Let us promote our most enticing asset - Thai food

Its reputation remains untarnished by political uncertainties and continues to rank as one of the world's favourite cuisines. In the past two decades, the meteoric rise of this Southeast Asian cuisine in all corners of the world has brought in tourists, foreign exchange and turned Thailand into one of the world's largest food exporters. Most importantly, Thai food also reflects the dynamics of Thai culture, its open society, tradition and way of living.

The Democrat-led government has repeatedly stressed the need to repair the country's battered image and restore confidence. Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has urged all concerned agencies, including the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the Board of Investment and the Department of Export Promotion, to work together - not separately as in the past - under the Foreign Ministry in planning roadshows abroad. Last week, the Commerce Ministry announced the revival of the Kitchen of the World campaign.

To ensure that Thai cuisine remains the world's favourite, the country must avoid past mistakes and misconceptions. It needs to do a lot more to promote knowledge of Thai food and appreciation for it to consumers, restaurant owners and manufacturers both inside and outside the country in more systematic and sustained ways.

In the past decade, the promotion of Thai food, through food fairs and exhibition, has been concentrated in the countries which have large numbers of Thai restaurants such as the US, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. They comprised around 80 per cent of the estimated 9,200 Thai restaurants world-wide, half of which are situated in the west and east coasts of the US.

The Democrat-led government (1997-2001) was the first to start the campaign to promote Thai food as a new source of foreign exchange income following the Asian economic crisis. It was focused on the export of processed Thai food as well as encouraging investment in opening Thai restaurants abroad. At the moment, less than 29 per cent of the owners of Thai restaurants are Thais.

At the time, very few Thais knew that their famous chicken chilli sauce (namjim kai) in various colourful containers could earn Bt2 billion to Bt3 billion annually. Now it has shot up to over Bt5 billion. Now, the Thai food industry accounts for nearly 20 per cent of the country's total exports and employs some 20 million people.

The first Thaksin government (2001-2004) was quick to follow up the idea with a full-blown multi-billion baht campaign. The government offered loans to potential Thai restaurant owners in an attempt to increase the number of Thai restaurants to 20,000 within four years. "The Kitchen of the World" was a grandiose plan without thorough thinking. Several hundreds of millions of baht were wasted in extravagant promotional campaigns and acquisition of commercial spaces overseas, which turned out to be a flop. The campaign was carried out without a comprehensive evaluation of ability and capacity of the Thai food industry and the culinary profession.

Although Thailand has long been associated with major processed food items such as canned tuna and other marine products, it was done through major foreign brands without local ones. With the growing popularity of Thai food and improved hygiene standards and food safety of local manufacturers, Thai brands have proliferated overseas. In the past five years, there has been a surge in the local branding of processed foods with more than 1,000 trademarks from nearly 3,000 manufacturers of various sizes. The trend continues to be bright even when the world is facing recession.

But the saddest part of the ambitious campaign was the failure to produce enough capable Thai chefs and to disseminate the knowledge and appreciation of the food among locals and foreigners. Obviously, the popularity of Thai food has increased the number of cooking classes. They were confined to five-star hotels in the early 1990s. But currently there are more than 36 Thai cuisine schools. The aim, which remains elusive today, is to produce at least 1000 Thai chefs annually to fill vacancies in new restaurants around the world. Quite often, newly trained chefs and assistants could not obtain working visas in prospective countries because they lacked kitchen experience and language ability.

At the moment, world-class Thai food chefs from Thailand are few in comparison with the ever growing foreign chefs specialised in Thai cuisine. Their linguistic ability, knowledge of nutrition, culinary training and skills as well as kitchen management have made them the most-wanted chefs. It is inevitable through them that the tastes, aroma, ingredients and presentation of Thai food also have been transformed to reach the international palate.

For example, given its worldwide popularity, Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has begun a worldwide campaign to educate global citizens about their national cuisine and proper ways to prepare it. Although the "Oishii" (meaning delicious) campaign has been a long-term effort to explain exports of Japanese agricultural and marine products, it aims at promoting and monitoring the standard of Japanese cuisine, which has strictly enforced recipes and standards. Two years ago, there was a plan to deploy "sushi police" for surveillance of so-called Japanese restaurants with sushi bars all over the world. After a few months, the plan was quickly scrapped. Last year, the mother of all restaurant guidebooks, Michelin, began ratings of Japanese restaurants in Japan.

To better promote Thai cuisine in the world, there must be a central bureau that would approach it in a holistic manner, including proper ways of preparation and systematic evaluation of quality and tastes. The Thai Select logo, awarded to several hundred Thai restaurants overseas supposedly offering Thai cuisine, must be evaluated. Impartial and better food critics and evaluators must replace officials picked from Thai embassies and their representative offices. The most pitiful aspect of Thai cuisine is that we do not have common names for menu items and ingredients, especially when they are translated into foreign languages. Anyone want to try "crying tiger" beef salad or noodle "looks like glass" from mung beans with ground pork, seafood and chilli (yam houn-sen)?

(The author thanks Thailand Research Fund for data and information)