Cookbook 'At The Same Table' Launches July 26 to Share Migrant Worker Stories
freesuntimes.com · post 60093 · 2026-07-27
SINGAPORE, July 27 — A cookbook built from the recipes and stories of 55 migrant and domestic workers in Singapore hit shelves on July 26, the product of a nine-month student journalism project that aims to put a face to the labour force underpinning the city-state’s economy. ‘At The Same Table’ was compiled by students at the Singapore American School and published through their organisation A Hand for Migrant Workers, founded by 16-year-old Tanya Arora and 17-year-old Aahana Mittal.
Over nine months, the team interviewed the workers, photographed their cooking, and documented their personal narratives. The workers themselves were recommended by two local welfare groups — HOME and ItsRainingRaincoats.
Migrant domestic workers form a quiet backbone of Singaporean households, yet their individual lives often remain invisible to the public. The cookbook directly challenges that anonymity. Dishes range from Sri Lankan fish cutlets and cassava cake to kadai paneer, kimbap, and Darjeeling-style momos — a culinary map of the home countries these workers left behind.
Stories on the plate
The project was not a quick snapshot. For nine months the student team conducted interviews, captured portraits, and collected family recipes, weaving together a document that is as much about migration and labour as it is about food. The initiative’s stated aim: to foster understanding and appreciation for the migrant workers who contribute significantly to Singapore society.
Industry groups regularly note that migrant labour is central to Singapore’s construction, service, and domestic sectors. The cookbook reframes that economic reality through a personal lens.
Each recipe becomes a vehicle for a worker’s story, turning a kitchen staple into a bridge between communities that share the same city but rarely the same table. The work of HOME and ItsRainingRaincoats, which identified and vouched for the participating workers, points to the broader welfare infrastructure surrounding Singapore’s migrant population. Those organisations have long advocated for better working conditions and social integration.
The cookbook adds a cultural dimension to that advocacy, using food as a conversation starter.
A scalable model?
Student-led documentation projects of this kind remain rare in Southeast Asia, where migrant labour is often discussed in aggregate — as flows, quotas, and remittance statistics. A Hand for Migrant Workers has produced a counter-document: granular, personal, and tied to specific dishes and names. Whether the cookbook format will be replicated elsewhere is an open question.
But the approach — interview, photograph, publish — requires relatively low capital and high trust, two things the student organisation appears to have built over its nine-month fieldwork period. The involvement of established welfare groups provided a ready network of contacts and a layer of credibility that many ad‑hoc projects lack.
For now, ‘At The
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