Taste of Place

Episode 3

From Farm to Laksa

[00:00:00] Anna Sulan Masing: A taste of place, of time, of space, of memory. How do we find a place to belong, a way to look to the past and to build a future. My name is Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, and I hope to answer those questions as we explore taste and memory throughout this series. Welcome to Taste of Place, a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast.

[00:00:36] Anna Sulan Masing: In our last episode, we traverse time exploring the history of pepper. On this third episode, From Farm to Laksa, we will cross space following the journey of Sarawak Pepper from the farm to our table. We'll start in Sarawak, a place of origin with the farmers and those that process peppercorns and make our way to the restaurants of London.

[00:00:59] Anna Sulan Masing: I speak [00:01:00] with professor Dr. Michael R. Dove, former member of the Malaysian Pepper Board, Larry Sait, chef and restaurant owner Mandy Yin and chef Tomas Heale to learn about the journey of pepper.

[00:01:19] Anna Sulan Masing: This is Dr. Michael R. Dove, a professor of social ecology at Yale who has done extensive research in farming in Borneo in Kalimantan – the Indonesian side. 

[00:01:29] Dr. Michael R. Dove: Pepper is my spice of preference, but it also has this incredible historic dimension. It became the curse of the historic kingdom of Banjar in southeastern Borneo, and not uniquely to that kingdom either, but it became something that a number of early Southeast Asian rulers

[00:01:58] Dr. Michael R. Dove: said that they [00:02:00] wanted to destroy. They wanted to prohibit the cultivation of, it carried this perceived mortal threat to indigenous kingdoms in the region, which is sort of incredible. And it's a story about colonialism and indigeneity and east and west and global trade. So a very timely story, in some ways. That's what pepper means to me.

[00:02:31] Anna Sulan Masing: The story about pepper from Borneo, where Sarawak is situated, is also a story about indigenous culture and the value we place on indigenous knowledge. 

[00:02:41] Dr. Michael R. Dove: I've worked a bit all over the Pacific and Asia region, but I've done most of my work and writing about two countries, Indonesia and Pakistan, and looking at the anthropology of agriculture and agri forestry in both places.[00:03:00] 

[00:03:00] Anna Sulan Masing: Michael's research is in swidden agriculutre, also known as shifting cultivation, a pattern of farming that rotates the areas that are being farmed so that the soil can be left to regenerate. It is a practice that is still used by indigenous peoples of Borno, also known as Dayaks. He became impressed with the depth of knowledge and effectiveness of their practice.

[00:03:25] Dr. Michael R. Dove: It was such a, a perfect adaptation to a wet, very confusing and challenging rainforest environment in which you can't predict a lot of things. You have to kind of mimic the rainforest dynamics. Swidden is probably the historically the most successful adaptation ever devised to that environment. 

[00:03:52] Anna Sulan Masing: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the achievements of the Dayaks have long been downplayed as primitive and destructive by the non [00:04:00] Dayaks who govern Borneo.

[00:04:01] Anna Sulan Masing: But as he dug deeper into his research, Michael discovered that despite being faced with the prejudices of ruling parties, the Dayaks had a rich history of international trade spanning back centuries. 

[00:04:16] Dr. Michael R. Dove: I talked with government officials that said, you know, these Dayak have a pre monetary economy. They don't even know what money is.

[00:04:27] Dr. Michael R. Dove: They engage in barter, but they know nothing about money or markets. And I was finding, quite the contrary, they had been engaged in trade before rubber and pepper in trade, in native forest rubbers. I started to do historical research. That trade is ancient. Particularly going to China. You know, before there was a republic of Indonesia, China had [00:05:00] linkages deep into the interiors of Borneo and other islands.

[00:05:06] Dr. Michael R. Dove: So all of a sudden you have a picture of people who have been engaged in effect in global trade for time immemorial and indeed historic records from China show that this trade goes back close to a couple of millennia. These things we're talking about, they speak to a sort of cosmopolitan character of these people, which is precisely what is not seen by the wider world, even though, or perhaps especially because small holders were out competing estates in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

[00:05:52] Anna Sulan Masing: The idea of ancient trade with communities deep in the Borneo jungle is a familiar story to me. One that was told to me through the objects I grew [00:06:00] up with. We have antique earthen jars and beads that are decorated with Chinese designs that are passed down generations. So I knew they must have gotten there somehow. With such a deep history of trade

[00:06:12] Anna Sulan Masing: it's no wonder that the Dayak farmers were quick to pick up growing pepper as a commodity. 

