You enter fearless, with seven others, confident that darkness alone poses little threat and challenge. As you venture deeper into the exhibition, with only a white cane and a gentle voice guiding you to “come towards my voice”, new thoughts surface: Is this what it truly feels like to be blind? Can I truly experience the world without sight?

I won’t give the game away: Visit Dialogue in the Dark Singapore and “see” for yourself. The permanent exhibition, a franchise of Dialogue Social Enterprise, is the world’s first Dialogue in the Dark exhibition housed in an educational facility, Ngee Ann Polytechnic.

Established with the dual aim of promoting inclusion and empathy for the visually-impaired as well as providing viable employment opportunities for them, Dialogue in the Dark (DiD) works on a simple, but powerful concept: Visitors are led by partially or fully-blind guides through completely darkened rooms where they are confronted with everyday situations, like crossing a street and shopping for groceries, without seeing anything.

Since October 2009, DiD Singapore has hosted about 5000 visitors (and counting), many of whom have walked away humbled and inspired.

“We want to change mindsets. We want to promote empathy, and not sympathy, for the visually-impaired,” explained Mr Glen Ng, Project Manager, DiD. “Many participants are initially disoriented in the dark. As they venture out of their comfort zone, they become very appreciative of the support and assurance given by the guides.”

Being placed in the care of a blind person has made participants more empathetic and receptive to the strengths of those often seen as “weak” by society. The challenge of navigating in the dark itself enables sighted participants to better understand the challenges faced by the visually-impaired and assist someone they see in the streets.

“I think DiD helps to debunk some of the common perceptions that we have about the disabled,” said DiD participant Siti Nor Farah. “We often think that they are dependent on other people; that they are helpless, when actually they can do things on their own and help others as well.”

Lee Lee is one such capable guide. She feels that DiD has been a “dream come true”.

Due to her visual impairment, there were very few job opportunities available for her. A former telephone operator, Lee Lee felt that such employment was both insecure – given the rise of automation in call centres – and inadequate as a platform for her to develop her competencies in communication and management. At DiD, Lee Lee is both a guide and the facilitator of DiD’s Executive Programme.

The Executive Workshop is targeted at DiD visitors who are senior management and sets them a series of tasks to perform in total darkness.

“In the darkness, everyone is working on an equal platform, so it is excellent for leadership training and team building,” said Lee Lee.

“And at the end of the day, executives realize that the facilitator is a visually-impaired person. This makes them aware of how competent we are in a wide range of tasks.”

The guiding experience itself has been an effective platform for the visually impaired to hone their professional skills and seek gainful employment in other industries. “As a guide, you have to adapt your communication strategies dependent on the age and personality of the group,” Lee Lee shares, “And you have to do so in a relatively short period of time – it is a real challenge but a very good learning experience.”

Immersed in complete darkness, participants have to make full use of their other senses to both navigate and appreciate the world around them. Lee Lee, a little amused, said: “Adults tend to be very scared so I have to encourage them and get them to be more comfortable in the darkness. In comparison, children tend to be more playful, so I encourage them to take responsibility for themselves and their friends!”

The tour is rounded up with an active listening and reflection session, where participants are given the opportunity to share their experience with their guide. Such opportunities for frank and open discussion between the sighted and non-sighted people are rare and welcome in Singapore.

In that regard, DiD is also especially suitable for national education programmes that focus on inclusion, equality and racial harmony. One of the DiD Singapore’s future plans is to bring more students to the exhibition and tie the tour together with civic education classes and community service programmes.

I walked away knowing what it meant to have my other four senses sharpened and deeply reflective.

As Mr. Jared Tham, my fellow DiD tourist, sums it up: “DiD fills an important niche because all too often people in the street know in their head what the situation is, but until they experience it for themselves, they won’t understand it in their heart.”For more information, check out www.dialogueinthedark.com.sg or email enquiry_dialogueinthedark@np.edu.sg. Visit them at Ngee Ann Polytechnic Block 5, #01-03 535 Clementi Road, Singapore 599489. DiD opens from 9am to 6pm daily.

Think of “Food” and “Asia” and what comes to mind is a rich and diverse mosaic of landscapes and sentiments: on the one hand, we can imagine golden fields of rice tended by tight-knit communities, abundant harvests at year-end festivals, and sprawling, animated markets; however, we also have unsavory images of grain rotting in the heat, poverty-stricken and hungry children, and food riots in urban centers.

