![]() How did chocolate milk powder get to Southeast Asia? Why is it so prevalent in countries of the global South? How did I, an Asian American historian of Latin America, find myself in a situation where I think about chocolate milk all the time? Cacao is native to Mesoamerica, so I wondered how it made its way around the world during a period dominated by competing world powers. Every other summer until I went to college, I would spend at least a month in Singapore, where my mother was born and grew up and where I have eaten countless roti-and-Milo breakfasts.īut as a historian, I wonder about how the food we now consider commonplace became widespread and mainstream. I get some weird looks when I place my order, in my Midwestern American accent: Roti pratha and iced Milo is breakfast for children, but that’s exactly why I get it. The simplest and most common form of the powder, however, is mixed into water or milk and served as a hot or cold beverage. In Singaporean and Malaysian supermarkets, there is of course Milo for sale in powder form, but on the shelves there is also Milo whole grain cereal, Milo snack bars, canned Milo, boxed Milo, and bottled dairy-free Milo. Milo is, as Patricia Kelly Yeo puts it, “Southeast Asian Nesquik - if Nesquik tasted good.” It is a chocolate malt powder sold in bottle-green plastic cans, usually emblazoned with a photograph of an athlete kicking a soccer ball. The first morning I wake up in my grandmother’s flat, I take a short and sweaty walk to my neighborhood kopitiam and buy myself the same breakfast: two orders of roti pratha with goat curry and an iced Milo. ![]() ![]() Here’s something that happens every time I go to Singapore.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |