FOOD
Thai takeaway in 80 languages
Thai food has been thoroughly globalised. You can find popular Thai restaurants anywhere you travel now, a far cry from the 1960s, when the Vietnam war had thousands of American soldiers wondering what they were being served during their stopovers in Thailand.
Their consternation led to the creation of a strange dish by a local chef, called American fried rice - rice topped by a fried egg "over easy", with a pork weenie on the side.But this first direct contact between Thai cuisine and foreigners resulted in many a GI returning home with a hankering for sweet, sour and hot. They spread the word. After the war many came back for more, while others opened "Thai restaurants" of their own on America's coasts. When international aviation opened Thailand even more in 1963, the restaurants of Bangkok bulged with visitors from afar - and in return the fresh produce and ingredients of Thai markets started flying to Europe and the US. Historian Charnvit Kasetsiri reckons that Thailand's democratisation in the 1970s made it "safe" for foreigners. "Thailand was no longer considered a dictatorial regime," he says. As the chimes of freedom continued to ring into the '80s, articles about Thailand's politics, culture and food began appearing with increasing frequency in major foreign publications. Time and Newsweek ran stories about "exotic" Siamese dishes. The culmination of all this has been the full flowering of the Thai food industry, and in the process a sharp rise in the Kingdom's profile abroad. It was more than coincidence that "Tom Yum Goong" - Thailand's best-performing film overseas - took its name from the classic Thai dish. The international popularity of muay thai helped the movie enormously, of course, and its success didn't come cheaply. Sahamongkol Film invested more than Bt300 million in the film, and the Thaksin Shinawatra government spent more than Bt5 billion promoting Thai cuisine over the past five years, with its "Kitchen of the World" notion. This ridiculous promotion of Thai food might work after all because most of the Thai restaurant owners have their own minds and recipes. The upshot is that it's now common to hear Thai food mentioned casually in mainstream Hollywood films and foreign TV shows. "Bridget Jones's Diary: The Edge of Reason" set the benchmark, with Renee Zellweger counting on visits to a Thai restaurant to get her through her melancholy. That's the kind of popular identification that advertisers can't buy. When the number of foreign visitors to Thailand hit one million in 1981, there were still only around 1,500 Thai restaurants overseas, in fewer than two dozen countries. That number grew exponentially in the 1990s with the launch of the "Amazing Thailand" promotion. The campaign bumped visitor arrivals to more than five million in 1995, and the foreign exchange was a windfall for the local economy - as well as democracy. Institutions embraced the freedom born of self-confidence, the public was more involved and, in 1997, a "people's constitution" was born. Foreigners, feeling more secure than ever, came in droves, gobbled up the food, got hooked, crated up the ingredients and opened their own Thai restaurants back home - or brought a Thai along to do it for them. By the end of 2000, there were 3,500 Thai restaurants overseas; three years later there were 7,000 - in 80 countries. Thais were justifiably proud, and began celebrating their cuisine more than ever before. Leading personalities started authoring cookbooks. Several TV series now focus solely on Thai food and cooking techniques, with the latest addition coming from the kitchen of no less a personage than Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. This is first of a series of articles examining the phenomenon associated with the globalisation of Thai food.
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