11/09/2025
🥰 Spread love through food to mark 60 years of Singapore’s independence
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By: Byron Ho
A group of 30 volunteers from Murdoch University in Singapore rose to the challenge to cook up meals at a soup kitchen in Little India to mark SG60.
This is their way to give back to the community and also salute migrant workers for their ongoing contribution in Singapore.
This is the first time that a team of volunteers from Murdoch Singapore turned up to support the work of Krsna’s Free Meals, a charity soup kitchen.
The enthusiastic volunteers gathered from 9am, and after a safety briefing and quick tour of the kitchen space, raced against time to prepare home-cooked vegetarian curry meals.
Working in two shifts, the Singapore-based alumni, committee members, and staff from Murdoch Singapore showed great teamwork and quickly assumed their roles.
The volunteers helped with food preparation from chopping vegetables and fruits, before cooking and then pre-packing the healthy meals for faster distribution.
These freshly cooked meals are then served between 11am and 2.30pm to migrant workers, the elderly and the needy.
The volunteers witnessed first-hand how the kitchen is able to churn out 2,000 meals for lunch in about 90 minutes.
Even as soup kitchens have been hit in recent years with rising food cost and greater demand for meals, Krsna’s Free Meals continue to operate on a shoestring budget.
It is run by a team of passionate and dedicated volunteers alongside numerous donors and vendors from the community.
This ground-up initiative, started in 2018 by Ms Latha Govindasamy and her sisters with support from their families, operates out of a 2-storey shophouse in the Little India conservation area.
Three times a week in the pre-dawn hours, volunteers from Krsna’s Free Meals collect donated ingredients such as spinach, cucumbers, potatoes, carrots, fruits and noodles from a wholesale centre.
The donated vegetables can amount to 300 kilos grammes or more, which lasts for a two-day period, and each day’s menu is then planned around the available produce.
This is how they save on ingredient cost and provide free breakfast and lunch daily, with around 5,000 meals served a day.
For the organisation, the weekends are generally very busy with long lines forming just before lunch time.
And by the time the volunteers from Murdoch Singapore ended their shift on a Saturday afternoon at 3pm, they enjoyed the camaraderie and were proud of their group effort in appreciating migrant worker’s contributions in Singapore.
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Stay connected with the Murdoch University Singapore Alumni Chapter and look out for upcoming activities.