Rice, wheat, vegetables, fruits, corns, and pulses, are important not only as nourishment for the people of Asia but, more importantly, as livelihood. Asia accounts for over 80% of the world’s agricultural workforce, amounting to almost one billion people concentrated in the food exporting countries of China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Given this dual importance of food in the Asian context, food security has become one of the topmost priorities for the region.

One man’s meat

The prospects of food for Asia are mixed. The region has seen a remarkable boost in agricultural output since the 1960s.

Between 1980 and 2000, production per hectare generally rose – in China by 60%. Increased income also meant that people could buy better quality food. In Asia, from 1996 to 2006, overall meat production rose by 40%.

Yet in spite of the rise in farm output and employment, and the rapid development in food production and storage technologies, Asia still has a large hungry population. The most reliable statistics indicate that16% of the region’s total population of 542 million people, are suffering from malnutrition. More than half of the world’s underweight children live in Asia.

Ironically, Asia’s hungry are our agricultural workers who spend up to 70% of their total income on food. With food prices rising 51% first half of 2008 compared to 2007, and commodity markets increasingly volatile, next year could be ‘another dangerous year for food prices in poor countries’.

Is it possible the region to develop alternative, sustainable and equitable food systems? What opportunities and possibilities can social entrepreneurship bring to address this complex and critical situation?

Sowing organic, reaping well

Farming at Raitong

One of the pioneers in sustainable agricultural production is a two-year old organic rice farm in one of the poorest provinces of Thailand. Co-founded by Mr. Bryan Hugill and Ms. Lalana Srikram, Raitong (“Golden Land”) Organics Farm has evolved from the Srikram-Kewandee family farm that has cultivated top-grade Hom Mali rice under rain-fed conditions since settling in the Sisaket province some 200 years ago.

Environmental sustainability and education are two of the main motivations for Bryan and Lalana to choose the organic path. In essence, this is a production method that uses natural, rather than chemical, methods to enrich the soil and is characterized by “polyculture”, the cultivation of different crops together in the field, as opposed to “monoculture” – concentrating on one or two crops. Says Lalana, “Organic production improves the quality of the soil as it improves the soil structure over time. Polyculture and the use of appropriate microbes and bacteria encourages carbon-storage and the fixing of nutrients in the soil, ensuring a healthy and high quality rice crop.”

Cultivating 25 rai (approximately 10 acres) of Hom Mali rice, Raitong Organics is the first certified organic farm in the Sisaket province, with international accreditation from the Organic Agriculture Certification Thailand (ACT) and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM).

“In contrast to popular belief, small farms are more productive than large ones,” Bryan explains, “Farmers know their land much better and spend more time on their land, leading to better management.”

Indeed, Bryan and Lalana’s success with their small farm – producing some 11 tonnes of rice per year with saved seed – has inspired other farmers in the community. Despite being initially resistant in the first year, farmers were much more receptive to organic farming methods after comparing their crop with that grown organically, which looked much healthier at the end of the growing season. Healthy and delicious rice – potentially a niche product for the region, has also sparked the interest of local provincial authorities. The Land Development Authority is now offering agricultural extension to promote organic certification, offering such services as ploughing farmer’s land for free and providing beans for farmers to grow nitrogen-fixing legumes.

One of the missions of Raitong is to enhance the awareness of the benefits of organic agriculture to local farmers and, when requested, assist them in implementing the necessary change. Bryan and Lalana firmly believe that organic farming represents a powerful way to spread income through the community in a sustainable way because, as a growing niche market, an increased supply of organic crop will create greater market opportunities for the entire community.

Raitong Organics is currently supplying a restaurant in Bangkok directly, bypassing exploitative middlemen and market structures. “Selling directly to food services establishes a direct connection between farmers and consumers,” Bryan explains, “This raises consumer awareness of organic food production, facilitates direct and immediate feedback, builds consumer trust and enables both parties to enjoy a fair price.” What system could be better?

“We hope that organic food production will snowball in the years to come, as more farmers learn about the benefits of, and consumers create demand for, healthy organic food, thus creating a greater market.” Bryan asserts, “We just have to keep demonstrating.”

Organic farming represents one of ways the food system can be changed at its source. Through promoting and facilitating the development of sustainable production methods and the direct distribution of farmed food to urban populations, social enterprises such as Raitong Organics Farm shows that an ethical alternative is possible. (For more information on Raitong Organics Farm, do visit: http://www.raitongorganicsfarm.com/.)

