Cultural Heritage
From our cultural assets to our next meal, what makes life in Singapore vibrant
27 Chilli Crab—sweet, savoury and spicy. Hits all the right spots.
28 Chicken Rice— a quintessential favourite of locals and tourists.
29 Kaya toast—sweet comfort any time of day.
30 Nasi Lemak—the perfect pairing of fragrant rice with zingy sambal.
31 Satay—the ultimate street food.
32 “It’s now very hard to find Eurasian food like Devil’s Curry or feng. Unless a Eurasian invites you home for dinner, you won’t get to eat these dishes. Growing up, it was still possible to have Eurasian food at a restaurant, but now it’s extremely rare to see these dishes and most young Singaporeans have never had real Eurasian food. It is slowly disappearing from our culinary lexicon.” —Loh Lik Peng, hotelier, restaurateur and founder of Unlisted Collection
33 We source for more than 90 per cent of our food from over 170 countries and regions—this is one of the ways Singapore is securing our food supply, according to the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources (now renamed as Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment). The country is also taking steps to be more self‑sufficient, especially in the face of climate change—and more recently, closed borders. The vision: to ramp up Singapore’s agri‑food capability and capacity to produce 30 per cent of our nutritional needs locally by 2030.
34 In 2019, local farms grew 14 per cent of Singapore’s leafy vegetables, 26 per cent of eggs, and 10 per cent of fish. Vertical farms such as Sustenir’s harvest include non‑native crops such as kale and strawberries, while Kühlbarra is rearing barramundi off the coast.
35 From kai lan to cai xin, Citiponics Farm @ Ang Mo Kio grows up to the 25 different types of vegetables on its rooftop farm. Following this pilot project launched by the Singapore Food Agency, the rooftops of nine more multi‑storey carparks across the island will be converted for the farming of vegetables and other food crops.
36 With 8,000 pieces from Singapore’s National Collection, the National
Gallery Singapore is custodian to one of the world’s largest collection of Singapore and Southeast Asian modern art, including works by local pioneer artists Georgette Chen, Cheong Soo Pieng and Liu Kang.
37 “An underrated or versatile Singlish word? Underrated I say ‘your head’, and versatile should be ‘ha’. ‘Your head’ is a simple retort to who you think sounds unreliable or stupid. But ‘ha’ is very complex. You can use it to end a sentence with a threat (‘Dun make me angry ha’); or with curiosity (‘What is this ha?’); or to cast doubt (‘He so nice ha?’); or to show enlightenment (‘Liddat one ha’). You
understand yet? Dun just go, ‘Ha, ha, ha’ ha. Ha your head.”—gwee Li Sui, poet and author of Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate (2017)
38 “This [flower arrangement] represents our vision of how dining will look like post‑pandemic: similar but different. We mix the ordinary with the extraordinary by arranging steel grass to grow out from a scholar’s rock of blue ginger.”—john Lim, founder of Humid House
39 Painter Ruben Pang, graphic artist Sonny Liew, author Amanda Lee Koe, singer‑songwriter Jasmine Sokko: there is a diversity of young talent and creativity across the arts scene in Singapore. And we hope to see more emerging, especially with initiatives such as the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, dedicated to promoting contemporary Singapore creative writing.
“My wildest dream event celebrating local talents would be a weekend‑long music festival held at the Old Kallang Airport, off Nicoll Highway, with multiple stages spotlighting local talents such as Jeremy Monteiro and Gentle Bones, while the Dim Sum Dollies can offer a comedy‑ driven takeover.”— Carolyn Kan, jewellery designer and founder of Carrie K