A Free Lunch
1.
When I picture my secondary school best friend’s home, I see the dining table topped with basins of beansprouts. We would pass the curl-tipped mounds on the way to her room to study. Her parents were school canteen vendors: There would always be food prep for the coming days on the tables. After long, tiring workdays, the tails of the beansprouts still needed plucking; bouquets of bok choy had to be shucked into singular stems.
A local canteen vendor shortage has now seen a pivot toward central kitchens run by catering corporations, rolled out in thirteen schools: a model that prioritises efficiency, and nutrient-standardised bentos. Students select their meals online, the food is cooked in the morning, and then transferred to lockers fifteen minutes before recess for collection, with only one or two canteen stalls left active. But what has been forgotten is how the Singaporean canteen vendor, the very anchor of the canteen food system, is a food worker with no equivalent. The mirage of effortlessness and template menus in the central kitchen model is at odds with how canteen workers have long anchored a crucial domestic space that uniquely combines food labor and care work: one that inducts young Singaporeans into a collective sense of the gastronomic, sociocultural self.
The canon of local canteen food—simply the norm, for locals—presents incredible cultural variety and idealistic choice. Kids select from options like nasi lemak and chicken rice, albeit with reduced salt and oil; homestyle dishes, like stir-fried macaroni or rice with side dishes; fusion items like seaweed chicken and nacho cheese. Cooking in this utilitarian yet creative mode, canteen vendors endeavor to feed physically and mentally active youth well. This diversity simply felt indelible, reflective of a country where national identity is predicated upon multicultural foodways, a record of the migrant communities who have made it home.
And, presiding over up to two-thirds of a child’s daily intake, five days per week, vendors soon recognize students’ names and orders. Coming face-to-face with the cooks themselves, it’s always clear who has undertaken the labor of cooking your food: thus, it’s always clear whom you should thank for each meal.
The canteen lies in the belly of the school: situated at the lowest floor, often in a recessed pit. There are steps, as well as a wheelchair ramp, with a coursing slope. The classic furniture, with its unmistakable fibreglass tops in different crayon colors, is shiny like Smarties. Long, communal benches run down the middle of the space, and round tables pepper each side.
These spaces are frontiers of food access for the schoolchildren, and they are segmented by queue lines made with strips of tape on the floor or metal guardrails. These lead to the windows, framed beneath large signboards bearing each stall name. Sometimes these are as self-evident as Western Delights or Japanese Oishi; or carry a maternal affect, like Nek’s Kitchen (Grandmother’s Kitchen); or use some endearing wordplay, like Yum Mee or Wild Wild West. This is essentially a replica of typical Singaporean hawker centres, miniaturized into a row of anywhere between five to seven or eight stalls. The very first canteens in the 1950s started out this way, when schools started giving concessions to itinerant food hawkers to trade within school tuckshops in exchange for a small rent. Subsequent regulations like the 1966 New Hawker Code, which confined the trade of “school hawkers” within school tuckshops, formalized this arrangement.
Like hawkers, they’re quintessential micro-entrepreneurs: cook, cashier, dishwasher, sales representative, and business manager all in one. But the traditional hawker economics of bulk purchasing, price control, and footfall do not translate for a single-stall setup within a school compound, inaccessible to the general public. Prices of the food are subject to the school’s approval; ingredient costs are typically shaped by supermarket rates, with 15 to 40 percent markup compared to wholesale retailers. Although rent is nominal, ranging from $5 to 15 monthly, stallowners absorb the compounded effects of unseen costs: detergent, insect repellent, masks, gloves, cookware, equipment repair, gas, and rubbish disposal.
This comes alongside month-long school holidays and home-based e-learning days, which structure vendors’ livelihoods similarly to a seasonal income model. Wages are also circumscribed by the fluctuating appetites of the school cohort, meaning that there’s always a cap to how much vendors could ever earn, on any given day, no matter how much they work. They could also face sudden periods of emergency shutdown if school goes online: when pollution standards reach unhealthy levels due to seasonal haze conditions, or there are unprecedented developments, like the pandemic lockdowns. It’s no surprise that juggling secondary gigs becomes almost mandatory: during those lockdowns, many vendors pivoted to operating as home-based businesses, some still operational today. However, taking on even more work is challenging for vendors in their fifties and sixties. Furthermore, they are not eligible for the Central Provident Fund, a savings and pension safety net for the majority of working Singaporeans.