With Singapore serving as an important food trading hub in Asia, there is both the premise and opportunity for food businesses to engage directly with the local and regional community – addressing gaps in our current profit-driven food system through socially-innovative initiatives.

No free lunch?

Think again: There may be many.

In the highly-competitive food industry, market players are not on a level playing field. In Singapore, food suppliers incur high costs in order to have their products listed and sold in supermarkets – there is even a premium for locating products on eye-level shelves!

As the largest market players, supermarkets have the power to charge high markups that are then passed on to consumers. Many supermarkets also hoard products for display that may remain unsold on shelves until they are thrown away, says an industry insider.

Unlike Australia, are currently no systems for salvaging and distributing unsold food in Singapore. Neither has there been any initiative from within the private, public nor people sectors here to comprehensively improve the allocation of food.

A 2008 report by Singapore-based research group Food for All revealed that although there is a large diversity of food programmes in Singapore that have been set up to address the issues of hunger, community food security and food waste, most of them are only stop-gap measures.

Such food rations programmes include monthly dried food distribution programmes conducted by Volunteer Welfare Organizations (VWOs) and Residents’ Committees (RCs), and the distribution of food vouchers by Community Development Councils (CDCs).

A well-established non-profit organization Food from the Heart operates three food rations programmes: a bread distribution programme coordinating some 1700 volunteers to deliver unsold bread from local bakeries to 11,000 beneficiaries every month; 17 Self-Collection Centres which distribute packets of food to 2900 needy individuals; and a food goodie bag programme in neighbourhood schools assisting 2700 needy students.

Given that the country is completely dependent on food imports, yet produces significant amounts of wasted food that could be redistributed within local and regional communities, the need for social enterprise to step in and propose holistic solutions to improve the efficiency of current systems of food distribution, as well as manage unsold food effectively, is urgently needed.

FoodXervices, a Singapore-based food distributor, is one of the first food businesses here who have taken the lead to change this situation – collaborating with civil society organizations in a number of food projects that aim to raise awareness of food issues, strengthen the connection between industry and the public, and integrate community service as part of the food business model.

A successful recent project was the “Every One Can” Warehouse Sale cum Food Donation Drive in October 2009, coordinated with anti-poverty group ONE (Singapore) as part of the Stand Up Against Povertycampaign. During this event, the first of its kind spearheaded by an industry player, members of the public who came to the warehouse to purchase food were invited to pledge essential food items such as rice, cooking oil and sugar for a food donation drive. By the end of the day, a 14-foot truck, equivalent to a 20-foot container, was filled with food at a total retail value of over $20,000 – all to be distributed by Food from the Heart to needy families around the island.

Following from this, FoodXervices and Food for All begun the Food Matching Programme, which aims to provide a service redistributing unsold food from warehouses around the island to the local and regional hungry communities.

Food for All has also begun a campaign to encourage community food programmes, as well as consumer groups, to purchase food directly from food suppliers and wholesale markets, rather than retailers, which will give them better access to fresh and nutritious food at affordable prices.

Soup for the soul

Encouraging industry players to actively reflect on food issues, and engaging them directly in community service that tackles structural deficiencies in the food system, is the first step. The second is to bring the public on board in this fight.

Few organizations make better use of community energy than food banks and soup kitchens, common in American and European cities – but rare in Singapore.

One of the pioneering soup kitchens in Singapore is The Soup Kitchen Project run by local vegetarian cafeFood #03 as one of their core projects. The Soup Kitchen Project, which is conducted every Monday, engages some four-five volunteers to prepare vegetables, occasionally salvaged from surrounding markets, into healthy, vegetarian meals.

The hot meals are then distributed by a separate team of volunteers to needy residents in Little India, as well as elderly tenants at the Thieves Market, an open-air flea market close by.

Considering the number of under-utilized kitchens across the island, in Child-care Centres, Senior Activity Centres and Community Centres, there is great potential for starting more soup kitchens to reduce food waste, bring communities together and create employment opportunities for the elderly and temporarily jobless.

Soup kitchens need not be charities; many are set up as cooperatives that employ ‘beneficiaries’ directly in collecting, preparing or distributing food, thus empowering people to take direct control of their food supply. Fresh food could be sourced from warehouses and markets – but they could also be obtained fromcommunity food gardens and local farms in Lim Chu Kang and Kranji, thus supporting the local food economy.

An integrated system of local farms and gardens, soup kitchens and food banks (warehouses that store and sell unsold, but edible foods at a discount or distributed for free), together with an innovative private sector and reflexive population, may be just the ingredients needed to create and sustain a vibrant, secure food community in the long-term.

…and the rest is gravy!

What is clear from the case studies of Raitong Organics Farm, FoodXervices and Food #03 is this: creating a sustainable food system needs to start from the bottom-up.

The dominant industrial food system, while successful in funding technological development to mitigate environmental changes, and producing the quantities of food needed for the growing populations of Asia, cannot achieve an equitable distribution of food, or indeed sustainable production of food, in the long-term.

Other stakeholders in the food system need to intervene – smaller, better managed organic farms, conscientious and innovative food businesses, food research organizations, and engaged food consumers everywhere.

Through engaging with wider society through social action, farms and food businesses can help raise awareness of challenges and gaps in the food system that social entrepreneurs from the private and people sectors seek to collaboratively address.

Importantly, the success of such social ventures can impress upon policymakers the need for holistic, community-centred strategies to address food security.

Food has a special place in Asian hearts: it feeds our stomach and our souls. As the source of nourishment, a fundamental livelihood, the cornerstone of social gatherings and a cultural product refined through centuries of cross-cultural interaction, it is imperative that us, as Asia’s future leaders, take active, socially innovative steps to address food security today.

In the latter, the reputation of a young interdisciplinary coalition is at stake. The speaker and topic must be chosen to fit the times: the speaker must be cutting edge and serious; the topic contemporary and thought-provoking. The floor must be opened to cumbersome questions, and perspectives must be challenged.

I had the honour of attending both of these events in the past week, and the perspectives I gained from them were markedly different.

Caroline Knowles, now Professor Knowles, of Goldsmiths University became an urban sociologist when investigating the lives of mental health patients in Toronto. Commissioned to investigate the community healthcare system, Caroline discovered that there was in fact no such system in place. So instead, she followed two ‘mental health patients’ around town, to find out how they navigated (that is not ‘flowed’) from space to place, place to space. It took knowledge and skill to find friendly security guards (who let them sit in food courts), free soup kitchens, sheltered bus bays. What Caroline proposes is that the journeys which a city’s inhabitants take themselves construct and constitute the city. For her, a city is the product of a million people negotiating difference, interests and obstacles. In other words, a city is a world of translation and travel.

I must confess I fell in love with Caroline within the first ten minutes. Its difficult not to fall for a lecturer who doesn’t use a powerpoint, but Google Maps, to show you the way journeys play out on a variety of scales. After Toronto, Caroline took us to Hong Kong to look at the way British expatriate women navigate an essentially Chinese city (‘studying privilege can be as revealing as studying poverty’). For these woman, walking was about energy, vitality, talk – not surviving. They moved from luxury apartments through hills, to the market, through aestheticized poverty, back home. And their maids? From home, across continents and seas, through a new country buying and re-collecting, and back to…work. Who’s restricted? Who’s freed?

Another interesting thing Caroline did was to follow the journey of a flip-flop. That’s right, object biography. She started from Fuzhou, amidst the ‘choreography of flip-flop feet on a factory floor’, via legal (and illegal) routes across Somalia, to the markets of Ethiopia, and on to the feet of a third of one of the world’s poorest populations. She emphasized the skill required for smuggling; choosing the right kind of person to do the job (and here, the older the better), the right routes with few guards, or guards who desert. Information gathered from cleaners and janitors near checkpoints. Smuggling isn’t a network; it’s a negotiation.

This kind of a city, seen from an the perspective of individuals by an (albeit critical) individual herself is one kind of city. It is the kind of city I experienced when I stepped onto the train at Waterloo East, changed to a rustier one at London Bridge, walked without a map through Lewisham, and towards the altermodern facade of Goldsmiths. It is a city I pretend to be alone in, that I pretend to skillfully navigate although this is all fake because I have a one-month unlimited rail, tube and buss pass in my pocket.

Am I truly ‘navigating’ if I already know the paths, people and obstacles? Does my single journey really matter in this vast, incomprehensible, autonomous intersection of movements and structures that is the city?

The second lecture, by Susan Fainstein of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, presented a strikingly different version of the city: that of a product of public-private interests that worked with and around the city’s population to shape a city they envisioned and wanted realized. Susan spoke about the need to maintain equity by institutionalizing urban justice (re: legalizing community benefit agreements), insisting on the participation of people in development decision-making, providing social housing whenever a community is displaced. A few choice case studies from New York, London and Amsterdam illustrated both sides of this dynamic: the city as a site of contestation, not creation; one in which different interest groups claimed authorship and territorial rights. It is the city that fills the spaces around people, squeezes them, impresses its tempo upon their time. What can one do except lobby the city? Where can one move?

