Rewriting food insecurity narratives in Singapore

Abstract

For many, the phenomenon of food insecurity can be reduced to a fundamental fear: what happens if I run out of food? People were made acutely aware of this fear at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, when supermarkets began to run out of essentials. In Singapore, I propose that this fear was rooted in the narrative of scarcity and accelerated by the pandemic's crisis rhetoric. It extended a scarcity narrative developed since Singapore's independence, being an island nation cut off from Malaysia that had to survive with limited resources. Concurrently, this built on the neo-Malthusian logic seen in the Green Revolution of food scarcity as the main framing of the problem of hunger, instead of malnutrition and interconnected social issues. This way, the narrative obfuscated a more important statistic -10.4% of Singapore's population was still food insecure in 2020 (Nagpaul, Sidhu, and Chen 2020). 1 This chapter reframes Singapore's narrative of food insecurity away from a misapplied scarcity and securitisation lens, instead connecting food insecurity to the lived experience thereof. Engaging this challenge paves the way for key discussions about how food insecurity is not isolated but intersects with consumption and malnutrition through axes of inequality such as class, gender, climate, and race. Solely increasing food production has not been nor will be the solution to eradicating hunger, especially without attention to its wider social processes. This has vital implications for the current national strategy of ramping up food production and diversifying food sources. In the wake of the pandemic, it has become even more vital to consider the heterogeneity of Singapore's social body to ensure future foodscape policy decisions do not reproduce existing inequalities.

The Future of Morphological Science Education: Learning and Teaching Anatomy in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…However, we can draw lessons we learned from the past crises we experienced—lessons that will aid us to adjust as well as to carry on with anatomical education. For instance, online education recorded high success when it was employed in the 2003 pandemic [ 78 , 79 ] and has once again been employed effectively [ 80 ]. Students can learn anatomy even without the use of a cadaver, entirely from online resources and textbooks [ 81 ], and, quite frankly, many medical schools have done away with cadaver dissection [ 82 ].…”

“…Even though online teaching and learning might seem to be effective and, in the era of COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, probably the only possibility to continue the classes beyond the classrooms, this way of teaching raises several concerns and challenges as seen below in Table 1 [ 17 , 30 , 42 , 43 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 82 , 83 ]. The first disadvantage of online teaching that should be taken into consideration is the problem of reliable internet access and/or technology struggle that significantly affect the ability to participate in online learning.…”