Dedicated to the holy in nature. The life in the seed. The beauty that feeds the world.
Saudi Arabia – In Jizan and Asir, Saudi Arabia’s southern provinces, live the reclusive Flower Men. For centuries, these descendants of the ancient Tihama and Asir tribes have been known for wearing colourful flower garlands on their head. They lived completely isolated until 20 years […]
For a taste of what the near future looks like, Wal-Mart already began bottling their own milk, shutting down over 100 dairy producers in the process. As for the distant future, I imagine it will look similar to the consolidation in other livestock industries, where a handful of mega corporations dictate production and the “farmers” are more like serfs, deeply in debt and entirely beholden to the corporation. I already mentioned poultry farming, but also look at hog farming: the largest hog producer in the country, Smithfield Foods, is now owned by a Chinese corporation, and which is responsible for staggering amounts of damageto rural American communities due to the concentrated waste it produces.
In the name of efficiency, profits will be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while waste gets concentrated into more and more toxic forms to be dumped on rural communities.
UK-based artist Asmahan A. Mosleh spends 8 to 54 hours on a single mandala, publishing photos of her intricate works on her Instagram, @murderandrose. The pieces, often gilded with gold paint, begin with a pencil outline which she then traces in pen, and finally pigment. Pearls of […]
One of my earliest memories is of sitting around a makeshift communal table with my mother and sister, past our bedtime, in front of the car park at the public housing estate we lived in in Singapore. It was sometime in the mid-1980s, long after hygiene regulations had confined vendors to dedicated hawker centers. This pushcart stall, likely illegal, was probably one of the last of Singapore’s itinerant hawkers. We sat on low stools, tucking into our piping-hot fishball soup and noodles served dry.
Singaporeans are obsessed with food. We can expound ceaselessly on where to find the best bak chor mee (minced meat noodles) and will queue for hours for a good yong tau foo (surimi-stuffed tofu and vegetables). Perhaps because most of us are descendants of immigrants thrust into an artificial construct of a nation, or maybe because we live in a country that is constantly renewing and rebuilding, one of the few tangible things that connects us to the past and our cultural identity is food.
There are many facets of Singaporean cuisine: Malay, Chinese, Indian, Eurasian (a fusion of European and Asian dishes and ingredients) Peranakan (combining Chinese and Malay food traditions), and catch-all Western, which usually means old-school Hainanese-style British food—a local version of Western food adapted by chefs from the southern Chinese province of Hainan, who worked in British restaurants or households.