[00:06:19] Dr. Michael R. Dove: I was struck when I did my initial research on this by the fact that pepper, like many commodities, many spices in particular, did not seem to be used locally in any sort of dishes. It was an export, a trade commodity.

[00:06:43] Dr. Michael R. Dove: You know, par excellence, I think the Kanto used pepper maybe brewing some liquors to give them added bite, but they did not use it on food. And that's an [00:07:00] interesting part of the commodity chain involving this spice and others. Something grown for distant use by other people. 

[00:07:14] Anna Sulan Masing: I think this is also what makes pepper farming complicated.

[00:07:19] Anna Sulan Masing: Over the years, I have visited many farms in Sarawak and have noticed that pepper isn't the only cash crop that these farmers grow. There is rubber, which can be tapped daily to provide a daily source of income, as well as palm oil fruits, which can be harvested weekly. These cash crops are grown in a system that emphasizes balance.

[00:07:42] Dr. Michael R. Dove: It's solely for a little bit of cash to pay school fees or something like that, but that is an integral part I think, of the farming system. Filling a place that a century before would've been filled by [00:08:00] gathering and resins and other non-timber forest products for the trade to China. I call these composite economies, and I think that's both traditional and ubiquitous.

[00:08:16] Dr. Michael R. Dove: In other words, an economy with a subsistence sector that gives you food. And a market oriented sector that gives you some cash. You know, they had more than one arrow in their quiver, so if there was external turmoil and markets collapsed, they could still eat.

[00:08:41] Anna Sulan Masing: To learn more about the pepper trade, I speak to Larry Sait who used to be part of the Malaysian Pepper Board, a federal government organization responsible for the country's pepper industry. Larry is an Iban whose parents grew pepper when he was a child. 

[00:08:57] Larry Sait: My name is Larry Sait. [00:09:00] I am a retired government servant.

[00:09:02] Larry Sait: I was formerly the Deputy Doctor general of the relationship board. Our parents are pepper farmers. My parents raised me from the cultivation of paper. It enabled us to pay for our school fees to pay for our schooling. Pepper is a cash crop. The benefit for planting pepper to the rural community is immeasurable. 

[00:09:32] Anna Sulan Masing: Formally known as the Pepper Marketing Board, the Malaysian Pepper Board came into existence in 2007. At the time, the board realized that Sarawak Pepper was facing increased competition from other countries entering the pepper trade, Vietnam in particular. And they needed to help farmers by promoting the pepper.

[00:09:51] Anna Sulan Masing: And so they participated in European ingredient and food exhibitions where the board got to meet international buyers.. To encourage farmers to [00:10:00] grow pepper alongside their other cash crops, the Malaysian Pepper board also emphasizes the advantage of pepper as a source of yearly bonus income. As I mentioned before, different cash crops can be harvested at different times, providing farmers with income at various points in the year.

[00:10:18] Anna Sulan Masing: In Sarawak pepper is typically harvested once per year, though it can also be harvested every six months in certain cases as well. By illustrating the benefits of pepper farming in this way, the Malaysian Pepper board hopes to maintain a healthy supply of Sarawak Pepper. Most Sarawak pepper, though not all, goes through the Malaysian pepper board.

[00:10:41] Anna Sulan Masing: My understanding of the supply chain for the most part, is that there is usually a general area manager that is appointed by the Malaysian Pepper Board who deals with a number of farms in a region. Through this manager prices agreed via the board based on the global price of pepper. The board then purchases and grades the pepper before [00:11:00] exporting it.

[00:11:00] Anna Sulan Masing: There are also private companies in the mix who can operate outside of this chain and export directly to buyers globally. 

[00:11:08] Larry Sait: Any pepper exported out of our country, the pepper board have to regulate whatever comes on. We have regulation that any pepper to be exported from leisure, it must be graded. So this level of quality control.

