no. 91: food as infrastructure

Back in February, I wrote a piece for Vittles on the history of hawker centres in Singapore, which contained the line “hawker centres are infrastructure.” We were trying to cover 60 years of warp-speed development in 3000 words, and I didn’t have room to go much deeper into the implications of this idea, but it stuck with me, because sometimes when you write a thing, you know it to be true. And if you’re very lucky, you’re actually right.

That line came about partly because at the time, I was also reading How Infrastructure Works, a vivacious, inquisitive look at how and why we have the infrastructure we have, and what it means to live in a world with massive infrastructural networks (and one of my favorite non-fiction books ever). 

I’m lucky enough to be friends with the author, Deb Chachra – she’s a professor of engineering at Olin College, and as she likes to say, a colonial thrice over – born to South Asian parents in Canada, raised and educated there, and a longtime resident of the United States. I mention this because she often brings it up in contextualizing her thinking. Deb was kind enough to sit down to think out loud with me for a couple of hours on the intersection of food and infrastructure. 

With Deb’s blessing, I’ve pulled together these edited excerpts from our conversation,  exploring how societies provide food that’s ready to eat, and why. 

Deb starts by laying out one of the core ideas from How Infrastructure Works – that infrastructure is agency. We explore whether food really could be supplied by infrastructural networks, and then ask why infrastructure, and specifically infrastructure around food, gets built. Our conversation isn’t specific to hawkers or Singapore – Deb looks at infrastructure as a global phenomenon – so I’ve added some further thoughts of my own at the end, returning to the hawker centres that inspired it. This is a longer piece than many others I send – almost 7000 words – but I think it’s worth your time, and hope you’ll enjoy it. 

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TW: So one of my favorite parts of How Infrastructure Works comes early on when you describe infrastructure as agency. And you talk about how infrastructure creates agency for individuals, for us as human beings, and I'm wondering if you think about this on the societal scale as well. 

Deb: So I'm going to back up a second and unpack a little bit. In his book Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen makes the case that, in general,  no one wants wealth for its own sake. We want wealth because it enables us to have, in his words, the freedom to live the kind of lives that we have reason to value. That's why I think we react the way we do to people who are, like, gazillionaires – because we understand at some level the purpose of money is to give us the freedom to do what we want to do, and if people have so much money that it’s well beyond that, that you can do everything you want to do, it's like it doesn't make sense to hoard yet more money, because like there's already no practical limit on what you're allowed to do.

That's the first piece of it. 

But the second piece is that there are two things that people do when they actually have access to wealth. 

One is that pretty much as soon as people's survival needs are met, the first thing that they spend money on is artificial light. And artificial light is not a survival need. The ability to function when the sun goes down or if you're inside isn’t freedom in any sort of abstract sense – it’s extremely practical and immediate. It’s agency. You can do what you want or need to do now, instead of being limited by your inability to see in the dark. And this is  such a reliable correlation that you can actually look at aerial or satellite photos of regions at night and track how much light is visible in them over time as a proxy for economic development. As soon as they possibly can afford it, what people buy is agency.

The other piece is that if you have not just money, but you actually have stability and social coordination, you buy this together. And so instead of “as an individual, you get water or you get light,” it’s like, “Oh, no, this is the thing that everybody wants, there are more efficient ways to do whatever it is together.” And there, the idea is that rather than individuals basically figuring out how to get themselves agency, any society that can actually organize itself with enough money and enough, “we all talk to each other,” then basically builds out infrastructural systems. And that could be building out water supplies for people who live in cities, the electrical grid, fuel for cooking. And you see this over and over again, that we don't actually get our agency because we individually figure out this stuff. It's way more efficient to not have to do it as individuals,  but instead to do it collectively. Everyone needs water, everyone needs light, everyone needs to be able to cook food, and we can leverage that. So what that means is that much of our agency in the world comes from these collective systems, rather than individually.

So you can think of water, you can think of sewage, you can think of electricity, utility gas networks for cooking, all of that, as “all of the domestic tasks that I would otherwise be dealing with as an individual, are basically dealt with by these infrastructural systems.” And that means it's somebody's day job, but it’s not mine. One of the things I say is that for most people on the planet who look like me – i.e. middle-aged brown women – most of their lives, their daily work is getting fuel for cooking and getting clean water. And I don't do any of that. And the reason I don't do it is because it's taken care of collectively. And so the way I think about agency is that my individual agency is underpinned by these collective systems. Because I don't have to do things as an individual. I can go do other things.

There’s this idea of the Great Enrichment that’s often framed in terms of wealth – that basically we suddenly got a whole bunch better at cooperating with each other, and therefore we got a lot richer in the last, you know, couple hundred years for no really apparent reason. But part of that is because we got – and this is the “I'm an engineer, not an economist” thing – it's because we got access to energy in an unprecedented way, and we cooperated well enough that we could use it to provide for basic things. And that meant that people got economic agency, and we also got civic agency and political agency, all of the things you get to do when you're not busy trying to figure out how to feed your household. I'm not enough of a historian to dig into this, but I strongly suspect the reason suffragettes and the women's rights movement grew up in places like the US and the UK when it did is because it was coincident with the rise of these infrastructural networks. If you're delivering electricity and water to people's houses, then women can do things other than figure out how to get those things. 

So that's the sense in which I think there’s collective societal agency as well. And again, not a historian, but I think the two big stories in the 20th century were one, the rise of these networks and the literal energy and power consumption associated with that. And two, the decentralization of political power, where more and more people have a say in the world. And I think that those two things are not unrelated. You know, Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about organized abandonment, when basic necessities aren't provided and how it leads to the carceral state, but you can think about these systems as the opposite of that. It's collectively providing for people, giving people individual agency through these collective systems and therefore giving society as a whole agency to do things that it's never been able to do before.

Politics and ownership

TW: We’re so used to thinking about infrastructure as these networks that provide for the basic necessities of living, and yet we don't really have infrastructure that provides food. 

Deb: Right. We don't think of it as the same. We think of water as a political right – that's why we get angry about people in Flint not having clean water to drink. And when Puerto Rico didn't have power after Hurricane Maria, you’d hear, ‘how can they not have electricity, these are Americans.” And that means we think of electricity as a political right too. It wouldn’t be relevant that they were American if we didn’t implicitly think of these basic utilities as political rights.

My take on it is that for something like water, there’s a clear benefit for you and your household to being part of this shared system, because if everyone needs water, if you're part of the system, it's cheaper and better for you – it takes less energy to deliver to your house, and therefore it costs less money, you don't have to worry about getting it, it’s clean, and it pretty much just delivers itself using gravity. But even better, if the people around you have clean water, your family is less likely to get sick. I'm sure there's similar stories in other places, but the one I know is Boston taxpayers in the 19th century being convinced by public health campaigners to spend the money to build up the system on the grounds that it would benefit them directly.  

With networks, the benefits for the individual or the household similarly grow with the number of people on the network. In the case of water, it's really obvious – build out one system to bring water to lots of people, living close together. Roads and other kinds of transportation function very similarly to Metcalfe's law, which is that the more people are connected to you by road, just like the more people who are on the telephone system, the more valuable your system is. The more personal mobility you have, the more places you can go, the more people you can interact with, the more valuable it becomes.

The difference between those systems and food, and for that matter, housing, is that it doesn’t directly benefit your family if other people have food, just like it doesn't directly benefit your family if other people have housing. And that's a weird thing to say, because unless you're a sociopath, you don’t want people around you to be hungry and unhoused. 

But this kind of pulls apart the economists’ idea of what makes a public good, which is that everyone has access to it, and you can't really keep people from it. But more to the point, everyone benefits from everyone having access to public goods. There's energy efficiency to having a water network. There are efficiencies associated with supply chains, but there isn't the same sort of energy efficiency for food, because it still needs energy (and so costs money) to move that food around – more food, more money. And we haven't even started talking about the cost of growing the organic material in the first place. So food is not a public good, and it doesn't lend itself to being a public good in the same sense as these networks. 

