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1
2019 Lecture 6
14 September 2019, 2.30pm – 3.30pm
FAR FROM EXTINCT? A HISTORY OF THE “MILO DINOSAUR” IN SINGAPORE
Dr Geoffrey Pakiam
Fellow, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore
What can a malted milk beverage tell us about a nation’s history? We can learn a surprising amount
about popular notions of belonging, childhood, well-being and pleasure from the rise of Singapore’s
most iconic malted drink, Milo, and the now-commonplace “Milo Dinosaur” beverage.
Today’s heritage food offerings are often portrayed as having charted a path from humble domestic
beginnings to large outward-looking enterprises. In contrast, the Milo Dinosaur has its origins in the
localisation of a multinational beverage brand, involving consumers and cooks from all walks of life.
Join historian Geoffrey Pakiam as he recounts the earth-shaking drink’s unusual popularity, and
asks whether it should be considered part of Singapore’s heritage landscape.
TIME (MIN)
0:06
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Thank you, Vidya, for those very kind words. Hello, everyone. Thank you so
much again for taking time to join me on this Saturday afternoon. Can all of you
hear me? Okay, great. My name is Geoffrey, and as Vidya has already
mentioned, I currently work at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore,
which is a research centre that’s dedicated to the study of social, political and
economic developments in Southeast Asia. Today’s talk is part of a larger
project that reconstructs what we call the biographies of different food items in
Singapore’s history – some going back as far as the pre-colonial times. Today’s
talk is going to look at a more recent period in Singapore’s past, mostly from the
1980s onwards. A full account of the Milo Dinosaur’s past, in my view, deserves
a much longer historical treatment, but that isn’t really our aim here today. And
that brings me to my second point. Can I please have a quick show of hands –
how many of you already think that Milo Dinosaur is a part of Singapore’s food
heritage? Any hands? Okay, so a bit of a mix, maybe about a third of the
audience… That’s interesting. Okay, that’s good. This is exactly why this talk is
going on. I’ve been given an hour to do it but I only want to spend about half an
hour at the most talking to myself. I’m really keen to hear your views about this
drink. Food heritage, after all, is something that is shaped by all of us, by the
wider community. I mean, everyone is a stakeholder at the end of the day and,
in a way, I see my role here as really more of a facilitator for discussion in that
sense.
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1:49
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Just some quick words of thanks to particular individuals and institutions with
their help and support in making this event possible. Gayathrii Nathan and Toffa
Wahed have been working really hard behind the scenes as research assistants
to help compile and analyse the historical data, some of which come into this
presentation. Also, a quick word of thanks to Phoon Yuen Ming for her help with
some of the newspaper research. Project co-investigators, Dr Loh Kah Seng –
who sadly can’t be here with us today; he is in the Philippines at the moment –
and Michael Yeo as well in the front. They have helped to conceptualise and
have driven this project since it began in 2018. I also want to thank NHB
[National Heritage Board] for supporting this project with the Heritage Research
Grant, and I’m also grateful to NMS [National Museum of Singapore] for hosting
this event. And, in particular, Wong Hong Suen for inviting us to speak here
today. A point of clarification: Our research is not sponsored by Nestlé. Is there
anyone here who works for Nestlé in the audience? No? Okay, good. All right.
We’re not here on behalf of Nestlé.
3:02
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
But in saying that, during the course of our research, we ended up drinking a lot
more Milo and Milo Dinosaur than usual actually, doing the writing research for
this talk. This had nothing to do with any notion of science. We weren’t trying to
do taste tests or find out which was the best version of it. I mean, it had more to
do with just inner cravings, while constantly thinking and remembering the drink
while researching and writing about it. It was a bit torturous in a way, and a lot of
us here in the audience probably grew up drinking Milo and maybe the Milo
Dinosaur. Its taste has been imprinted on us since childhood. Some of us,
anyway. So, at this point, I’m sure some of you are thinking of all the possible
things we could have researched on, why of all things do we have to choose the
Milo Dinosaur? We could have chosen something more traditional, more Asian.