[00:11:25] Anna Sulan Masing: This quality control as Larry explains, is Sarawak Pepper's selling point. The Malaysia Pepper Board labs, which I have been to have machines that meticulously process the pepper up to the microbiomes level. This does raise the price of pepper, of course, which the Malaysian Pepper board ultimately determine.

[00:11:44] Anna Sulan Masing: Larry says that setting the price is very important in making sure that the farmers aren't paid below the global market price. In his opinion, the Malaysian Pepper Board, which is a government organization, is there to support the farmers, ensure that they're not [00:12:00] being mistreated, and to guarantee an exceptional quality of pepper. 

[00:12:09] Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper is one of the main agricultural activities in rural Sarawak. 98% of pepper from Malaysia is from Sarawak and 90% of Malaysian pepper is exported. But the ideal conditions in Borneo to grow Pepper as well as the flexible farming practices that support it can also be a double edged sword. A paper was published in 2020 in collaboration with the Malaysia PEPPER Board and the University of Malaysia, Sarawak, which was a critical review of the development and performance of the PEPPER industry in Malaysia.

[00:12:41] Anna Sulan Masing: The paper found that the industry had not performed in the previous decades as had been hoped with a decline in global pepper prices of more than 70% since 2015, which they reported had a huge effect on household incomes in rural Sarawak communities. [00:13:00] This means that small holders struggle with production and a lack of funds to invest and innovate their farms.

[00:13:07] Anna Sulan Masing: It creates an aging population as it is an unappealing commodity to farm and can affect the quality of the crop. Across the last four decades, there has been a lot of fluctuation in pepper prices, which reflects the rises and falls of pepper farms. The flexibility of rural farmers in Sarawak has meant that no farm is a mono crop of pepper.

[00:13:29] Anna Sulan Masing: The average size of a pepper farm in Sarawak is 0.5 hectares or 5,000 square meters.

[00:13:42] Anna Sulan Masing: To those passionate about Pepper like Larry, it's important for buyers and consumers to know and see where pepper comes from. 

[00:13:52] Larry Sait: During my time, we do bring in our buyers to Sarawak and bring them right to the farm. [00:14:00] Especially the Korean buyers, the Japanese buyers, and our buyer from Sweden. At that time, it was rainy season and our four wheel drive could not climb up the hill, so had to walk on foot to the long house.

[00:14:15] Larry Sait: I think about more than two hours on foot. But they're not complaining. We are telling them this is how difficult our farmers producing peppers. They're very loyal after they seen how the farmers produce, what they sell to them.

[00:14:35] Anna Sulan Masing: I have always wanted to show people where and how Sarawak pepper is grown. When the opportunity arose in August, 2019 to visit Kapit, the market town in Sarawak my family is from, with friends, I was so excited. Chef and restaurant owner, Mandy Yin was among those who came along on the trip. [00:15:00] 

[00:15:00] Mandy Yin: I'm Mandy Yin. I am a chef restauranter slash author slash food writer based in London.

[00:15:09] Mandy Yin: My restaurant is Sambla Shiok Laksa bar, which is based in Highbury in North London. Originally, I'm from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I'm a Chinese born Malaysian and have lived in London for over 20 years now. So most of my life. 

[00:15:25] Anna Sulan Masing: Mandy's debut cookbook, Sambla Shiok, the same name as her restaurant was released at the end of 2021.

[00:15:33] Anna Sulan Masing: Her restaurant is one of my most favorite in London, and she's originally from Malaysia. I speak to Mandy about Kapit, seeing another side of Malaysia from the one she knew, and what visiting the pepper farms was like for her as a chef and a resturaunter.

[00:15:52] Anna Sulan Masing: What dish do you think of when you think of pepper? 

[00:15:55] Mandy Yin: Bak Kut Teh, which is a Chinese herbal pork soup. Lots [00:16:00] of Chinese aromatics but it's definitely, there's lots of black pepper and white pepper used in this dish with lots of garlic. It's just this round warmth, like a hug. I grew up in Petaling Jaya suburb of Kuala Lumpur, a massive cosmopolitan metropolis and shamefully, I think many Western Malaysians

[00:16:21] Mandy Yin: we've never been to Borneo. So flying into Kuching, then traveling to Sibu, then taking the three hour long boat journey up river, three hours up river. That's a long distance. I remember opening Google Maps. We're in the middle of nowhere. It was humbling. It was just a privilege to have experienced that. Kapit was a fabulous little market town.