So that’s why I'm trying to pull out these ideas of things that are public goods by virtue of being networks and energy, and things that are essentially social goods by virtue of us collectively deciding, “we want to do this thing.” And food kind of falls in between because having things like distribution terminals or like supply chains clearly benefits everyone. If you have a cold chain to deliver cold stuff then other people can use that, like the banana warehouses – if you would like to sell bananas, or you would like to buy bananas, you can be part of this shared system that moves bananas around the world. 

All of those infrastructural systems basically have some kind of economy of scale. Supply chains are not energy efficient, though it's a little bit of that, but mostly they just grease the path. We have a set path that we walk to get produce from the farm to the local distribution center to the regional distribution hubs to the grocery stores, and then to your house. Supply chains don't have the same sort of “you benefit because everyone else has access too” network effect. 

The other piece of it is that housing isn't a public good because you don't directly benefit from your neighbors being housed. What’s worse, if you think of housing as a private good, then you may actually think, “I want housing to be scarce, because that means that the value of my housing will go up.” Especially if you think of property not as a survival need but as an investment, then there's actually an argument for fewer people around you being housed, not more, because of the value of scarcity.

And with both food and housing, it arguably goes back to the fights around enclosure in the UK – the idea of taking shared common land and basically putting fences around it and saying it belongs to someone – essentially, the invention of private property. Because as soon as property became a private good, then food also became a private good, because food has to come from somewhere. So if you don't have access to land to grow food on, if you can't forage in the forest, because it belongs to someone, if you can't go fish, it suddenly means that it's possible for you to starve from not having access to land. 

So I think that both food and property are a combination of, one, we decided that land was going to be private. And two, because they don't benefit from the network effects of things like water or electricity or communications, they fall out of the realm of “yes, this is clearly a public good.” It’s hard to convince people to pay for food and housing for other people because they don’t directly benefit in the same way as they do with network infrastructure. Which sucks. It means we have people who are unhoused, and it also means that we have people who don't have enough food to eat, that both food and housing insecurity are rampant in an incredibly rich society. 

Fungibility

TW: I wonder if a big part of this is the fact that water can be provided ready for you to use with much less direct human involvement than food. 

Deb: Clean, potable water is essentially fungible, right? Food is not fungible. People have very distinct, very strong preferences about what they eat. I was listening to a podcast about with Anya von Bremzen talking about her book, National Dish,  about the construction of national foods. Very few national dishes are actually the things people have been eating for a long time. There's usually an element of “we’ve decided that this is the thing that's going to be our national food.” So food is not fungible in the same way that water is fungible. I think that's part of what accounts for the tremendous amount of variety, unless you say, well, “this is what we eat.” Is it Denmark where everyone eats like the same kind of sandwich every day for lunch? 

TW: Most of Scandinavia, I think. (Editor’s note: he’s wrong.) 

Deb: Yeah. So it's like “this is just like the social norm.” And it actually makes it possible to say, “oh, well, we all know we're all eating basically the same thing for lunch every day.” But if you live in a world where everyone is eating different things for lunch every day, then there's no collective provision possible. So I do think it's more complicated than water or fuel for cooking or a fridge. 

TW: Just in terms of how to provision it, because there's so many more moving parts. And as you say, it's not like providing the same joule of energy.

Deb: Right. It's not fungible. Electrons are fungible. Water is fungible. Joules are fungible, more or less. But food is absolutely 100 percent not fungible. And the other thing, of course, is this idea of food not being a public good in the economic sense, even if it is in the social sense. 

TW: Which ties us back to shelter, which is much less fungible than energy and water as well. 

Deb: Yeah, absolutely. And again, people have preferences in what kind of provision they have, and most people want stability in their housing. And you know, America is like, “you should buy a house as soon as you possibly can.” But in a lot of other places, it's expected that you’ll rent for your entire life and then it'll go to someone else, which is a good example of housing as infrastructural provision, particularly if it’s public housing, or if it’s carefully regulated. But housing as property and investment is really at odds with housing as infrastructure.