The city is as much a product of actual processes on the ground, whether individualistic journey or collective interest, as well as that of academic discourse. How one begins to think about where one lives is influenced by whom we listen to and where we listen to them. How often to we listen to the streets themselves, or ask people on them what they think about the whole thing? What about the experience we ourselves had in getting to these places where people talk? What kind of city did we move within and between?

Similarly, Landfall, a thought-provoking exhibition of new work at the Museum of London Docklands “exploring the Atlantic Ocean as natural phenomenon, transporter of dreams and peoples”, is deeply empathetic. Curator Ingrid Pollard put together the series of mixed media work from a transatlantic collaboration of artists from London and Houston, as well as children living in Project Row Houses (Houston), where the artists stayed. Children were asked about their dreams and hopes for the future; the task of the artists was to translate and articulate both the childrens’ and their own: composer Dominique Le Gendre’s orchestral piece ‘Dreamwinds’ suggests shifting yet stable currents of an ocean flowing between places and cultures; Beth Secor’s embroidered cotton portraits of black and white women weave the history of African cotton slaves together with the material expressions of colonial reality; Godfried Donkor’s southern ‘Vogue’ collages of beautiful African women against the sleek elegance of a magazine cover are simultaneously fantasies of, and warnings against, the integration of African and Western culture.

Yet, this is only what I watched and heard. Were these really the messages the artists sought to convey? Were Pollard’s own ceramic paper-boats, which I admired as symbols of a once tumultous, now permanent transition of peoples across an ocean, perhaps merely the playful interpretation of a historical journey too often dramatized? From children and artists, through media, to me – with each attempted translation I seized the opportunity for re-intepretation, to bring these stories closer to my own experiences and dreams.

And this, in my opinion, is the real beauty and importance of Samuel Ho’s photographs and the Landfall project: Both are heartfelt attempts to express the politics of movement and aesthetics of migration in a public gallery for all to pick apart, watch and listen to. They are attempts, then, to create a real place and time for understanding outside the oppressive political rhetoric of tolerance, as well as the artistic seductions of ethnic performance. By conveying the stories of others, they make us interested to hear these stories ourselves. They inspire us to listen to those whose stories have now become part of our own.

For more information on Landfall: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/AboutUs/Newsroom/LandFall+at+Museum+of+London+Docklands.htm

Hunger in Singapore was the red-hot issue at the very first Project Perk discussion, organized by the Democratic Socialist Club at the Central Library’s Perk Point. The session was moderated by Ms. Heather Chi, a local food activist from youth group Food for All and was attended by some fifteen undergraduates from different walks of life.The session begun with a simple, but humbling question: Does anyone know anything about hunger and poverty in Singapore?

Very rarely do we associate hunger and poverty with prosperous Singapore. Besides the fact that poor people rarely get evicted and are banned from begging, many community service centers are also hesitant to “hand out” food and money to the needy – fearful of encouraging a “crutch mentality’” amongst Singaporeans.

However, according to the Community Food Survey conducted by Food for All, which is still in progress, almost 12000 households in Singapore currently rely on supplementary food rations – dried food packets or cooked meals – in the country. That’s quite a shocking statistic.

Many of these food rations programmes are operated by Family Service Centres (FSCs), Residential Committees (RCs) or other Voluntary Welfare Organizations (VWOs) who do not provide food as their core programme; it is often only through working with needy individuals, especially those that are unemployed, do centres realize people are starving and may need a temporary supply of food to tide them over a difficult period.

The largely ad-hoc and informal nature of food provision for the needy means that, in many instances, centres do not know whether their beneficiary is already receiving food assistance from elsewhere. Neither do they know if there are any other food programmes in their district with whom they could collaborate, such as through buying food in bulk to reduce costs.

The food price hikes in 2008 saw a rise both in the costs of purchasing food, as well as the number of people applying for food assistance. With many food rations programmes dependent on donations from volunteers or a single corporate sponsor, it is often very tight for centres that have to raise almost S$3000 every month to sustain their food rations programmes.

However, not every food rations programme in Singapore is struggling. The non-profit organization, Food from the Heart, operates an excellent logistics system coordinating some 1700 volunteers to distribute unsold bread from local bakeries to some 11,000 individuals every month – helping to reduce food waste as well as feed the hungry. They have managed to raise funds through Charity Golf Tournaments and Operas – events that also raise awareness of their work.