2.
Crafting a canteen menu also poses significant complexities. Vendors continually pivot in adherence to Healthy Meals in Schools Programme guidelines, which aim to reduce fat, sugar, and sodium in canteen food, and emphasizes a “balanced diet.” In 2023, guidelines stipulated that cooking sauces and cooking fat now had to be Healthier Choice–certified—a local nutritional labelling scheme where brands with “better” nutritional grades are identified by pyramids on their labels. This compounds upon earlier regulations for creating “healthier meal options,” such as adding brown rice to white rice and providing a certain serving of fruit with each set meal. Whole-grain products, fresh produce, and Healthier Choice–certified ingredients are significantly more expensive. But vendors cannot increase prices without consent from schools; thus, they often bear the price hikes from these menu tweaks. Currently, most stalls offer fruit free of charge to students: bowls of apples, orange wedges.
“With sharp increases in utilities and no subsidies, the current price ceiling does not reflect the economic reality of 2026,” canteen vendor Ct. tells me frankly. Ct. runs a Malay cuisine stall alongside her husband, at a secondary school canteen in central Singapore. On non-school days, she runs a home-based business with a rotating menu of traditional cookies, sandwiches, and a blend of fusion and traditional Malay cuisine, to supplement her canteen income. “Healthier ingredients are costlier, yet our meals are capped at $3.30, including fruit,” she says. “We operate only about 18 days a month… [making] it extremely difficult to cover overheads.”
The increasingly dense matrix of guidelines that each vendor must now navigate is clearly an attempt to shape the diets of children, but it’s passed down in plain edicts, without meaningful support for vendors to absorb these mandates into sustainable operations. The emphasized shift toward the inclusion of whole grains, vegetables, and fruit is not unreasonable. Yet it seems vastly unreasonable that the cost is frequently borne by the vendor.
The current central kitchen model, supposedly an efficient solution, is entirely unhelpful in cohering flavors and food groups. Online, people have pointed out the bland appearance of various catered meals in sample photos, likening them to “combat rations” and “prison food,” the trays filled with uniformly pallid vegetables, lumpy proteins in viscous sauce, brown rice or wholemeal pasta. An operating officer for the central kitchens was quoted as saying that “a dietitian will work with its chefs to find ways to make vegetables appealing to children, for instance, by including colourful vegetables or dressing them in a tasty sauce.” Relying on colors and out-saucing the flavor of vegetables are not sustainable, or even convincing, ways to move the palates of children.
What of the abundance inherent in the local fare that many canteen vendors whip up daily? I didn’t understand eggplant until I had it at school; at home, it was rarely cooked and when it was, it would be braised in soy sauce until stickily indistinct. The sambal eggplant I chose on a whim, smothered with a genteel child-friendly chilli, was brightly piquant: oblique-cut wedges of snappy skin over creamy flesh. I was first introduced to sayur lodeh through the canteen — a Malay dish of vegetables stewed in coconut milk and an aromatic spice base. It was an epiphany: nutty long beans simultaneously tender and crunchy; naturally sweet carrot and cabbage blooming luminous, against cream and spice. A certain quota of vegetables injects a certain quota of nutrients. But eating that same quota of vegetables, in the sound and color of local cuisines, feels like a lifestyle.
In a report by Channel News Asia investigating the reception to the catered bentos, cameras zoom in to the food waste bin at a school. Students tip near-full trays into the abyss: on average, half of every bento was discarded. Wincing upon tasting the vegetables in a bento, the journalist goes directly to the director of the Healthy Meals in School guidelines. The director admitted that she hadn’t personally tried any of the catered meals.
The cameras pan to the melamine plates from a canteen stall at a dishware return point, wiped completely clean.
3.
In one of the anecdotes shared by Ct., a teacher exclaims at the price of asam pedas ikan (a sour-spicy fish dish). “The ikan is really expensive, eh?” they remark.
“The market rate is expensive,” Ct. responds. “Other schools sell ikan at $3 to 4. Here, I’m running a charity, teacher,” she jokes.