Food is somewhere in between. I think food is not like water and food is also not quite like property. Like water, it’s a survival need. But it’s also highly specific, highly particular. And while there are supply chains and distribution networks, it doesn't have the same network effects as water. 

I think those are the two big things that explain why it’s a common belief that everyone who's American should have clean water, but it's a much harder sell that everyone should have food and housing. Nobody really blinks an eye at like, “oh, we all pay so everyone has clean water.” If anything the opposite is true, “why is it that some people don’t have clean water?’

TW: And nobody blinks an eye at the notion that everyone should have power though you’ve got to pay for it. 

Deb: That's why there's utility shut-off laws. Right.

But “everyone should have money for food” is different. I have a standing donation to a food bank and I also cook food for a community meal fairly regularly. And the food bank in particular – there should not be a parallel supply chain for food. My engineer's head just says this is super inefficient. The whole point of money is that it's fungible. We should just give people money and they can go buy whatever they want. The end. There are plenty of people making that argument. 

Donating to a food bank doesn’t make me feel good – it actually makes me angry. I would actually feel better if people just had unrestricted access and they can make their own good, bad or indifferent choices about food versus being like, “they only get food that's donated” or “they only get food that we've decided is like the right food for them to have.” 

TW: And it's precisely because food is so individual and non-fungible that it serves as this nexus for discipline as well. 

Deb: Right. Like discipline for socialization, it's like the sort of punishment piece of it, or control. Discipline is actually the right word, because it is kind of a combination of punishment and control. It's like, “oh, if you're poor, you're only allowed to eat these kinds of food,” but also like, “you should only eat things that are good for you.” If you can actually buy it yourself, you can eat cheese puffs and whatever. But “oh, no, we're paying for it, you can only get this kind of milk and this kind of eggs and God forbid you buy potato chips for your child.”

TW: I was just listening to a podcast about how you can't use EBT [Electronic Benefit Transfer, effectively, any form of food assistance] for shredded cheese. You can buy the same cheese in a block on EBT. 

Deb: Because the shredded is closer to being a prepared food, I presume. And that's actually an excellent example of this idea of the expectation that you’ll be trading off your own labor when you get “free” food.. It’s a reduction of agency, a reduction of freedom to say, “no, I'm sorry, but you have to shred the cheese.” 

TW: Which in a way is saying that we don't want that half hour of your day in the economy. 

Deb: Right. Which is just a horrifying message. It’s that we think that you need to be shredding cheese instead of just buying the shredded cheese and saving you that half hour. We don't trust your judgment about what it makes sense for you to spend your time on. We're going to make you shred the cheese, whether you want to or not. This is the kind of thing that makes me really feel like I can't do the entire topic of food justice, because it's so clear that it's not fungible, because it's not just engineering economics, because it's so deeply rooted in society and culture, because it's so deeply gendered and rooted in gender control. 

Density, the organization of time, the ownership of networks

TW: I want to push back on the idea that there are no network effects from public, more conjoint provision of food. 

Deb: So I would love to talk more about that. It’s the same thing with housing. Public housing exists for a reason. In both of those cases, there are absolutely are network effects. They're just not as unambiguously direct as water flowing downhill, but there are absolutely network effects for provision of food, because like water it’s something that everyone needs every day to survive. 

TW: I'm thinking in particular of urban density. Just in order to have anything remotely like a city, you need to be able to bring food in from the agricultural land outside, simply because you can't grow enough food around the perimeter of Boston to have a city as dense as Boston. 

Deb: Right. And of course historically cities have had granaries. 

TW: Cities have had granaries that support them. Large, communal bakeries. 

Deb: The private provision of food – this idea of “you go to the grocery store and you buy food and you bring it home and you cook and you eat it at home” is, I think, historically, relatively unusual. It was pretty common to have shared bakeries or to have shared communal kitchens or you just never cooked at home and you always ate from your local communal kitchens. You know, I’d say that the reason we have municipal water is because everybody needs water every day. And if you have a whole bunch of people living closer together, then that problem becomes acute. And exactly the same thing is true for food. You can't have an agglomeration of people together without solving the “where the food comes from” problem. 