So why haven’t other food rations programmes been able to scale up and improve their anti-hunger efforts?

A number of perspectives were suggested, including the fact that centres might not want to advocate on behalf of their clients due to political sensitivities, and the fact that many centres are already fighting fire and do not have the manpower to spare. It was also highlighted that Singapore does not have a food shortage, and that the different ethnic communities do a very good job providing for their own, through food kitchens in places of worship.

The crux of the issue here appears to be information and mobility. Many of the hungry do not have money to travel to these centres to get food, and some may be hesitant to take food from a religious organization they are not affiliated to. In addition, another significant hungry group – the migrant workers – are often unfamiliar with Singapore and do not know where they can go to get assistance.

In the university’s academic context, we do not have access to this information either. But we can start; through platforms such as Project Perk where people working on related issues can come together and share their findings, we may be able to uncover this issue one research paper at a time so as to be in a better position to intervene in the crisis.

On a community level, we can also contribute through facilitating collaborations between food rations programmes, supporting programmes directly through food donation drives, as well as promoting community gardening efforts in low-income neighbourhoods to enable the poor to supplement their diet with fresh produce!

Working together, we can fight hunger too.

About Project Perk

Project Perk is a monthly current affairs discussion forum spearheaded by the Democratic Socialist Club, that aims to be a platform for undergraduates to discuss social and political issues they are currently researching, in an inclusive, democratic setting.

Conducted informally in the Central Library’s Perk Point, Project Perk invites all students working on term papers, Independent Study Modules or theses who would like to discuss their findings and perspectives with contemporaries from other disciplines to submit a topic for discussion. Following the session, key points will be summarized on an online platform and archived for reference.

For more information and/or to submit a topic for discussion, do contact Heather (heather@nus.edu.sg).

The global food industry has been the subject of intense scrutiny – and criticism – over the past year from actors as diverse as journalist Michael Pollan, environmentalist Vandana Shiva, and Prince Charles of Britain.

Their main contentions: the unsustainable mass production (and waste) of cheap food; the harmful health effects ofagrochemicals, global inequities in food distribution, resulting in famines; inadequate food safety regulations; farm land grabsby richer nations; and the questionable practice patenting Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) by large multi-national companies that both exploit communities and damage the environment. With the recent death of Norman Borlaug, father of the first Green Revolution, the debate about how to produce, distribute and consume food fairly and sustainably for a world of eight billion has reached a peak.

There is another, more personal, battleground in the food fight – that of health and nutrition. These include the issues of poor hygiene standards in food production, the lack of nutritious food in school canteens, the health effects of processed foods, and the “obesity epidemic”. With much of the world’s food controlled by large corporations and regulated by big government, the two sets of issues – unsustainable methods and unhealthy content – are not unrelated.

Professor Albert EJ McGill, Director of food consultancy firm Future for Food, and currently Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Chemistry shared a refreshingly honest perspective on the ethical dilemmas within the food profession at “The Food Professional’s Dilemma – a healthy diet or a healthy profit?”, a public seminar hosted by the Masters of Science in Environmental Management programme at the School of Design and Environment, NUS.

A former food scientist, Prof. McGill highlighted the importance of keeping the concept of “food” separate from that of agriculture, diet and health. In his view, food needs to be seen holistically as an integral aspect of cultural practices and social interactions; people who ‘eat’ do so as much for meaningful experiences and personal happiness, as they do for ‘nutrition’.

However, dietary guidelines that specify what, how much, and how often one should eat are set by committees overwhelminglydominated by medical experts and food scientists. Here, certain foods and nutrient groups, depending on the latest research, are labeled as ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘eat sparingly’ – while the food professionals themselves are wont to ignore their own advice!

The key issue is: What makes us eat what we do? Dietary guidelines? Come on!

Food choices are determined by both supply and demand: agribusinesses such as Kellogg are frequently accused of saturating the children’s cereal market with high-sugar, high-fat products, and advertising them on prime time TV – but if permissive parentsdidn’t allow their children to stock the supermarket trolley, such foods would never have the wide-ranging impact they do.

Food choices are also affected by peer group dynamics and specific cultural contexts of eating. Prof. McGill highlighted the hilarious case study of Jamie Oliver vs. Rotherham, South Yorkshire – where parents rebelling against the chef’s healthy eating campaigns pushed fast food through the school gates to their children. He also asked the pointed question: If your friends were thinking of heading to McDonald’s for brunch, would you say no – on nutritional grounds?

