far end of the bench. She briefly looked in the direction of the sparrows having their merry feast. Then turned her full attention back to her own feast.

The cleaners appeared within two minutes to clear the mess. The birds took a brief flight and perched themselves on the rails patiently awaiting for their turn again as soon as the woman leaves her pile of debris.

It has been 10 days since the disastrous food poisoning episode at Geylang Serai which resulted in 2 deaths and over a 100 people taken ill. The breach in hygiene was traced to cross contamination of foods stored in a refrigerator shared by several stall holders.

There was plenty of finger pointing as to who did not do an adequate job of protecting the public health. There were so many reasons leading up to this unfortunate incident of food poisoning - improper food handling, careless food storage, rats and bird droppings, sloppy health inspection. The list is long.

And nobody thought to blame the customers. The ones with such filthy personal habits that all efforts to keep the public eating place clean and safe are futile.