TW: And as you point out, there have been different models for communal provision of food that go back a long, long way. You know, there was always this kind of public-private thing going. There were the cookshops of ancient Rome where a large portion of the urban population kind of just ate out of these cookshops, but ultimately that was economic activity – they were paying for the food with their private money, it wasn't just available.

Deb: The infrastructure that you have shapes what’s actually possible. If everybody has a private kitchen, then you can cook at home, but if there's a lot of shared restaurants and the expectations that everyone goes out, then it's possible to have housing without provision for food preparation, or anything other than the most rudimentary provision for cooking. So there's a circularity there. If the social expectation is you go out and eat – and I don't mean go into fancy restaurants, I mean like go to a canteen and just get food – then that means that there will be less provision to do that preparation at home and vice versa. So what's present basically sets the social norms, which then shape what’s present.

Infrastructure, growth, how you spend time

TW: Coming back to the idea of agency where we started, we talked about how the unlocking of individual agency actually creates greater agency for societies as collectives, and we haven't taken that through to the point of talking about national policies, the way governments working to modernize their countries do that by building out infrastructure. 

Deb: Right. Essentially, the argument for large-scale investment in infrastructure has pretty much always been that it underpins economic growth, that if you build physical infrastructure that gives individuals more time to fully participate in the economy. 

TW: And the argument is precisely that it gives individuals the ability to participate more in the economy. I'm just wondering if you've looked at the history of development policy and whether governments kind of look at this more broadly than specifically economic participation, or if that’s always the unwritten motivation?

Deb: So when most of these systems were built, the argument that's typically used is it'll save money. I've argued that using money as a metric is the wrong metric, and I know it's the wrong metric, because if you actually try to put a dollar value on them, the numbers get so high they’re basically meaningless. Greg Milner tried do this for just the systems built on GPS in his book Pinpoint and it's risible. And GPS is one of our newest public goods. We have these systems and we build these other systems on top of them, and if you try to put an actual dollar amount on it, it'll quickly become hilariously astronomical. And if you can’t put a meaningful dollar value on GPS, good luck trying to put a dollar value on clean water or electricity or even weather forecasts. And what basically tells you is that we shouldn’t be measuring their value in money. 

But the thing we've only lightly touched on is that I don't spend any of my time getting fuel for cooking and I spend very little of my time getting clean water. I do spend a chunk of my day cooking. And I don't have to. We certainly haven't collectively decided that we want, you know, a national network of canteens that serve high quality food so that everybody just can go and get some food to eat and then go back to work or do whatever. And there are a few pieces of that. 

I still think it’s astonishing that the U.S. has decided that every kid in school should get the school lunch. And I find it even more astonishing that people oppose it, because that really is getting into food as infrastructure. Your ability to unlock your individual potential is dependent on not being hungry. And therefore that we should just make sure all kids actually have food to eat does not seem like a giant stretch to me. I mean, frankly, if you oppose kids’ school lunches, well, see my earlier point about being a sociopath.

So that would be an example of [a system that provides actual meals]. And then certainly in other polities there have been canteens and they’re either highly subsidized or it's just the workers’ canteen where people go for lunch. 

I feel like we've tried to solve that problem by capitalism-ing our way out of it. There's your energy bars and your Soylent. The last time I was in San Francisco, someone was telling me about how there used to be tiny restaurants kind of all over the wharf, because that's where if you were a dock worker, you would go and get your lunch and then go back to work. And so you wouldn't go home and make dinner and you wouldn't bring a packed lunch. There would just be hot food available, relatively inexpensively, for you to eat. And so it was private provision to meet this universal need. 

But I was reading something – I want to say it was Jenny Odell in Saving Time –  about how a lot of times when we think “oh it takes X amount of time to do things,” it’s because we're trying to do them in a specific way. She was talking about the difference between cooking dinner for 20 people once a week, as opposed to for five people every day. We don't do much with other households or families, like you’re cooking together or living in Baugruppen or having communal kitchens or all of the variants where you don't actually have to get a meal on the dinner table every day. Because of the sort of individual household focus, we’ve kind of fully privatized eating, and that means taking away agency. That means that someone is like, “well, I have to get dinner on the table every day.” And so you order pizza or you get takeout or you get something or you spend time cooking that meal. 