We are in the heart of Asia, what’s going on? Well, the drink itself, as we’ll soon
see, actually poses, I think, some really interesting questions about what it
means to be a “heritage food” in today’s context in Asia. And our decision to
choose the Milo Dinosaur as one of our case studies was also shaped, as
historians would say it, by the abundance of materials that was already
available, that we could use to flesh it out and analyse its life and time, so to
speak.
4:21
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
The context that we live in today includes a lot of what we can call “living
heritage” – heritage that’s actively practised and promoted across Singapore,
not in the past but today. And not all of it, but a great deal of what we consider
“traditional” or “Asian” food heritage has arguably already been branded and
mass produced often for international or overseas audiences. It includes
complete dishes like chilli crab, kaya toast, samsui chicken. And when I last
checked outside at the shop, we had notebooks with the Milo Dinosaur on the
front cover, and badges as well. But also we were talking about just basic
ingredients, sauce kits including laksa paste, chicken rice paste, fish balls, tofu,
soya sauce, Maggi seasoning.
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5:15
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
What we think about… When we think about what makes something that we eat
and drink part of Singapore’s heritage and traditions, most of us don’t really
think too hard about it. I mean, it’s fine – it’s either yes or no. We make a snap
judgment and that’s usually enough to keep things going. But as academics, for
me, there are plenty of grey areas that do matter and I would like us to treat the
Milo Dinosaur as part of a thought experiment. It might push boundaries that, at
times, we might feel a bit uncomfortable considering what is important. I think
that we try and have these discussions about such boundaries, because
through them we can learn a lot about assumptions of food heritage and even
the society that we live in today.
6:00
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Now, to answer this question about Milo D and its place in Singapore’s food
landscape, we can start to think about the question in three different ways. I
think it’s useful to think about it geographically – if you want to put it cutely, the
Milo Dinosaurs’ “habitat and range”, so to speak. It’s an open secret that it’s
popular regionally, especially in Malaysia, but are there aspects of the drink
which are especially local, Singaporean – is there a “subspecies” of the drink in
Singapore, so to speak? And what about know-how, the craftsmanship that
goes into the drink? Or, in a more legalistic way, the property rights associated
with recipes and preparations? Who are the custodians of the Milo Dinosaur?
Are they individuals? Are they families? Coffeeshop vendors? Big businesses?
Who does the Milo Dinosaur really belong to in that sense, and who does it
benefit when it’s made and sold and, of course, drunk? And, finally, food, and
food is often seen as a way to bring people together. In other words, sharing an
identity and making a community of sorts, and does the Milo Dinosaur really do
this? Who does it exclude? Who does it include? Does it really matter at the end
of the day?
7:18
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Okay, are any of you not familiar with what the Milo Dinosaur is before I go on
further? Everyone knows? Okay, that’s great. What about Milo itself? Everyone
knows what Milo is, right? Okay. So, excellent. Milo: malted chocolate powder
usually used to make drinks, made by Nestlé, currently the world’s biggest food
company, by the way. And also, I would say, possibly responsible for some of
the haze that’s going on outside, which is making it a bit hard for me to talk at
the moment. Because Milo has got two ingredients in it which come from tree
crops that are produced in this region. I see some of you nodding. One of them
is palm oil and the other one is cocoa. So we’ve got two of those things, but we
don’t know how to really trace it, so that’s another question that we put aside for
later. As for Milo Dinosaur, I’ll just go through the basics. It’s basically Milo
powder blended with sugar, hot water, milk, chilled with ice cubes, and then you
crown it with several spoonfuls of Milo powder on top. So the recipes, of course,
vary. Some coffeeshops give three spoonfuls, others as many as five spoonfuls,
which is about just as much as what’s already inside, the liquid that’s chilled to
begin with. So it’s times two. So it’s a bit like a milkshake, but not exactly one
either.
