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Dishing It Out: The cost of diet westernisation
Growing up, “pok shui” – what my family calls fizzy drinks – was a treat only to be had during festive occasions. Fanta Orange was only featured during wedding banquets, and 7-Up was a Chinese New Year drink drunk exclusively at your cousin’s house while the adults played mahjong in the background. This principle extended to other sweet drinks and fast food – a McDonald’s drive through is a sign that there was something worth celebrating, and was by no means a regular occurrence. Today, however, I grab a bottle of iced lemon tea casually as I leave a 7-11; I find myself reaching for the McDonald’s app every time…
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From Yuck to Yum: Vegetables in the modern diet
You sit at the table, watching as your dining companion picks the peas out of their fried rice. Perhaps you abhor them for doing so, joke that they have the taste buds of a child; or perhaps you are that friend, the one who can’t stand vegetables “unless it’s broccoli”. We treat our disdain for greens as if they were innate, some kind of trait all children are born with, yet a substantial body of research shows that food habits are learnt. Though there is an element of inborn sensitivity to flavours, food environments and our experience with foods play a much larger role. It is no wonder that with…
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A Fish Eat Fish World – Wild-caught fish in aquaculture
Asian seabass, milkfish, tilapia, groupers – these are just some of the species farmed in Singapore’s waters. As awareness on the obscene amount of resources required for intensive livestock farming grows, so does attention on fish as alternative protein sources. Today, almost 50% of the world’s ‘last wild food’ is wild-caught. Though the proportion of our consumption supplied by wild fish catch is dwindling, there has not been any real decrease in the amount of fish removed from our oceans – rather, the decrease in percentage accounted for is more indicative of intensifying aquaculture, and higher production. In other words, aquaculture does not directly relieve the burden on wild fish…
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Akan Datang: Irish Potato Famine 2.0
Bok choy, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collard greens, kale, turnips – a walk down the supermarket aisle in Singapore will leave one quite convinced that we have access to a wide range of foods here. Lesser known to the average urban consumer, however, is that all of the above belong to the same plant family. The brassicaceae, or mustard, family is perhaps one of the most common examples used to illustrate the unconscious narrowing of agrobiodiversity in global food systems of today. The many cultivars of brassicaceae vegetables are a result of centuries of artificial selection. Selective breeding of wild mustard with large leaf buds became what we now…
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No Pain, No Grain – The environmental costs of rice production
Rice: the ubiquitous staple that finds its way into just about every dish in Singapore. It is difficult to imagine our local foodscape without it, yet few of us in this urban city-state know where our rice is from, how it’s grown, or what social and environmental costs it incurs on the communities we import from. This article hence seeks to shed light on rice, the staple crop on which we rely. Contrary to popular belief, the rice plant does not need to be grown in water. The primary reason it is grown in waterlogged paddy fields is to stave off pests and drown any weeds, since its semi-aquatic nature…
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Pig Business -The creation of modern pig farming
When examined from a 8000 year timeline, the story of pigs in China is a sobering revelation of how different - and damaging - modern pig farming is from our earlier interactions with hogs.
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Leaving the field – Implications of labour movement in Southeast Asian rice cultivation
Agriculture worldwide is experiencing labour shortages. What are the driving factors behind this trend in Southeast Asia, and what are some implications labour-saving tech adoption?
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Whe(a)tted appetites – How Singapore came to love wheat
Southeast Asia is home to some of the largest importers of wheat worldwide. Yet with staples of a region historically determined by what crops are easiest grown in their environment, how did Singapore come to consume as much wheat as we do?
