I have been wondering about the names of vegetables for a while. I cook, buy groceries and speak their names in Mandarin, English and sometimes Malay. I have noticed that a fruit’s or vegetable’s name can mean different, sometimes contradicting things in different languages. Tomato is a “Caucasian brinjal” to the Hokkien. 白菜 (“white vegetable”) is a “Chinese cabbage” to English speakers. Soursop is a “Dutch durian” to the Malay speakers. Investigating these and other names reveals colonial legacies and cultural biases. We may or may not hold these prejudices today, but we imply them when we say our vegetables’ names.

Marketing labels add adjectives to the names of fruits and vegetables, influencing how we think about them too. “Sweet”, “airflown”, “Japanese”, “premium” and many more have been used to create distinctions among the same types of vegetables, mostly to raise their value. While one could use science to dispute these distinctions, I recently found out that taxonomy itself isn’t free from commercial influences. Decisions to lump or split plants depended on what colonial botanists considered was valuable for trade. This gave me the idea to create a new taxonomy for commercial vegetables, to highlight the ludicrosity of labelling languages while also acknowledging the capitalistic motivations of the 18th-century classification system.

And so I published a small book. Side A features seven stories about fruit and vegetable names and the implications of their use today. Each story comes with an illustration by Sokkuan Tye that cleverly conveys the absurdity and humour that I may or may not have properly delivered through words. Side B covers my experiment with the new vegetable taxonomy and my critique of four types of labels that mystify rather than clarify the plants we eat. Almost Useful designed the book, using typography to help differentiate the vegetables discussed.

The book is available here.