The fact remains: eating is part of our economic and social lives. Fast food remains the cheapest supply of quick calories for people-on-go. These include students, office workers, busy parents; in other words, the most common social roles in contemporary society.

Recognizing this, it becomes clear that food ethics is as much the domain of food professionals as it is the responsibility of food consumers like ourselves. Certainly, the food industry is culpable for misrepresenting the food that is sells; however, our demand for quick, cheap, and tasty food has, in part, necessitated the mass production of processed foods and the employment of technologies and marketing methods to enhance the appearance, shelf-life and cultural ubiquity of such foods.

Food politics is our domain of action. The industry, through its dietary guidelines and scientific research, as well as civil society, with its undercover activism and advocacy, have already provided us the information we need to make an informed choice.

The rest is up to us.

Attending a pub debate is one of the must-do’s for anyone on exchange in an English-speaking country. In London, the world’s cultural capital, that goes without saying. Having just returned from a very interesting and intense Big Ideas debate on medical ethics at The Wheatsheaf (and expecting another narrow-minded, issues-based discussion full of drunken talk and polarized views), I was pleasantly surprised when speaker Miran Epstein – a Senior Lecturer in Medical Ethics and Law at The London School of Medicine – provoked much ire right at the start when he proclaimed: “Medical ethics is all political economy.”He went on, stoking the flames: “There is nothing wrong with the ethics we have, the Hippocrates Oath, whatever…the issue is the social and political context within which this ethics is applied. There is no point having this debate about ‘who to save?’ ’should abortion be legalized?’ or whatever when, as we speak, huge sums of money are diverted from health-care to fund big banks everyday and governments speak of fictional resource constraints and the need for an ‘ethics’ to allocate life and death!”

Here someone said, “Alright, can we step back from politics a bit and focus on medical issues…” To which he erupted: “The very fact that we separate bioethics and politics is itself a reflection of the perversity of the society we live in!”

By this point (barely five minutes into the evening), almost the entire (English, medical) crowd was up in arms while I was merely extremely excited. As a social science student interested in social ethics and its implications, I found Miran’s points extremely refreshing. Although his attack on an entire tradition of ethical theorizing was rather brazen, I was very heartened to hear a bioethicist questioning the need for a ‘better, more relevant’ ethics and the politics of ethical practice itself.

To Miran, ethics functioned as an ‘ideological smokescreen’ behind which medical professionals could be absolved of the need to have a conscience; with clear ethical guidelines grounded in a legal framework, medical practitioners need no longer think critically about their own discipline: who was funding drugs research? who had vested interest to ‘prolong death’ in palliative care institutions? who ultimately benefited from opt in/opt out organ donation arrangements? Who to give this one kidney to?

The patient checked all the boxes, I can proceed.
Guantanamo Bay has myself and two colleagues “supervising”, this torture is legal.

Another issue that was thrown into the open was that of the extensive ‘medicalization’ of life. Miran stated, rather controversially, that he had no issues at all with euthanasia and assisted suicide. Some people want to die, let them die, and by all means help them – just don’t get a doctor to do it. At this point, the audience absolutely erupted; assuming (wrongly) that Miran had just washed his bloody hands in front of them, stating that euthanasia and assisted suicide were outside the realm of ethics, or at least medical ethics, and that as long as someone else did the dirty work, everything would be fine. This was not what Miran was saying at all (the French accent didn’t help).

In fact, Miran was questioning (though not directly) the very scope of medicine itself and the extent to which professional medicine should intervene in the autonomous lives of individuals:

He raised the example of reproduction. Historically, reproduction was firmly grounded in the family and the community; pregnant women were cared for their mothers and grandmothers; midwives assisted in birth; wet nurses assisted in breastfeeding. However, over the centuries, the entire process of reproduction began increasingly to come within the scope of biomedicine and women increasingly surrendered themselves to a whole range of specialist advice and medical technologies. No longer was it acceptable for a woman to give birth on her own… and no longer acceptable for her to abort an unwanted child.

In Miran’s opinion, the excessive medicalization of life (’which paradoxically denies the right to death but also the right to live – thanks to prohibitive consultation and treatment fees for the poor!’), and the ideological smokescreen of professional ethics, has resulted in doctors who increasingly turn to deception to reconcile their conscience with their practice:

(1) Euthanasia: Alluding to the ‘law of double effects’, doctors can always ‘justify’ an untimely death by saying that they merely wished to reduce the level of pain by prescribing higher and higher doses of morphine which, unfortunately, killed the patient in the end. This effectively bypasses the law, but makes the doctor essentially a deceiving murderer. Wouldn’t it be more ethical to legalize euthanasia but take it out of the medical practice entirely? So the children want their parent to rest in peace? Why then let them pull the plug.