According to the latest Hunger Report from 2022, a nationally representative study on food insecurity, around 10.4 percent of Singaporean households are either moderately or severely food insecure; it’s a number that has surely risen along with inflationary pressures in recent years, where up to 42 percent of local households have had to lower their grocery budgets. Another study found that, among the majority of Singaporeans who live in rented public housing, almost 15 percent reported their children were not eating enough because they “just couldn’t afford enough food.” Children are the most vulnerable group in society; therefore, the cooks who work in spaces for children naturally assume vital roles within infrastructures of care—now more than ever, a deeply sobering responsibility.
In the context of food scarcity and hunger, food allocation becomes a moral act; as food provisioners, vendors find themselves at the frontlines of food insecurity. Providing for up to two thirds of every student’s daily intake, five days a week, vendors often prioritise ethical intervention over profit, choosing to be part of the students’ social safety net. This no longer belongs to the realm of hospitality other food producers operate within; this is care work, a public good that, in the site of the canteen, finds a merger with small-scale individual enterprises and the goodwill of the private citizens who run them.
Many vendors absorb prices over worries that students are eating less or consuming snack foods over balanced meals, or give out food freely in good faith, with no certainty that students will or can pay them back. “My husband and I often provide extra portions or free meals to students who lack sufficient pocket money,” Ct. says. “We do this for the students’ well-being, not for high profit margins, which remain razor-thin.” Students have come up to her specifically because she allows them to eat first and pay later if they have the ability to do so. “It’s important that you have a full tummy while doing revision,” she tells them.
It’s true that many vendors enter the profession specifically because of how meaningful it is: years of students essentially raised by their cooking, which lays a daily groundwork toward their thriving. Yet the unpaid care work of vendors, as an informal kin network for students, is intangible and unremunerated within the economics of the canteen vendor trade. “I return to the canteen because I truly value the connection with the students,” Ct. emphasizes. “However, this is a gruelling schedule to manage alongside my family responsibilities.” After the long day at the canteen, Ct.’s “second shift” begins at home: caring for her young child, coaching her children through their work, and preparing for the upcoming weekend cooking for her home-based business.
In 2022, the Ministry of Education (MOE) was asked in parliament about what they would do to support school canteen vendors to “sustain an adequate income for their livelihood” in light of inflationary pressures. MOE responded that they “carefully strike a balance” to ensure canteen food meets nutritional needs and stays affordable, while vendors still earn “a meaningful income.” No existing literature suggests what an “adequate” or “meaningful” income for vendors could be.
The other mention of vendor support comes from a bulletin released last year on providing healthy and affordable student meals, with a subsection dedicated to canteen vendor support. The section reiterates the maxims of low rental rates, favourable utility charges, and “periodic reviews of the recommended meal price range to reflect current market condition,” with potential for “gradual increments” in menu prices.
In short, other than monitoring existing conditions, the current template for vendor support is raising the prices of the food sold. The section referring to plans for addressing vendor shortages is entirely dedicated to explaining the central kitchen model. Nothing of improving the livelihoods of existing stallholders, a baseline wage, or easing entry into the profession itself, to make it more welcoming to newcomers. One can’t help but feel that this kind of policymaking—merely reflecting the current state of events, instead of trying to ease the difficult lives of existing vendors—is cynical. Ct. tells me that, on one hand, “many adults still expect ‘vintage’ pricing” at insufficient rates for her to sustain operations; on the other hand, students are immensely grateful whenever Ct. steps in to provide them food they cannot afford. The cost of living crisis is severe, and vendors often patch the gap despite living off excruciatingly slim means themselves.
Alongside the canteen vendors’ material struggles, the long view of a life without school canteens reveals much at stake. “The canteen allows you to listen to your body and its appetite, how you get to know your friends’ preferences, and understand a diversity of food opinions,” Yeo Min, co-founder of local nonprofit the Museum of Food, says. In regularly running hands-on workshops introducing heritage food to students of all ages, she’s witnessed how their early conceptions of food are especially vulnerable to the conditions that are first present. “You have the option of buying small snacks, like a hot dog… asking the auntie for extra rice, or extra noodles. With fixed catered food portions, they don’t connect to their hunger in the moment,” she says, “and can’t explore what feels good in the now.”
