Prawn Crackers

We often develop a strange illusion around foods that are too familiar: we assume they have always belonged exactly where we first encountered them.

If not for a recent accident of curiosity, I might never have looked into the origin story of prawn crackers.

It started with a bag of Papatonk prawn crackers. I noticed that my blood glucose rose fairly quickly after eating them. That made sense once I remembered the main ingredient: tapioca starch.

Then I realized Papatonk is an Indonesian brand. I had also bought Indonesian prawn crackers before, the kind that come as raw translucent chips and need to be deep-fried until they puff up. That made me wonder: are prawn crackers actually an Indonesian specialty?

Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to help me trace the history. The earliest origin of prawn crackers seems likely to be Indonesia, perhaps going back to Java around the ninth or tenth century. Malaysia also considers itself one of the places of origin.

When I was a child, I often ate “Pigeon Brand” prawn crackers. It might have been the only brand we could buy at the time. My mother would fry them as a snack. I still remember the raw chips before they touched oil: semi-transparent, lightly colored, and oddly beautiful. But I never once thought about where that food came from.

The same thing happened with other childhood snacks. I once assumed nougat and Maltesers-like malted chocolate balls were local Shanghai things, but their origins were much farther away.

This kind of mistaken origin story is not limited to food.

Last year, the Japanese anime Yaiba was remade. When I was a child, I watched the Taiwanese translation, known as Kowloon Pearl. In the story, two ancient gods appear in the background: the wind god and the thunder god.

I asked ChatGPT whether those figures came from ancient Chinese mythology. The answer made me realize that my own framing was too narrow. Even the wind and thunder gods we think we know may trace their imagery back through Hinduism or Buddhism, changing as they moved across cultures.

Seen across such a long chain of transformation, obsessing over “who passed what to whom” underestimates the complexity of cultural movement.

Perhaps food is like culture: it is always in motion. Being too obsessed with authenticity makes it less interesting. The most charming flavors are often hybrids, carried across oceans and remade through local habits.

Whether prawn crackers came from Java or a Shanghai alley is not really the point. If they taste good and bring back a familiar memory, that is enough.

Postscript

Ten or twenty years ago, satisfying this kind of sudden curiosity would have required a very different amount of work. How many books would I have needed to read, how many searches would I have needed to run, and how much effort would it have taken to understand the origins of prawn crackers, wind gods, and thunder gods?

With AI, this becomes a ten-minute task. If you do not trust the first answer, you can ask it to dig deeper, provide sources, and give you a trail to verify.

History and culture rarely have absolute “standard answers” anyway. If the chain of evidence is reasonable and internally coherent, it can still be a useful interpretation.

Without AI, this kind of multi-perspective verification would be prohibitively expensive. Being able to satisfy curiosity through low-cost research is itself a major form of progress.

Originally published on X.