[00:16:46] Mandy Yin: The hustle and bustle, and it was just really amazing to see, you know, just people going about their lives and so many coffee shops, that was what I love too about carpet. So clearly people love to eat there, so that resonated with me. It's a [00:17:00] central hub for so many. From the farms, they would travel there, they'd need to eat, and then they go back home.

[00:17:05] Mandy Yin: And actually the heat, Anna, it was so hot, so hot, and going to the pepper farm, it was just incredible. The work that has to go into picking all the pepper corns and then harvesting and being able to listen to the farmers explain how hard it was and how actually little money they got for their crop and how expensive, for example, the first fertilizer cost.

[00:17:30] Mandy Yin: It's just eye opening to realize you just take pepper for granted. I also stupidly didn't realize that white pepper is actually just black pepper, but with the husks having been painstakingly washed off in the river, that's also incredible. So it's definitely humbling how much work and time and how their lives really did center on their farm.

[00:17:56] Mandy Yin: It was so important to the farmers. It [00:18:00] really was their cash crop and it was prized by them. It plays such an important role in their cooking as well. And I think the beauty of Sarawak pepper, it's so beautiful, is so strong that you don't need that much of it. At home, I just use ground pepper. It's so crap compared to proper Sarawak pepper corns and toasting it, and they're grinding it with a pestle and mortar.

[00:18:25] Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper is not simply a commodity that sits on dining tables. I have noticed that those that work intimately with the pepper, where pepper becomes something you touch, taste, and smell, you can't stop people talking about it. I love what Larry said to me at the end of our conversation.

[00:18:45] Larry Sait: I still have fond memories of playing in the pepper garden.

[00:18:50] Larry Sait: I'm still passionate about pepper. Anytime that a conversation comes to pepper, I'm always excited.[00:19:00] 

[00:19:03] Anna Sulan Masing: Now we leave the pepper farms of Borneo and land in London, traveling to the restaurants that use Sarawak Pepper to bring their dishes to life. I speak with Tomas Heale, a chef and owner of a vegan restaurant in London, and he shares what Pepper means to him and his cooking, how he discovered Sarawak Pepper and what he uses it for.

[00:19:25] Tom Heale: My name's Tom Heale. I'm a chef and I work at a restaurant called Naifs. It's in Queen's Road, Peckham, and I run that with my partner Anne and my two brothers. My mother's side of the family is all Swiss German and there's a very unique cheese from where my family comes from called Bel Panele. And essentially that's like a hard ball of cheese, which kind of tastes a bit like a fresh cheese and it's completely covered in cracked black pepper.

[00:19:53] Tom Heale: So it's a very striking experience to eat, but it tastes like a fresh cheese and it's very peppery. [00:20:00] It's something which is hard to picture before you tried it. Basically from being a chef, from working in kitchens, I had a vague awareness of high quality quote unquote varieties of pepper. A memory which I've got of like specifically Sarawak Pepper would be a point a few years ago where everyone was quite fixated with Cacio e Pepe.

[00:20:19] Tom Heale: So that dish sparked an interest in black pepper varietals. Specifically with Sarawak Pepper, what was most exciting about it for me, the analogy I use is kind of like with coffee where coffee again can be something which is very ubiquitous. You kind of know what coffee tastes like, and you have this general sense of the kind of coffee flavor, same with black pepper, and then you try a black pepper or a white pepper

[00:20:47] Tom Heale: that's really exciting and really high quality and it's been looked after and it's been grown in the right way, and suddenly it's got all these other flavors you didn't know were possible. I think that kind of complexity, that was kind of [00:21:00] intrinsic to it. Was kind of really exciting. So we use it on the menu quite often in a way that's bringing that focus and using it as like a spice blend, but with like one or two ingredients.