For Yeo Min, the catalogue of local canteen fare cultivates an understanding of local foodscapes, a form of cultural maintenance that anchors them within a sense of solidity, against the constant barrage of evanescent digital trends. “The canteen is physical, counter to all the digital influences that these generations are exposed to,” Min says. “If all that you want to eat are viral food trends first seen online, from different countries, and there’s nothing you crave in real life. Isn’t that sad?”
“There’s so little human connection to the food we eat, nowadays. Children associate food with QR codes on a menu and viral trends on their phone, rarely seeing the person behind the cooking,” says Min. “Less and less people frequent hawker centres, the only other place where you see aunties preparing and dishing the food in front of you. Now, they’ll have food that just comes out of a box.”
4.
In January 2026, fresh controversy arose around the bentos served at local junior college Hwa Chong Institution under their new central kitchen meal model, serviced by airline caterer SATS. Immediately after the first day of school, photos emerged: turquoise bento boxes with mixed grain rice, next to a pool of chunky orange sauce with white sediment and pallid peas; above, a spoonful of greens adorned by two crinkle-cut carrots, wading in translucent fluid. Taken anonymously, posted on Reddit, and riding on the heat of existing canteen discourse, it blazed across social platforms and independent media channels, making its way to formal news outlets.
Institutional response only further galvanized controversy. The school’s official statement in mainstream media outlets stated that the photo “does not accurately reflect the typical food offerings or portion standards,” only to be refuted by interviewed students. A public tussle followed: the school trying to hold its PR line, then students rising to speak out to enraged public support. WhatsApp screenshots documented a teacher warning their class against talking about the controversy. More screenshots from parent group chats alleged that students were punished with demerit points, in amounts reserved for major offenses—entailing corrective work orders and exclusion from awards, scholarships, and overseas trips—for talking to local newspapers about the quality of food.
A week from the fiasco’s start, students published an open letter through a local media platform to air “significant dissatisfaction in the student body,” in the hopes that the caterer and the school could work directly with students towards a “favourable solution.” The students stated that the catering model lacked support from the beginning, but was implemented despite “recurring feedback.” In fact, organized student pushback actually started as early as 2024, catalyzed by the first announcement of the central kitchen model. A Change.org petition, created by students, urged the school to reconsider the shift: citing sentiment across the school cohort on how the price, portions, and nutritional value were inconsistent with the students’ needs.
Under the Public Order Act in Singapore, a police permit is required for public assembly for cause-related events, circumscribing protests or demonstrations. While staying within parameters, the most recent fracas unconsciously builds upon a history of small-yet-determined instances of direct action, or coalition-based movements, specifically related to the provision and quality of food — for and by Singaporean students.
The 1970s and 1980s saw a smattering of student-organised canteen boycotts in junior colleges and polytechnics due to dissatisfaction at the price, quality, and quantity of food served. In 1971, the Singapore Polytechnic Student Union was able to call off their canteen boycott, after successful negotiations with the canteen operator for “improvement of service, quality of food and greater cleanliness.” Even teachers were moved to join the boycott in a particular case from 1976.
A 1989 boycott by students in Yishun Junior College began through word-of-mouth and photocopied sheets of paper that said “Boycott commences today” against high food prices and a declining quality of food. During this period, prior to the implementation of the Individual Stallholder Scheme that allowed canteen vendors to rent stalls directly from the school, many canteens were run by an anchor tenant or canteen operator—in this case, a company called Amori Pte Ltd—who monopolized operations and rented out the units within the canteen. Like the central kitchen caterers of today, these monopolistic structures consolidated market control, allowing them to easily raise costs or cut corners on food quality without immediate repercussions. The boycott acknowledged that the vendors, too, were unhappy: They couldn’t sell what they wanted or adjust the prices to meet the students in a shared vision for a good meal.
The throughline linking those movements to the Hwa Chong students’ insistence on speaking out is a silver lining. It demonstrates how the students consistently struggle to claim their autonomy in how and what they eat, and they are adamant that they deserve a food provisioning system which fulfills their sociocultural and personal needs. Both are deeply political acts. Their petitions are never simply about feeling full, but what a truly “adequate” meal symbolizes: mental wellbeing, morale, productivity, and health.
Students who persist in believing that eating well matters are arguing for an alternative future and a broad-based vision of collective wellness; they are refusing to capitulate to the logic of scarcity. This vision is crucial because—even as it is dependent on material resources, ultimately decided and allocated by the government—it isn’t something that can ever be enforced top-down; it is something that must be held tight, negotiated, and embodied on a communal basis.
