Modern Pangs: The Politics of Food and Hunger after Merdeka, 1957-1969

Modern Pangs explores the beginnings of modern Malaysian food practices, economies, and discourses from the ruins of war in 1957–1969. In pursuit of a national food utopia, state planners and local thinkers implemented food programs, incited developmental discourses, and espoused productive ideals that aimed to reconfigure the ways in which Malay(si)ans cooked and ate food across the peninsula. In three chapters that interrogate multiple yet overlapping projects—Malay household economics, state dairying projects, and hawker political movements—Modern Pangs seeks to interrogate the questions, ideas, and decision-making that undergirded competing visions and practices of overcoming hunger.