[00:21:11] Tom Heale: So at the moment we kind of use it in a spice blend, which is mostly sour pepper with smoked and dried jalapenos. And also quite a lot of toasted camelina seed, which is a British seed that we get from Homa Dos and essentially very toasty, looks similar to a linseed, but it has a very specific flavor, which matches quite well with the woodiness of the black pepper.

[00:21:37] Tom Heale: And we put that on breaded, fried king oyster mushrooms. It basically to me, creates what I would call a super flavor, where you can't see the differences, like the dividing lines between each of those different flavors. Kind of has that complexity, but I think that's like a nice way to show it off.

[00:21:57] Anna Sulan Masing: I've always been interested to see how [00:22:00] different people relate to Pepper from how it tastes to them to how they use it to cook. Here, Tom walks us through his impressions of what Sarawak pepper tastes like. 

[00:22:12] Tom Heale: I find it quite mild, which I think lends a really nice balance. And that balance is between lots of different flavors, woodsy kind of slightly smokey notes, quite a lot of acidity, which is really nice.

[00:22:24] Tom Heale: And specifically something that kind of came to my head and it was one of those situations where the flavor memory came to me as I was tasting it, which is like mango skin. Literally the skin of a mango where it kind of becomes quite astringent, woodsy, citrusy. Smokey and fruity kind of aspect to it.

[00:22:45] Tom Heale: Something that's really nice about it is the sweetness. In terms of tasting pepper, what's really fun about it is that time delay between the smell and then like the first taste and then the lingering taste. I think that makes it really fun to eat. 

[00:22:59] Anna Sulan Masing: Our [00:23:00] conversation about pepper and spices led us to conversations around providence, storytelling and how you cook with ingredients not local to you or outside of your heritage.

[00:23:11] Anna Sulan Masing: For Tom, it is all connected. It is about being aware of your responsibilities, understanding what is baked into the capitalist nature of running a business, and how you present yourself. 

[00:23:23] Tom Heale: I think specifically providence is really important in general because it kind of, as a chef gives you a sense of connection and excitement and respect for not just the kind of raw ingredient, but also for the cultural background of where that's come from.

[00:23:39] Tom Heale: I think all of those things are inseparable, really, and it's only good for a chef to learn about those things because it gives you so much more inspiration with cooking.

[00:23:54] Anna Sulan Masing: When cooking, Tom looks to dishes and inspirations from where ingredients come from, which [00:24:00] helps in understanding the nature of the ingredient and the flavors. For Tom and his family who are from Cornwall and have a British and European heritage, it is about making sure that their approach is also rooted in what is authentic to them and their histories. But in his current life as a chef, it is ensuring that the creative work isn't appropriating a sense of knowledge or experience outside of his own. 

[00:24:26] Tom Heale: I think specifically our goal is to create a type of food, like a type of cooking, which is quite pleasurable and sensuous, where lots of the vegan cultures, which are predominantly vegetables and less meat and fish, are not Western cultures. And they are separate from the culture that I grew up in and my family grew up in.

[00:24:53] Tom Heale: So I think all chefs could consider cross cultural borrowing, I think is something which [00:25:00] just happens naturally and it's good and it's totally fine if it's done respectfully, but I wouldn't want to open a restaurant that was taking too heavily from a Buddhist culture or from like Ethiopian culture if that's not my culture.

[00:25:14] Anna Sulan Masing: This approach is also reflected in how Tom and his family talk about the food and the ingredients they use, how those elements are part of the story and storytelling of their restaurant. In fact, how I found Tom was through a food writer who had spotted on Instagram a post of Naifs account, mentioning they use Sarawak Pepper in a dish.

[00:25:38] Tom Heale: The menu is the way that you interact most frequently with the customers. There's not really a better or worse way to use something as long as there's not problems with the supply chain. It's a bit of a shame that with providence it's often used as kind of a customer facing thing. This is where this thing comes from, and you might write that on a menu of almost like an advertising thing, like this product is high [00:26:00] quality because we know where it came from.

[00:26:01] Tom Heale: Whereas I think the most direct benefit to the customers is probably secondary in terms of providence because it gives the chef the tools to be able to make a happy and engaged kitchen and an interested kitchen which is conscious about what it uses and why it uses it and where it comes from. And then that makes the food better as a secondary effect. For example, in terms of Sarawak pepper, we haven't got that written on our chalkboard menu or menus that we give out in the restaurants, but it is the kind of thing we would talk about on Instagram. I think there's some kind of profound difference there in terms of what function those things are serving. It's something which for us primarily, we want to know our relationship to it.

