Sample Test 3

Growing Food in a Garden City

By Fiona Williamson and Joshua Goh

In June 2020, the National Parks Board (NParks) launched Gardening with Edibles, an initiative that saw the distribution of nearly 460,000 seed packs to interested households. Each pack contained approximately 1,000 vegetable seeds, allowing Singaporeans to grow a few rounds of crops ranging from tomatoes to leafy vegetables like kalian.[1] The initiative’s main purpose was to drive home the importance of food security as part of a wider national campaign, Our Singapore Food Story.[2]

Due to Singapore’s heavy reliance on imported food, most locals rarely have a hand in producing the food they eat. In 2020, fewer than 3,100 Singapore residents (or 0.14 percent of the labour force) were involved in industries such as agriculture and fishing.[3] Gardening with Edibles bridges this wide disconnect between farm and table by providing Singaporeans with the experience of growing their own food.

Edible gardening is not a recent phenomenon in Singapore; Gardening with Edibles was preceded by the Grow More Food campaigns. These initiatives and practices of edible gardening in modern Singapore emerged from a confluence of food security concerns and planning ideals from the Garden City Movement in Britain and demonstrate just how deeply rooted edible gardening is in the Singapore Story.

A vegetable farm in Punggol, 1970s. Collection of the National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board.

Edible Gardens for Health and Wellbeing

 With the advent of a Garden City Movement in the late 1800s, the connection between gardens and urban wellbeing was widely touted by social improvers and town planners in Britain and the U.S. In Britain, for example, Edwin Chadwick and Benjamin Ward Richardson had both proposed models for healthy cities wherein gardens played significant roles in urban wellbeing.

Richardson’s model city narrative Hygeia (1876) argued that cities must have tree-lined boulevards and green spaces and homes should be “surrounded with garden space, [to] add not only to the beauty but to the healthiness of the city”.[4] One of the most influential writers of the late 19th century was Ebenezer Howard, whose Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898, reprinted 1902) birthed the concept of the garden city “to raise the standard of health and comfort of all true workers of whatever grade – the means by which these objects are to be achieved being a healthy, natural, and economic combination of town and country life”.[5]

Such ideas eventually found their way into official circles in Singapore through trans-imperial knowledge networks. In the 1910s and 1920s, a series of imperial health conferences drew connections between planning, housing and health, and linked ideas of social justice amid the popularity of new labour movements to access to green, healthy space and food. These concerns intensified at the outbreak of war in 1914, when many people failed to pass the basic health requirements to enter military service, probably the first time such a mass health screening had taken place.[6]

While these urban planning movements did not directly address edible gardens, some of Singapore’s health institutions did set up kitchen gardens to improve patient wellbeing. In 1917, for example, an institution for the mentally ill had created a kitchen garden. By 1918, “excellent fresh vegetables were available … aggregating 10,534 pounds for the staff and ‘inmates’ grown by the patients themselves”, reported the Singapore Free Press. [7] Edible gardens had been incorporated into Singapore’s hospitals long before Khoo Teck Puat Hospital developed its “A garden in a hospital” concept. [8]

Edible Gardens for Food Security

At the same time, food security concerns provided further impetus for colonial authorities to promote edible gardening as a means of ensuring the wellbeing of working-class families. This was not a new idea as there had been edible gardens in British cities since the late 1700s. Local governments rented out small plots of land to urban dwellers who wanted, or needed, to grow their own food, rather than buy it. [9] Such allotments proved to be an enduring aspect of working-class British culture all the way through the 20th century.[10]

From the 1910s, there had been growing international concern that agricultural output would not match population growth. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 demonstrated that when global supply lines were severely disrupted for long periods, countries overly reliant on imported goods struggled to be self-sustainable. It was remarked in 1918 how “[t]he cost of a few sprigs of ‘chukup manis’, a few scraggy beans, or a cucumber or two, is astonishing in Singapore … and altogether the supply of local grown foods is altogether inadequate”.[11]

The local situation had been compounded by the gradual erosion of market gardening in Singapore, traditionally undertaken in the 19th century by many Chinese communities to the east of the town centre, around Rochor through Bendemeer.[12] By 1919, an impending rice shortage across Malaya meant that plantation workers were encouraged to “get busy and cultivate gardens, planting food stuffs such as ragi [finger millet], yams and maize to be eaten instead of rice”.[13]

Detail of map showing paddy fields, sugar and cotton plantations, and vegetable gardens as indicated in Map of the Town and Environs of Singapore from an Actual Survey (1839) by G.D. Coleman. Map of the Town and Environs of Singapore from an Actual Survey by G.D. Coleman. Courtesy of National Archives of Singapore.

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NOTES

[1] Goh Chiow Tong, “NParks to Give Packets of Vegetable Seeds to Households to Encourage Home Gardening” Channel News Asia, 18 June 2020,   https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/nparks-give-packets-vegetable-seeds-households-encourage-home-gardening.

[2] “Our SG Food Story”, Singapore Food Agency, 21 August 2020, https://www.sfa.gov.sg/fromSGtoSG/our-sg-food-story.

[3] As of June 2020, only 3,100 residents were employed in industries classified as “Others”, which includes agriculture, fishing, quarrying, utilities, and sewerage and waste management. This represents only 0.14 percent of the total labour force (as of June 2019). See Manpower Research and Statistics Department, Singapore Yearbook of Manpower Statistics 2020 (Singapore: Ministry of Manpower, 2020), A7, https://stats.mom.gov.sg/iMAS_PdfLibrary/mrsd_2020YearBook.pdf. On the contribution of local farms to Singapore food’s supply, see “Our Singapore Food Story- The Three Food Baskets”, Singapore Food Agency, 13 August 2021, https://www.sfa.gov.sg/food-farming/sgfoodstory.

[4] Benjamin Ward Richardson, Hygeia: A City of Health, (London: Macmillan and Co, 1876), 20.

[5] Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, (London: S. Sonnenschein & Co., 1902), 22.

[6] Robert Freestone and Andrew Wheeler, “Integrating Health into Town Planning: A History,” in The Routledge Handbook of Planning for Health and Well-Being: Shaping a Sustainable and Healthy Future, ed. Hugh Barton, Susan Thompson, Sarah Burgess, Marcus Grant (Oxon and Routledge, 2015), 17–36.

[7] “ Vegetable Growing In Singapore ,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 15 February 1919, 5. (From NewspaperSG)

[8] Salma Khalik, “Khoo Teck Puat Hospital Wins International Design Award, Beating US and Japanese Buildings” Straits Times, 13 December 2017, https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/ktph-wins-international-design-award-beating-us-and-japanese-buildings.

[9] N. Flavell, “Urban Allotment Gardens in the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Sheffield,” The Agricultural History Review 51, no. 1 (2003): 95–106. (From JSTOR via NLB’s eResources website)

[10] See Margaret Wiles, The Gardens of the British Working Class (London: Yale University Press, 2014)

[11] “Malaya's Food Supply,” The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 24 January 1918, 50.

[12] These gardens are clearly marked on National Archives (Singapore), Map of the Town and Environs of Singapore from an Actual Survey by G.D. Coleman, 1839, map. (From National Archives of Singapore, accession no. SP006292)

[13] “ Shortage of Rice,” Malaya Tribune, 23 April 1919, 4. (From NewspaperSG)