Whe(a)tted appetites – How Singapore came to love wheat
“If feeling humbled in the face of nature is what you’re after, skip the Grand Canyon and stand in a large filed of wheat. Or stand in any grain field next to dozens of other, contiguous grain fields. The wide, ripe expanse doesn’t just surround you, it envelops you. It makes you feel small”
~ Dan Barber, The Third Plate
We have no such luxury to experience the vastness of wheat fields in Singapore, but a walk through the supermarket brings you close – shelf after shelf of bread, instant noodles, crackers; endless rows of flour-based products. Rice may be the staple we identify with in Southeast Asia, but what we don’t realize is that wheat plays an equally large, if not larger, role in our food system.
If it’s any comfort, we are not alone in our overreliance on wheat. Today, 15 crops account for 90% of the world’s food energy intake. Two thirds of this is provided for by wheat, rice, and corn. But with the staple of a region historically (and logically so) determined by what crops are easiest grown in the region, how on earth did we, in tropical Southeast Asia, come to consume this much wheat?
Exploring common street food to determine what our early foodscapes looked like, we will find wheat-based products rarely featured. Through the 1950s, chai tow kuay, trishaw noodles, char beehoon, peanut porridge, and mee jian kuey were the food options commonly offered by hawker stalls (Chua, 2015). Fascinatingly, one would see extensive use of rice flour (like in chai tow kuay and char beehoon for example) in place of wheat flours. Wheat was likely only incorporated in dishes brought by early Chinese settlers, which makes geographical sense given China’s ability to produce the crop. Compare these to our far more globalized foodscape of today, where breakfast can consist of anything from mee pok to wheat-dominant Gardenia bread and sourdough loaves.
This shift towards wheat consumption can be observed in the broader region of Southeast Asia as well. As we develop, breakfast food patterns are changing. Though Philippines had identified her “traditional” breakfast food as rice (boiled or fried), and Malaysia had stated nasi lemak as hers, discrepency has been observed in rural and urban areas. Urban participants, having greater access to wheat-based alternatives like bread and crackers (Philippines) and roti canai, chappati, and bread (Malaysia) consumed a significant amount of it. Greater ease in obtaining these products, as well as greater food purchasing power, were cited as contributing factors in the study. Indeed, considerations like the suitability of a staple to be cultivated in a region becomes irrelevant as food imports from further away become cheaper and more convenient.
In the case of Singapore, though, there may have been a more intentional and targeted whetting of our appetites for wheat.
Eat more wheat campaign
The Eat More Wheat campaign launched in 1967 could have been a turning point in wheat demand here. Launched as a response to soaring prices of rice due to political instability in Thailand, the movement was the Singapore government’s attempt to reduce dependency on just one grain (Tarulevicz, 2013). Ironically, this “diversification” might have induced our current overreliance on wheat. As the Russian-Ukraine conflict drags on today, supply chain disruptions mean wheat-reliant Singapore now faces skyrocketing prices of staples like our daily bread, exactly what the campaign intended to prevent.
I digress.
The Eat More Wheat campaign marked a consolidated government effort to encourage consumption of this crop. Cooking competitions were held and organizations like the Port of Singapore Authority, which previously provided rice as port worker’s free meals, started to distribute bread instead. This, I suspect, could have been where the widespread incorporation of wheat into our regular diets begun.
Wheat flour also got more accessible, with now household brand Prima Flour having been approved to set up the first local flour mill in 1961. The potential for Singapore-milled flour to replace imported brands, and eventually be exported to neighbouring countries was an attractive avenue for industrial growth that may have influenced the government’s decision to launch the Eat More Wheat campaign as well.
Rather than cling stubbornly to a temperate crop, perhaps our long term solution lies in rediscovering regional grains and developing our own flours and breads
In all, a combination of the above factors created an environment where wheat products could be widely consumed. Though at the time of the campaign only a dismal 1.8% of 900 households surveyed had taken to the crop, barriers to consuming wheat lessened over time. Namely, the working class no longer lacked time to convert flour to edible bread or noodles, nor lacked money to buy the additional ingredients required to make it palatable (rice was eaten with just soy sauce or salted fish). As the economy grew, these reasons against wheat faded into history.