5.
Word-of-mouth testimonies are the highest form of accolade when it comes to food; it’s the medium of endorsement that travels quickest, spurred by the velocity of its insider nature. And so it was for Uncle Pang, whose renown extended beyond CHIJ St. Nicholas Girls’ School. Many a friend to any St. Nicks girl would’ve heard of the affectionately termed “Orange Bowl uncle,” a vendor who served fishball noodles and variations of local mee, a regional noodle based dish, alongside his signature chilli. His cookery yielded effusive praise across a career exceeding three decades.
When he finally retired in 2022, a community circulated farewell note project culminated in a website overflowing with memories and well-wishes. Students reminisced about running to queue for his noodles and the crushing disappointment they felt when the coveted bowls rapidly sold out. How the ritual bowlfuls were a fundamental cornerstone of their taste memory: so utterly transformative that they sought to transmit the experience itself. An alumni, who’d sent her own daughters to the school, wrote: “Now, my two daughters love the taste of your noodles just like me! Sometimes, I even ask them to pack some back home, so I can relive the taste of my childhood.” Others even brought their husbands down to try the noodles.
The testaments to Uncle Pang’s tenancy reveal how profoundly relational the occupation of a canteen vendor is: the care work in his service of orange bowls, powerfully extending beyond the material consumption of the noodles. “Even though you went through a lot of health struggles, you said you’d continue cooking for the children, as long as you could still move,” a note on the website reads.
The kinship between the canteen vendors and students flows both ways, rooted in an understanding of canteen cooking as care work and the human urge toward reciprocity that is borne out of it. This is the “power of the care framework,” an infrastructure upheld by the vendors within the canteen space: one which, according to feminist economist Nancy Folbre, inspires “coalitions that bring together workers, consumers, and citizens around a vision of social responsibility that builds on family and community values of care for others.” When the canteen vendors embody that access to food with consideration for health and dignified eating should be a right and not a luxury, it’s only natural that the community who receives the care feels that the same standards should be conferred unto the vendors. Ten years ago, students from St. Joseph’s Institution International rallied around their Malay food vendor, who sold mee rebus in the canteen. Mdm Jamaliah was the sole breadwinner of her family and worked alone; after an accident which left her with a severe leg injury, she had to recover in a care home, unable to work. Groups of students organised various fundraisers—a car wash, a smoothie drive, a music busking event—at their own cost. In total, they raised over SGD $50,000 for Mdm Jamaliah, providing her with a fund for expenses not covered by insurance and social welfare schemes while she recovered.
Maintaining the school canteens and the infrastructure of care within them are inseparable from maintaining the vendors and cooks who form it. The food matters, but it cannot be sustained without sustaining the workers who provide it. The vendors’ vision of good food and often selfless conviction in their line of work might be emotionally rewarding, but it doesn’t contribute toward threadbare take-home pay or the overwhelm of infrastructural difficulties in keeping the canteen going. Care work, as Folbre argues, is priceless “but needs to be respected and honored in order to keep flowing.” The relationships formed between vendors and students, as well as the determination many vendors put behind the cause, escapes economic frameworks for perceived relevance. But its future is affected by the economic decision-making of those in power.
“The boundaries of acceptable eating and a decent cuisine, as well as maintaining those boundaries, are important social acts,” writes anthropologist Hanna Garth in her book Food in Cuba. What if efficiency weren’t the first and only barometer for food policies, and we worked to recognize an expanded definition of value? Access to culture, human relationships, eating with dignity and enjoyment—surely these are neither chore nor impractical luxuries? If institutions recognize that upholding these values raises collective standards for health and wellbeing, and aim to collectively ensure a greater supply and quality of caring labor, this is inseparable from committing to sustaining the workers who perform it, a value worth embodying for ourselves and future generations. As the bell tolls for canteens, what will our money buy?
Gan Chin Lin is a Singaporean writer and recipe developer. She writes about domestic labor, alternative baking and Singaporean heritage foods through a regenerative lens. Her work focuses on the organic, ongoing conversation between heritage, nature, and navigating food futures. You can find her on Instagram at @tumblinbumblincrumblincookie.
