Hooray! The ‘farm to table’ concept has finally picked up in Singapore. Marketing strategies have shifted from boasting about the vast distances the piece of perfectly seared steak has travelled for your enjoyment to showing off the restaurant’s humble rooftop garden that yields just enough mint to garnish your plate.
Early Spoils at Open Farm Community, Singapore, a new ‘farm to table’ event and dining venue
Food is beginning to travel less and less. Suddenly, the glamour of imported foie gras is being sidestepped for locally-caught fish and organically grown local veg.
While not exactly on the same calibre as similar concept restaurants elsewhere in the world, it is a relief to see that a genuine effort does exist to make the dining experience a more sustainable affair.
We don’t yet know which chicken laid our egg or the temperament of the cow that produced the cream for our coffee (maybe that’s why it was slightly bitter) but we cannot underestimate how much good, no matter how incremental, this trend will wholly have on the environment and of our perceptions of what a true ‘dining experience’ should entail.
Diners are not only more aware of when their food is ‘local’ but we are beginning to know the names of the farms that actually produce the produce. It was not too long ago that the Kranji Countryside was virtually unheard of… and the organic farms in the Cameron Highlands sounded more like they were somewhere in the UK than in Malaysia.
Lemon Tart with Basil Ice Cream from Open Farm Community, Singapore
We have always known that the land-scarce metropolis that is Singapore relies on foreign imports when stocking supermarket shelves. I feel it carried an implicit assumption that this was only so because whatever Singapore could yield simply wasn’t good enough. Yet (finally), that notion is being challenged.
Now, leading restaurants boast about how closely they can source their ingredients, with some even setting a radius of how far they are willing to let it travel. The fascination with ‘molecular’ cuisine is fading as chefs preach about letting ingredients ‘speak for themselves’.
Warm salad of broccoli, pine nuts, sugar snap peas topped with crumbled feta & minden mint (also by Open Farm Community, Singapore)
Chefs (and even bartenders) flit in and out of the kitchen (or over the bar) to pick herbs fresh from their very own rooftop gardens, miniscule clippers in hand. Regular people are sidestepping the supermarkets and heading straight to the source when shopping for groceries. Visitors are actively making the trek to see these more distant corners of country, to witness firsthand the start contrast it has with the city’s urban core.
A secret personal hope is that our new collective interest in growing our own ingredients will be enough to dissuade land developers from using up the last patches of green space Singapore has for more commercial developments.
Singapore has always been branded as the “Garden City” but it is hard to focus on the trees that line the streets when brand new condominiums and shopping malls pop up relentlessly, like weeds. Fingers crossed, we might even see spaces being repurposed as vegetable patches instead! Dare to dream…
However, we are still in early days and we cannot afford to feel too optimistic just yet. After all, this is just a trend and, in the same way we abandoned full denim suits and knee-high platform vinyl boots, it is at risk of being swept aside as a fad rather than a more significant movement.
The realist in me knows that urban farming is not without its obvious limitations but with enough momentum, it has the potential to uproot Singapore’s dominant reliance on foreign goods.