(2) Opt-out schemes for organ donations: Essentially a scheme to capitalize on the ignorance of a segment of the population who would have said ‘no’ had they been offered a choice, medical professionals choose not to ask at all and assume that everyone who did not say ‘no’ would have said ‘yes’ had they been asked, and thus find an easy way to obtain large numbers of organs for surgery and research…essentially by deception. (Miran did qualify, however, that in his ideal world, all dead bodies and their organs would be public property solely by virtue of their value to the living.)

At this point, most of the audience was either too angry or too exhausted to comment and the facilitator called for a ten minute break and another round of drinks. Although I left the discussion at this point, many questions remained unanswered, awaiting further research, reflection and discussion:

In what direction should the debate on ethics proceed? Should we accept Miran’s challenge to question the need for an ‘ethics’ in the first place and use this as a basis to critically examine the society that we live in – a society that ‘needs’ such an ethics at all? Should we accept his view that there is nothing fundamentally ‘wrong’ with our present medical ethics and that the issue is the political economy within which this ethics is embedded? If this is so, perhaps we should shift our focus from attempting to formulate a ‘purer’, more relevant ethics to simply eliminating ethics completely from the field of medicine altogether and calling ‘ethical dilemmas’ by their real name – social and political controversies.

The rest of the post is in point form, it is my five most significant takeaways:

1. Nothing beats having friends to hang with: This may sound strange considering how much I enjoy stalking happenings in the city by myself, but I have consistently found that I’ve had the most fun with other people on the rare times we’ve traveled, had meals, cooked meals, watched musicals, gone for walks, shopped, attended art events, attended talks, attended protests, etc. I’m terrible at hanging out though, if there was one thing I wished I had more insight into after exchange, it would be why this is so.
2. It’s tough running a one-person household: Interestingly, the most challenging part of my entire exchange was planning meals. It’s crazy to try to provide yourself with variety when there are only a limited number of veggies sold loose, and it’s likely most of your food will go bad before you get a chance to cook it. It also took me awhile to figure out how to eat cheap but full out (Costcutter! Pret! Chinese takeaway!). It makes you think about how it actually makes economical sense to get married and have 2.4 kids.
3. Traveling isn’t everything: Admittedly, I’m saying this after doing a solo excursion of twelve cities in nineteen days, three trips to Oxford, Bristol and Coventry, as well as a seven day tour of the Scottish Highlands and Northern Ireland. But perhaps it is because I traveled so much (and many traveled more) that I’m disillusioned with travel entirely. Although I certainly appreciated the company and some very beautiful urban landscapes in Europe, I don’t think I feel comfortable moving into new place in the capacity of a tourist, here to see, to snap, and then leave. I don’t think it is how I would like to learn, to experience a place in the capacity of a consumer. But that is just me; I’m very happy being in one place, wherever life might place me, reading, working, savouring the moment. No more expensive expeditions in this lifetime!
4. Activism isn’t everything, either: During my time in London, I made it a point to attend rallies, protests, benefit events, conferences, etc. related to social and environmental causes. I met many inspiring groups and individuals, collected invaluable information and also had a very fruitful time compiling a report listing the various groups and initiatives I came across during my time. However, having interacted with activist groups and activists has made me wary of ideology and identity – how these can demarcate and exclude, and establish guidelines and ways of acting that both divert focus from the issue at hand, as well as critical dialogue on the point of activism in the first place. I have become wary about claiming and naming the moral high ground, about the need to challenge all assumptions about the Greater Good. I myself may no longer call myself an activist the next time you see me, simply because a definition without qualifications is misleading at best, bare-faced lying at worse.
5. Home is beautiful not because of what it is, but how it is remembered: I don’t think I can say I am depressed to leave London or ecstatic to be back home. Student exchange for me has been a passage of time I have voluntarily chosen, so I have accepted that, for five months, I would be away from “Home” in a foreign territory, and that this would end after five months. What I have missed are interacting with family and friends, buying cheap food, knowing my way around. What I will miss here are exactly the same things. I’m just happy I chose to come and return, and that I survived everything in between.

See you in Singapore!