Made in Macao | A thought on creative development

Jenny Lao-Phillips

I believe lots of Star Trek lovers, especially those from North America, have played a drinking game. It goes like this. Whenever Mr. Spock says “fascinating”, we down one shot. Whenever Dr. McCoy says “he’s dead, Jim”, two shots. I cannot remember the condition for three shots, but I guess you get the idea. To make government official announcements more fun, we could apply a drinking game.

In recent years, the Macao government has cultivated a significant list of often-used words that can get everyone in the audience drunk before a speech is finished. Imagine, for every time the words “economic diversity” is mentioned, we take one shot of a spirit of your choice. “Chinese and Portuguese speaking countries”, deserves two shots, “creativity”, three shots, “Greater Bay Area”, four shots. If I hear “One-Belt-One-Road” again, I’ll probably down the whole bottle. For those lightweight drinkers, you can always secretly use those words in playing bullshit bingo, just to make life in Macao more fun.

This year, we have another new term: “gastronomy” or to be exact – “creative gastronomy”. Let’s give these terms five shots for sure, as we will be hearing them all the time. At a luncheon where the Director of MGTO gave a brief talk about Macao’s application to UNESCO to be a Creative City of Gastronomy, I was fascinated by the efficiency and administrative effectiveness that she explained were demonstrated in how the government quickly gathered information needed for the application, organized international gastronomy events to invite members of creative gastronomy cities – who, by the way, have voting rights to determine whether Macao could join or not – and organized related events around the theme of gastronomy. Basically, the government added food to everything.

Now, having done all that and finally secured a place in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) within a year, this was impressive. But why do we want to be in the creative cities network? And why creative gastronomy?

According to a statement by the Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture published in the Macau Daily Times, he explained that “gastronomy [is] a driver to preserve Macau’s cultural identity, while promoting sustainable development and expanding its international cooperation.” However, the creativity of Macao’s gastronomy has not been accounted for.

Don’t get me wrong, I am one hundred percent supportive of this initiative and I believe that Macao totally deserves to be a creative city of gastronomy, but not only for the reasons of future development. For one thing, we already have an intangible cultural heritage in the area of gastronomy; our Macanese cuisine. And that has not been mentioned in the publicity around why we want to join the UCCN. Our Macanese cuisine is already a creative invention combining local Chinese and Portuguese cuisine through herbs and ingredients gathered by our ancestors along the Portuguese navigation route. Not many cities have food as creative as ours.

Moreover, we have another intangible cultural heritage: the Drunken Dragon Dance Festival which includes a banquet of hundreds of people serving special kinds of rice and dishes. Another piece of proof of our already-creative gastronomy. Not to mention the different fusion restaurants and snack shops all over the city selling food that is locally created or developed from traditional recipes.

What I am trying to express is that we don’t need to hold several international gastronomy events in Macao, or add the topic of food to the title of every event. Creative gastronomy already exists everywhere in Macao. All we need is “creativity” to promote existing “gastronomy” to the “Greater Bay Area” and “Chinese and Portuguese speaking countries” to achieve “economic diversity”. That sentence deserves 15 shots of vodka.