Dear friends, 2013 has been a crazy, fun, wild year. For the first time since college in the US, I spent more of the year outside than inside Singapore, my home. In completing my longest research trip to date, I travelled overland more than 20,000 km from Kaniyakumari at the southern tip of India to Beijing in China, crossing Nepal and the Tibetan plateau in … Continue reading From Kerala to Shaolin: Thanks to supporters
“I love local hawker food. There are not many countries in the world like Singapore where one can easily find reasonably priced food with the same high level of hygiene and great variety.” – MP Baey Yam Keng, in the wake of his recent $2.50 nasi padang.
Many people in the middle- and upper-classes love to cheer Singapore’s delicious cheap food. When my foreign friends ask me what’s great about Singapore, I often cite this (among other things).
Unfortunately for us all, it is a boast loaded with classist undertones. The main reason a country as rich and expensive as Singapore has such cheap hawker food is that many labour inputs are underpriced. Everybody from the lorry driver to the dish washer to the hawker is being underpaid. Indeed, for a country with a negligible agricultural sector, one would expect (the imported) food to cost more than in many other countries. Continue reading “Loving Singapore’s “cheap” hawker food”
