Earning our food
Why do we sport for food
A few weeks ago, I came across an eye-opening Instagram post. It was about food history in a familiar Southeast Asian setting. It’s thesis on how colonial economy, class, and race shaped food habits is also the kind of approach I am very fond of. But still, you never know when new knowledge will be revealed to you. Despite being familiar, I have never taken the concept “earning food” this way.
Before stepping further into the post, let me bring this up:
I used to think that beating ourselves in the gym or running for kilometers to earn a serving of our favorite dish was “toxic”.
I used to resist the idea of the gym being a place to burn off excess calories. I thought of it as unnatural, as the epitome of modern greediness of wanting to look good without giving up eating a lot. I mean, the very function of food is to fuel us up, isn’t it? If we lack control over our eating, then being overweight is the risk we signed up for. Food doesn’t just appear; it requires a lot of energy to be produced. Therefore, it feels almost unethical, at least heedless, to burn away food for the sake of pure indulgence.
It was Deborah Woong, a Malaysian writer, who wrote the Instagram post I saw. The post was about calorie-dense Malaysian street foods that upper-middle-class influencers often condemn as unhealthy. This take came from judging without connecting, among others, Char Kway Teow, Nasi Kandar, and Nasi Lemak with the situation that gave birth to these foods in the first place. Colonial Malaya, the historical setting of when these foods first emerged, she beautifully said, ran on human bodies. The plantations, the mines, and the loading and unloading of the busy docks relied on the manpower of coolies who needed immense fuel. Happening for generations, this necessity crystallized into the familiar taste contemporary Malaysians hold fondly.
Through that Instagram post, I came to understand another meaning of the concept “earning food”. In the olden days, it would mean working, whether directly to produce food in the field or indirectly to earn money to purchase food. Nowadays, with the global food landscape dominated by monocultures fueled by the petroleum industry and controlled by the super-rich, our problem is no longer on the production side, no longer on how to obtain food, but ironically, on using up the energy in our body after digesting the food. Therefore, in this petro-food era, earning food has turned into making ourselves worthy of enjoying it. It has shifted from exhausting ourselves to produce food to exhausting ourselves to be able to enjoy our favorite food without an excess calorie debt.
The petroleum industry is deeply embedded in the modern food system. Petroleum fuels the machinery that cultivates vast monocultures of wheat, corn, and soy, powers the factories that process them into flour, oil, sugar, and animal feed, and drives the ships and trucks that transport food across the globe. Petroleum is also a key ingredient in many synthetic fertilizers and agricultural chemicals that sustain high-yield industrial farming. As a result, this petro-industrial system has reshaped diets worldwide, often not through natural supply-and-demand forces but through illicit food aid programs and trade agreements. Even in a more natural scheme, this supply already encouraged the expansion of profit-driven, capital-intensive processed-food industries and spurred calorie-dense street foods in the small-scale realm, making people increasingly dependent on foods derived from these crops.
Get Yuanita W. Pratiwi’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Nowadays, we are pretty much like Squidward in that SpongeBob episode when he finally admitted he liked Krabby Patties, entered a storage room full of them, and wildly devoured them until his thighs exploded. This petro-food era is more or less that storage with mountains of Krabby Patties that appears out of nowhere, without SpongeBob having to flip the patty one by one.
While we live in the petro-food era, our taste is deeply historical. Contemporary marketing certainly plays a role, but much of our preference is shaped by the past. We tend to like the food we grew up with. Even as new street food stalls open every day, much of what they serve has its origins in earlier times.
We can view this across multiple time periods—from the oldest to the most recent. At the level of biological evolution, our bodies are predisposed to prefer energy-dense foods such as sugar and fat, which were once scarce, while often rejecting the bitterness of many vegetables, which are harder to digest. Humans’ preferences for vegetables are often acquired later in life because children’s taste buds are the most honest to our primordial inclinations. The commercial food scene, from gigantic factories to street food stalls, is dominated by energy-dense ingredients because it is the easiest to tap into this primordial inclination.
In modern history, particularly the past two centuries, social and cultural forces pushed by colonizers in the colonial world have shaped what we consider desirable, even prestigious. They have influenced us to admire the lifestyles of the wealthy, which were the colonizers themselves and their indigenous collaborators, while dismissing those of our own community as backward. More recently, in the context of rising commercialization in the 1980s and 1990s, experiences of money scarcity happening at the same time as market expansion have further shaped preferences, leading this generation to value purchased meals — at least hold a special place for eating out — over home-cooked meals.
The public food scene in the city itself also grew out of the demands of the working class. This claim requires further historical research, but it is worth noting that high-end restaurant culture, often associated with upper-middle-class consumption, is increasingly seen as incompatible with contemporary decolonized visions of Southeast Asian cities. In many Southeast Asian contexts, such establishments are still closely tied to colonial legacies and elite urban lifestyles. As a result, greater cultural legitimacy has been granted to street food, which has also expanded to attract more affluent consumers.
This convergence between an increasingly well-paid, desk-based population and long-established working-class food cultures has contributed to contemporary concerns about “unhealthy” eating. However, such judgment is misleading. These foods are not inherently unhealthy; rather, they were produced in a different socio-economic context, shaped by the nutritional demands of labor-intensive work and the constraints of affordability and access, but are celebrated in today’s age of sedentary lifestyles.
Foods aren't indeed free of the situation in which they were cooked. So after this thought, am I still thinking that using the gym to make ourselves worthy of earning the food is heedless? No, I am not. I believe food preference is not a mere individual choice. Centuries, even millennia, of taste-shaping history stand behind that one decision to order a portion of Char Kway Teow on a tough Tuesday evening. We are not only looking for flavors to dance on our tongue, but also for comfort, nostalgia, and belonging. This way, going to the gym can be read as an act of resistance against subjugation into a machine life where we were conditioned to sit all day and subsist on salad and coffee.
Though I hope that somehow electricity can be regenerated through every thrust on gym equipments, so that communities can produce their own energy and dismantle the almighty power of the petroleum industry.