The biggest contributors
Today, wheat forms a significant part of our diets in the form of processed food like instant noodles and crackers, or pasta, bread, and other baked goods. While demand for the latter subsectors dropped due to slowed business during the pandemic, demand of milled wheat for instant noodle and biscuit markets remained high, supported by an already large and evergrowing milling sector locally and in Southeast Asia. 70% of wheat flour in Indonesia is consumed by the noodle industry.
Home to one of the biggest milling companies in the world, P.T. Bogasari, the country also stood as the world’s largest importer of wheat in 2018. Even the USDA picked up on this contention in consuming so much of what we cannot grow, stressing the danger of Indonesia’s total reliance on imports for wheat (for food and livestock feed). The Russian Ukraine conflict proved this, when in the wake of skyrocketing imported wheat prices, livestock farmers in Southeast Asia were forced to source feed from locally grown corn. Except this only drove the price of corn up, exacerbating a vicious cycle difficult to break unless demand for livestock drops.
Wh(e)at's the issue?
Well, overreliance on any single crop is dangerous from a food security point of view – we already know that. Monocultures are a big issue with our current agricultural systems as a whole, where we not only lack diversity in types of crops, but diversity within crops as well. Wheat is not spared from this system, and the white flour we demand more and more of is made of an overwhelmingly singular variety of wheat, given that the plant itself is “invisible” – tasteless, textureless, modified beyond recognition.
Circling back to the issue of overreliance of wheat in Singapore specifically, the issues with wheat agriculture are multiplied tenfold by the fact it can only be grown so far away from us. Our contributions to global demand of this temperate crop puts even more pressue on foreign wheat farmers struggling to produce enough for their regions, and neglects the smallholder farms in our own backyard. Currently, Southeast Asia’s production level of wheat is so low, it doesn’t register on the International Grain Council’s (ICG) records. The convenience and cheapness in importing foreign grain has torn our focus from the dormant potential that lies in exploring region-suited varieties.
Wheat also inherently incurs higher food miles – the “environmental and social costs associated with transporting food from where it is produced to where it is processed, and then to the wholesaler, retailer or catering outlet, and on to the end-consumer”. The amount of food and distance food is being transported is increasing every year, and growing demand for temperate produce only contributes to the greenhouse gas emissions of transportation, especially taking into account the frequency of imports for food, which is perishable.
Rather, we should “rediscover perennial wheat varieties that are native to its place, so much so that it can grow wild without destructive agricultural practices”, in the words of Dan Barber. But what would this look like for Southeast Asia?
Southeast Asian "wheat"
Agrotechnology and genetic engineering tend to ask what it takes for wheat to be grown in the tropics, but as this paper questioned in 1989 – is there any real need to expand production when the world already houses surplus stocks of 130 million tonnes? Rather, could we look to existing natural solutions, and adjust our tastes and preferences to what nature gives?
Tropical grains suited to grow in Southeast Asia include millet (consumed during the war when wheat and rice was scarce) and sorghum. Instead of temperate crops, turning to these varieties for diversification from rice could have afforded us greater stability in our food systems, and drastically lower food miles. With lower global demand for these grains, incorporating them into our diets also supports their cultivation, resisting the complete homogenization of our diets and agriculture. During the Japanese Occupation, tapioca flour was also used as a replacement for wheat, which imports of dropped.
The field of upcycled food also holds exciting prospects, with okara (soy bean pulp, a discarded byproduct of soy milk/tofu making) being developed as a gluten free flour. By diversifying the types of flour we bake with, and keeping an open mind towards businesses who may launch non-wheat products, we as consumers can shape demand for a more diversified food system.
On top of direct human consumption, livestock feed drives our imported wheat demand as well. Dr Tangendjaja, Technical Consultant at US Grains Council, described how price hikes in wheat due to the Russo-Ukraine war forced Malaysian farmers to replace a portion of feed with locally-grown corn. This, however, caused corn feed costs to rise. In this part of our food system, regionally-grown and/or alternative feed like black soldier fly larvae may lessen pressures, but merely switching to another crop is not enough – the ever rising consumption of meat that global agricultural systems cannot keep up with must be stemmed.
Ultimately, the consumption of wheat in and of itself is not an issue, but global trends tending towards the production just a few crops, with no regard for climatic conditions and agrobiodiversity is worrying. As wheat-based food prices continue to climb amid mounting political tensions, the importance of affordable and available staples is once again highlighted. Rather than cling stubbornly to a temperate crop, perhaps our long term solution lies in rediscovering regional grains and developing our own flours and breads, to the benefit of our wallets and planet.
