A Dive into Singapore’s Seafood Culture
The AlumNUS recently caught up with Assistant Professor Anthony Medrano, the National University of Singapore (NUS) Presidential Young Professor of Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College and the Editor of Lala-Land: Singapore’s Seafood Heritage. Part cultural history, part cookbook, Lala-Land compiles essays written by Yale-NUS students and alumni on familiar seafood dishes and the marine life behind them.
Can you tell us about the book’s background and how it came into being?
The book came to be because of a pair of Cs: COVID-19 and closure. In 2020, I was teaching a module titled ‘Asia’s Edible Ocean’, focused geographically on Southeast Asia and Japan. I had a plan to take the class to Sabah to visit fish markets, but overseas travel became impossible because of the pandemic. So I refocused the class, in real-time, around Singapore. We managed a few field trips to hawker centres and fish markets, and the final assignment became a biography of an edible ocean dish narrated across the themes of history, culture and ecology. In subsequent iterations, the final assignment had to be about a dish consumed locally or an ‘ocean’ element within local food culture.
The announcement of Yale-NUS’ closure was another driver behind the book. Members of the Singapore community had been involved in the module, leading guided walks, sharing their time and expertise, and meeting with my students. When it was announced that our college would be closing in 2025, food writer and chef Pamelia Chia (Science ’15) floated the idea of a book to Edmund Wee at Epigram. I saw the book as a way to archive the kinds of teaching, learning, sharing, collaborating and community-building that happen at our college.