[00:26:48] Tom Heale: As a chef, I'm sure I get told a lot of stories about a lot of ingredients which get condensed and they get rounded off. They're not lies, but they are maybe simplified versions of things. [00:27:00] 

[00:27:00] Anna Sulan Masing: And of course our conversation naturally turned to nostalgia.

[00:27:05] Tom Heale: With Black pepper, I think it is a very nostalgic flavor to me.

[00:27:09] Tom Heale: So now if I'm tasting a black pepper, and I'm trying to get the complexity, part of it is this thing where it's like, yeah, that's something that was my grandma's table where there's the pepper and the salt shaker, and it's something which you'd be putting on like potatoes.

[00:27:26] Anna Sulan Masing: North of Tom's restaurant, Naifs, and across the Thames, we meet up once again with Mandy at her restaurant, Sambal Shiok. As Mandy specializes in Laksa, I of course wanted to talk to her about Sarawak Laksa and wanted her take on what Sarawak pepper tastes like. Laksa is a seafood based noodle soup, and throughout Malaysia there are many regional versions and the range is huge.

[00:27:53] Anna Sulan Masing: For example Assam laksa, or Penang assam, is a sour tangy fish Laksa from Penang. And [00:28:00] Sarawak laksa has coconut milk in it with prawns instead of fish, and doesn't have the sourness. Compared to Tom, When Mandy talks about the flavor of Sarawak Pepper, she characterizes it as being quite strong. 

[00:28:13] Mandy Yin: My Peranakan side really loves chili heat, so that's my default, a setting in terms of my palate, I crave chili heat. Whereas when we're eating in Sarawak and I first tasted the laksa, it was less of the chili heat and more of this round pepperiness. And it's fascinating because the cuisine is, from what I saw on our brief trip, actually not a lot of chili whatsoever other than the sour laksa , which didn't have as much chili kick say as a Penang assam laksa, but quite muted and more balanced, and I think I would describe the pepper flavor from Sarawak as being ultra floral, smokey, woody. [00:29:00] I think pepper is one of those things that you really need, your nose for. You just really get the smell at the back of your throat when you consume it rather than the taste. 

[00:29:12] Anna Sulan Masing: Personally, I think Sarawak pepper's distinctiveness makes it strong as opposed to dominant or overpowering.

[00:29:19] Anna Sulan Masing: In that sense, you can add a little or a lot to your dishes. It's all up to your taste. 

[00:29:25] Mandy Yin: There was a soy braced egg tofu dish that we had a couple of nights. And again, the strong flavor profile there other than the soy sauce was the white pepper. Beautiful and spicy, but not in the chili sense that I'm more used to from western Malaysia.

[00:29:42] Mandy Yin: Another use of the white pepper clearly was the Iban farmers themselves. We were treated to this amazing feast. One of those dishes that we had was a manok pansoh, which is the chicken cooked in bamboo. And so again, it's [00:30:00] quite simple, but very clean, nourishing flavors with, again, the pepper and laksa leaves thrown in there with a bit of onions, so just very simple, but very comforting is how I would describe pepper.

[00:30:18] Anna Sulan Masing: Inspired by the dishes from our trip, Mandy created recipes which appeared on her menu at the restaurant with detailed descriptions of the inspiration, the pepper, and the trip we took. These recipes also feature in her cookbook with the same sensitivity of explanation and background information. As a Malaysian, I was curious about Mandy's thoughts of nostalgia from that trip, if any, Or was it so different from Western Malaysia that it felt like a whole new place?

[00:30:47] Mandy Yin: It made me think of my parents and them growing up in the fifties and sixties in Malaysia, in Petaling Jaya, when it was much less developed. And my dad actually, he grew up in Malacca. He's often [00:31:00] told me I used to go jump into the river and that's how I learned how to swim. That was just the feeling that I got in Sarawak.

