Why Food, Real Estate, and Ethical living? It probably does seem like an odd combination of topics, and it is. These are our combined interests. Our eyes widen when something related to one of these three topics is brought up in any conversation. Heck, more often than not, we'd bring it up ourselves!
So... what kind of food are you talking about?
Well, we're pescetarian, although we're not very strict about it (see below for more details). So this means we eat mostly seafood and your usual carbs. We're trying to incorporate more grain and seed into our diet to make up for the protein we're not getting from meat, but we're still taking baby steps. Ed was convinced to sit down to a dinner of puy lentils, beetroot and wild salmon the other night. That was a mini-triumph, but it may be a while before he lets me try other more 'adventurous' meals.
Is the food you're talking about specific to Cambridge?
Not really. But Cambridge allows easy access to such a wide variety of vegetables at a fraction of the cost they are back home (in Singapore). So our meals are bound to be influenced by whatever is in season or grown in nearby farms. Asian ingredients are either not very authentic (like the oyster sauce we bought in the supermarket), or very expensive because they are imported. So where necessary, the asian recipes might be slightly adapted to work around these constraints.
How about the real estate? Is it only restricted to Cambridge?
Even though we are enjoying our time here in Cambridge, our hearts still belong to Singapore. We're just as tuned into the property news in Singapore as we are to those in the UK. Further, Ed's PhD research involves both the UK and ASEAN region, so the articles here reflect that.
How do you try to live ethically?
Indeed, it is a loaded word and can mean so many things. For us, it means trying our best to live in a way that does not harm people, animals or the environment. We're still fairly new to this ourselves, but we're figuring this out with every decision we make in our lives. Do we buy that gorgeously soft calf-leather bag? Should our cats be fed meat, which is found in most cat food?
At the moment, we stay away from leather products, try to minimise waste, keep to a pescetarian diet and have our cats follow suit, and eat only eggs from hens allowed to run free. Wherever possible.
What do you mean by 'wherever possible'?
We strive to live ethically or responsibly, but we are recent converts. This means we have a whole bunch of leather products we bought before we changed our lifestyle. We're now using them to death to make sure they don't go to waste.
Trying to be a pescetarian amidst friends who are mostly not can be fairly challenging. We accept everyone's life choices and do not want to make things difficult for others. So if we're out in a group and someone suggests having ramen for dinner, we wouldn't protest but might nudge them towards the shop that sells ramen made with fish broth. If we end up at a ramen shop with pork broth however, we'd order the one that comes with only vegetables. That being said, and sometimes this can get confusing even for our family members, if someone ordered chicken karaage (fried chicken) and there's leftover, we would eat it so that a life is not lost just to end up in the bin.
Why not go vegetarian or vegan altogether?
We chose to be pescetarian when we took a two month break in Australia and visited multiple petting/working farms. There was something about seeing our furry or feathered friends in their natural environment that made something click in our heads. We grew up in a city where the meat comes from the supermarket, slaughtered and split up into neat, clean packets we grab off a rack. We're far from the killing. We rarely interact with chickens or cows - these are usually overseas - and we don't link the meat we eat with the lives that are taken.
We knew we would find it difficult to personally kill a chicken or a cow (or pigs/sheep/lamb for that matter), and therefore decided one night that we would stop eating anything we were not willing to kill with our own bare hands. We thought the line was drawn along cold vs warm-blooded animals, until we witnessed the death of 12 frogs we ordered in the market. for a dinner party. They were thwacked repeatedly on the head until they were lifeless, and we felt the blood drain out of our bodies as well. So I suppose not.
For now, we eat all types of seafood but wouldn't rule out going vegetarian or vegan one day.