Sai Tung, please!

By Evelyne Chaubert

Here in the States, we easily think of America as the Land of Food to Go. We have the drive through, the Big Gulp and Starbuck’s lattes with cup cozies. But to walk down my home streets of Bangkok, Thailand is to see the mecca of street food and the hundreds of inventive ways it can be carried.

We are a culture that loves food, which in turn means we eat all the time and that means eating on the go. In a culture where vendors are sprinkled all down the road, one can find grilled meatballs on a stick, sticky rice in bamboo bark, ice cream in a hotdog bun or fried bananas in newspaper at any hour of the day.

Wherever you hear “Sai tung?” you know you can take it with you. This phrase literally means “put in bag?” And it’s not just for food. One of my favorite things to get is Coca Cola Sai Tung! Yes, even the drinks go in a bag! The vendors are less willing to let you walk off with their bottle, because of high incentives for recycling, and some brilliant vendor in the forgotten past found this solution. The vendors puts crushed ice in a tall rectangular sandwich bag, grips one corner of the bag with a rubber band between their fingers and swings it few times until the rubber band wraps the corner of the bag, pinching it closed. Then they fill it with the beverage and stick in a straw; voila, your drink, sai tung! I carry it around via the loop in the rubber band and can also hook it on to anything. It is fascinating to see how an improvised solution has become a widespread and accepted product.

It may be makeshift, but how creative and resourceful when you think of the economic and ecological issues behind it. And Thailand is not alone in this ingenuity. South East Asia and Latin America display an array of approaches to taking liquids to go. In Singapore it’s two holes and a string, in Malaysia plastic twine replaces the rubber band, in Mexico the straw holds the bag closed until you buy it and in Bali a piece of twine wraps the straw upright in the center of the bag.

So I was a little surprised when I visited Bangkok a few years back and noticed an upgrade in the drinks “sai tung”. Someone has begun producing what look like miniature shopping bags that hold the ice and the drink, but don’t need to get wrapped up to form the DIY handle. It’s functional, but I found I really missed watching the vendors’ little ritual of tying off the bag. By designing in the convenience of the handles, the experience of Coke in a bag had been watered down.

Sometimes the colloquial solution to a problem has uniqueness and a cultural resonance that a new design solution just can’t match, at least not for many years. Maybe the innovation of Coca Cola Sai Tung pushed out tea stalls on the side of the road, and now these more convenient bags are slowly pushing the old out. Being a designer means that we are always at the front of this wave, creating new solutions that might bury older ones. That’s how culture evolves; we just need to be sure our new designs are more than technically innovative, they need to be wonderful experiences too, even for something as simple as holding a cold drink on a hot day.