TW: Which is really interesting because this touches on your idea of the ultrastructure. And one of the reasons we're having this conversation at all is, I've been doing a lot of thinking about hawker centers in Singapore and how they are almost infrastructural, in that after we've resettled most of the population within 10 minutes of a hawker center, women's workforce participation just went way up. And of course, there were other factors at play as well. But I have to think that the ability to just not cook is part of it. 

Deb: You know, I have a standing joke that Indian food is a cuisine that's designed to keep women in subjugation. It's just incredibly labor intensive. To make chapatis, or even just to make daily meals, it's not like you put everything together, you stick your one-dish meal in the oven and you forget about it. And Peranakan food is that way as well. A lot of these cuisines evolved based on the idea that there was this free workforce making food for you á la minute. Like in India, it's like, ”oh, chapatis are only good if they come straight off the tawa,” and so you know, mom is in the kitchen cooking chapatis and everyone else is at the dinner table and the chapatis are coming out and being served to them. Except that somehow the fact that your chapatis were made 10 minutes ago is fine when you're mom, it's not fine for anyone else. 

I have to say whenever I make chapatis, which is rare, I'm just making a bunch of them and sticking them in the oven to keep warm, because I can. I don't do the “you're going to get your chapati hot off the tawa” – it's not a thing in my house. Everyone gets a slightly less-fresh chapati. And the reason why it's not is precisely because of who has agency and who's doing what. 

But yeah, the idea of not having to cook – one piece of that is the cuisine piece. Another piece of that is making it the norm that people go out to eat. And those all are incredibly socially situated and related to things like gender dynamics. In the US, think about the rise of prepared convenience food as a way of making it possible for the women to enter the workforce instead of spending all of their day cooking. 

And there's been a parallel trajectory around prepared food in India. That as more and more of that food became available, then women don’t have to do all of the labor-intensive food preparation. And it was seen as like, “oh, it’s because more women are working.” I mean, it's circular. There's a demand for prepared foods and then prepared foods are available so more women are able to work. 

And that absolutely does parallel physical infrastructure. Like in places with unreliable municipal water provision. As soon as the water supply is compromised, like “oh, the pipes are leaking and we're going to deliver water with trucks,” women leave the workforce to stay home and make sure their family gets water. It’s disproportionately women. I'm thinking of Mexico City specifically, but it's always disproportionately women. Somebody has to make sure that the water delivery truck actually comes to your house, and that takes precedence over a paying job. 

And there's many different solutions, but in North America, it's privatized and it falls on the individual household, just like child care has been atomized in the same way. 

TW: And at the same time I'm thinking about how, to the extent that we have provided public access to cooked food. It's really been in support of the migrant worker population in cities, right? That's overwhelmingly young and male. 

Deb: So I think about things like the mill girls in Lowell who lived in boarding houses who would have had canteens... I think it does have to do with that kind of density, where you have enough people together, where it actually makes sense to do communal provision, I think is definitely a big piece of it. 

TW: And it's also density arising from internal migration and internal migration happening because people are coming off the land. 

Deb: Yes. I mean, that's not like farmhouses, where you actually are feeding the people in the household, where everyone is working in the land that was being fed from the land. This is a different thing. And as I said, I think this is actually closer to this idea of when people live far away from each other, you can get your water from the land. And for that matter, you're staying closer to the land. But as soon as you get a bunch of people in close proximity, that’s not an option anymore. But there is this real difference between getting cooked food and prepared food, right, and hot food particularly, right, as opposed to just going to the grocery store and buying prepared food, because there's obviously that too.

And I think about like, you know, Marks & Spencer ready meals, which you take home and you heat up. And it's that sort of missing link between “you buy the raw ingredients” and “you go to the hawker center and someone gives it to you.” 

