Amid cave drama, no one goes hungry

“This is the fourth day we’ve handed out noodles,” vendor Som Norkham said on Thursday.

“A lot of the market people would like to come and cook for the officials and volunteers in person, but we don’t want a big crowd getting in the way, so we just have a few representatives doing it.”
The Doi Wao food hawkers aren’t the only ones keeping the rescue effort well nourished. Other people are voluntarily preparing and distributing meals, and His Majesty the King has arranged for a kitchen to be set up in front of the cave.
The free food reflects the nation’s gratitude for the officials’ and volunteers’ hard work. A Thai reporter who’s covered natural disasters overseas said he’d never before seen food distributed at such scenes so plentifully.
A Thai based in Britain who blogs on Facebook at Deserthousewife.diary surmised earlier this week that the generous feeding of the cave rescue teams stemmed from Thai people’s love of food, as famously suggested by the traditional greeting “Have you eaten yet?”
“We are not a rich nation, but when we cook a feast, we cover the whole neighbourhood,” the blogger wrote in a commentary that had earned 26,000 likes and 14,000 shares as of Thursday.
“We cannot stand seeing hungry people in our territory ... People of other nations may eat to live, but our nation people, we live to eat.”