[00:31:08] Mandy Yin: People living off the river, especially the Iban in their long house and in the forest. It just made me more appreciative of the simpler things in life. It was the atmosphere that you felt walking around Kapit and even Kuching. You meet upfor breakfast and then go to the market, go off to another coffee shop and have a chat.

[00:31:31] Mandy Yin: What was the phrase? We were sitting in the coffee shop that afternoon, just drinkings coffee and soft drinks and juices with snacks. 

[00:31:40] Mandy Yin: The phrase 

[00:31:41] Anna Sulan Masing: Mandy is referring to is ‘lepak’, which is when you relax, chill out with friends and enjoy that simplicity. Of course, rural Sarawak isn't simple or easier than any other lives, but this word for taking time exists and is so much a part of life.

[00:31:59] Anna Sulan Masing: Malaysians [00:32:00] appreciate the simplicity that food, drink and togetherness can bring. And also, that is how nostalgia works. It remembers the good things and longs for it. Lepaking is something we should all incorporate more often.

[00:32:23] Anna Sulan Masing: One last thing before we go. The international trade of Pepper, like many supply chains in our capitalist world is opaque and impersonal. The language used in marketing Sarawak pepper is flowery and romanticized, but often erases the non-white bodies that labor to produce the pepper that we consume. Our trade routes are built on the unequal extraction of resources from the global south to the global north, and it will take years, decades, or even centuries to change this.

[00:32:59] Anna Sulan Masing: [00:33:00] No one is getting it all right. But what we do need is to be honest and accountable for the segments of the supply chains that we actively participate in. Because if we can't name it, how can we fix it? I was lucky enough to learn from speaking to people off record in Sarawak, that there exists local groups independent of the Malaysian Pepper Board, looking for ways to create greater transparency.

[00:33:28] Anna Sulan Masing: One such organization, Carus Group, is a Sarawak company focused on transparency, locally grown ingredients, and working directly with farmers. Keelan Woon, a Director for Carus Group hopes that their efforts will help encourage young people to get back into farming and ensure the future of this industry. The things we covered in this episode only scratch the surface.

[00:33:52] Anna Sulan Masing: I am always looking to learn more from those brave enough to sincerely face the ugly truths in the ways that [00:34:00] colonialism persists in the modern world. If you export or import Sarawak Pepper and want to talk about what you do, I would love to hear from you. You can reach out to Catherine, our Taste of Place producer at Catherine@whetstonemedia.com.

[00:34:20] Anna Sulan Masing: This episode has been quite a roller coaster. We've traced the trade route of Sarawak pepper from east to west, from the contemporary farm to the metropolitan table. Pepper has made me re-look at my past, my childhood, my nostalgia, and see it as a place of labor. Pepper farms are spaces of complexity where multiple negotiations are constantly in play.

[00:34:46] Anna Sulan Masing: As Dr. Michael R. Dove puts it so succinctly: 

[00:34:50] Dr. Michael R. Dove: It's fascinating to think of how these sort of postage stamp little fields of pepper in the middle of the rain forest, [00:35:00] no mechanization, maybe no chemicals, but how they tie us to them, right? You look at this little postage stamp field and you're looking at a global commodity chain.

[00:35:32] Anna Sulan Masing: Thank you so much for listening to episode three of Taste of Place. Thank you to my guests today, Dr. Michael R. Dove, Larry Sait, Mandy Yin and Tomas Heale. And be on the lookout for Carus Group ingredients when in Sarawak. I'd like to thank my producer, Cathering Yang, audio editor, Dayana Capulong, researcher Caroline Merrifield and intern Ashley Choi..

[00:35:57] Anna Sulan Masing: I'd also like to thank Wetstone [00:36:00] founder Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective executive producer Celine Glasier sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, music director Catherine Yang, managing producer Marvin Yueh, associate Producer Quentin Lebeau, production coordinator, Shabnam Ferdowsi, production assistant Maha Sanad and publicist Melissa Haughton.

[00:36:25] Anna Sulan Masing: The music created by Catherine Yang and cover Art created by Whetstone Art Director Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast on WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio, on TikTok @WhetstoneMedia. And subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channel, Whetstone Media for more podcast content.

[00:36:48] Anna Sulan Masing: You can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at WhetstoneMedia.com.