You buy the food prepared, in a world where everybody has the facility to prepare their own food, it's like, “oh, we'll bring you the thing, you just take it home, and you put in the oven and you cook it.” But it's definitely the UK version of that, which is where we know you have an oven at home and you just don't have the time or the know-how to make it or you want more variety that you can produce by yourself without putting a lot more time and energy and care into cooking.

TW: And so in a sense we should be thinking of frozen pizza factories almost as infrastructure. 

Deb: Well, at that point, can I have a communal pizza oven instead, please? So I can just wander down and bake a pizza. 

In New York, you can go and get your breakfast sandwich at the bodega and it's cheaper and faster than you can make it yourself, even assuming that you have the knowledge of how to do it. 

And I think that's the sort of economy of scale, because you have the density and, just like everyone needs to drink water every day, everyone needs to eat every day. And then you get to do whatever the agency provided by  that bodega sandwich or Marks & Spencer ready meal makes possible. 

And the dark side of it is, well, it’s so you can participate in capitalism, right? It lets you go and get your dollar-fifty breakfast sandwich or whatever and then you go to work. And your dollar-fifty breakfast sandwich means you're not spending half an hour, an hour, or more in the kitchen making food for yourself or your household and you can go make someone else money instead. 

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I want to leave us with three thoughts on this subject. 

The first is that calling hawker centers infrastructure illuminates a dynamic that’s prevalent in our food system today (perhaps to a greater degree in the Anglosphere than in Singapore). If we frame cooking as domestic toil, then hawker centres are doing precisely what our electricity and water and sewer systems do – freeing us from the need to spend our time doing this work. In Deb’s words, they’re giving us agency. But there are almost always strings attached, a prior claim on our time, a right choice to make with that agency. In Amartya Sen’s words – development is freedom, but what are we being freed to do?

And in Singapore it was especially stark, because the development of the hawker centers was so closely interwoven with national development policy. Industrializing Singapore meant making Singaporean labor available to foreign capital – multinational corporations willing to build factories there – and one way to make more labor available was to reduce the amount of time Singaporeans spent working within the home. It’s not entirely clear that policymakers fit hawker centres into this mental framework, but they were certainly aware that building childcare facilities and factories close together would help women enter the workforce. 

So this period of accelerated development makes the tradeoff between care work and work for profit especially stark, and hawker centres, alongside other social services like universal childcare, and “hard” infrastructure like plumbing and better transit, were key enablers of that trade. 

The second idea that I want to leave you with is that hawker centres became part of the Singaporean way of life because hawkers were integral to Singapore already. The hawker centres and wet markets were just pavement over the desire lines of existing foodways. The HDB built them because that’s how Singaporeans were used to getting their groceries and midday meals, because so many Singaporeans depended on hawking or selling vegetables for their living. They were an investment in the way Singaporeans ate in the 60s and 70s. 

And like all physical infrastructure, hawker centres encode the ultrastructures of their day – they embed relationships and power structures in concrete. The subdivisions in hawker centres, the plethora of stalls designed to be owned and operated by two or three people, represent a society in which hawkers represented a much larger proportion of the workforce than they do today, when a lot more of the workforce was involved in some way in providing food, and care, and the basic necessities of life. They represent a society that was in some respects more equal, in which large corporations had less of a role in daily life. And so maybe the angst we see around the hawker economy today is really about the shifts happening in the ultrastructure around it. It’s less about not being able to get your favorite tau huay and more about all the reasons why. 

And the final idea I’d like to offer is this – that people are a key part of all our infrastructural networks, and that this is especially true of food. Even water mains and power lines, the networks that deliver more fungible necessities, have to be maintained, and it’s foolish not to view the maintainers as part and parcel of those networks. This is even more the case with food, for all the reasons Deb and I discuss above – because it’s not fungible, because meals are discrete goods with physical supply chains. Maintaining our food system, maintaining our infrastructure, is inseparable from maintaining the people who comprise it. Power lines and water pipes don’t need to make a living wage. They don’t dream of doing other things, or get tired of working 14 hours a day. Faced with this reality, how do we want to shape the system that supplies our food?