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8:38
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
So, there are several ways to trace the birth of the Milo Dinosaur. The first story
has to do with our little Singapore. And, in this story, the Milo Dinosaur was
invented by Indian Muslim open-air eateries in Singapore during the mid-1990s
– the kinds of eateries that were already serving very sweet, sweetened milky
drinks, like teh tarik, bandung and ice Milo. Some of the claimants include A&A
Muslim restaurant in Sembawang, or used to be in Sembawang. Al-Azhar eating
restaurant near Beauty World Shopping Centre. Al-Amin eating house, also
near Beauty World; they are neighbours sharing the same street. And one
newspaper account claims that Nestlé actually went to Al-Amin to ask for
permission to use the names Milo Dinosaur, Milo Godzilla and Milo King Kong.
And these are all variations of the Milo Dinosaur. For those of you unfamiliar,
Milo Godzilla is Milo D with a scoop of ice-cream on top, sometimes whipped
cream. Milo King Kong is two scoops and maybe with whipped cream as well.
Nestlé went to Al-Amin and asked them for permission to use the names of
these three drinks for their own marketing purposes, which sounds really weird
to me. Why should Nestlé be asking for permission to use its own Milo
trademark? So we’ll come back to this a bit later. Anyway, the other question, of
course, is why these monstrous names? One reason is presumably to get
customers to imagine a larger, rowdier version of the ice Milo that was already
being sold, something that was fiercer, something bigger, a bit more
intimidating, more fun. The other reason was something which had to do with
the times of that period. We had a cinema culture in the early 1990s and early
2000s, where popular imagination in this region was dominated by films about
giant lizards and apes. So we had Jurassic Park, which started in 1993. I think
[Jurassic Park] 1, 2 and 3 were in 2001, and then the last one, Jurassic World,
was in 2015. So it’s always there in the background.
11:02
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
We had Godzilla, which came out in 1998 – not the current 2019 one, which I
haven’t seen yet – but this one definitely wasn’t very good. And it was made by
the folks who gave us Independence Day, so it’s big blockbuster, special
effects, loud. And then we’ve got King Kong in 2005, which was a much better
movie. So these were all sort of happening around the same period and it was
part of a public consciousness in a way.
11:29
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Of course, things are never that simple when it comes to food and food
histories. We have a second origin story, and that’s looking at Malaysia itself. In
this story, Milo Dinosaur was born in Malaysia by the mid-1990s, around the
same time. But it was served under a different name and this name was the Milo
Shake. And it was served at roadside stalls, and we have none other than KF
Seetoh, our local food champion, who talks about this in an interview. He says
that, in the past, we had something similar to the Milo D that was served in
Malaysia at roadside stalls and I had this myself. But it wasn’t just him –
Singapore vendors also knew about the Milo Shake. When they were
interviewed around the same time in the mid-2000s, they claimed that, well, yes,
we know about the Milo Shake in Malaysia but our Milo Dinosaur is different. It’s
more chocolatey and it’s more creamy. So, nevertheless, many Malaysians
remain convinced that the Milo Dinosaur is a Malaysian creation. Now, there’s
probably never going to be a clear answer and maybe there isn’t a point to try
and ask who started it first. That’s not really the point, but we should note also
5
that Malaysia has had one of the highest, it has had the highest per-head
consumption of Milo in the world. And guess who’s in second place? Singapore.
So we are still partners in many ways, all these years. A quick aside: Did you
also know that the slogan “Malaysia Boleh” was coined by Nestlé, by Milo’s
sponsorship of Malaysia’s SEA Games effort in 1993? So you can see how
ingrained Nestlé is in the national culture in Malaysia and, we’ll see later, in
Singapore as well.
13:23
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
And this, of course, brings us to Nestlé itself, which is our third point of origin,
and the Milo Dinosaur’s main ingredient. As we’ve said before, Milo powder was
developed in Australia by an Australian chemist working for Nestlé Australia.
And his name was Thomas Mayne and he was working on it during the Great
Depression at a time when he wanted to find – according to the Nestlé story –
he was trying to find a drink that would help children who were in need of more
nutrition.
13:54
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
So, there you have him. Not in the 1930s, this is him in the 1980s, still going
strong, still loving his Milo. He was a devout promoter of Milo to the very end.
He had a cup of it, reputedly, every day till the end of his days. But in the ’30s,
Milo was first made in Australia, the powder itself, and then it was exported and
it was marketed in places such as British Malaya, as a fortified tonic food for the
middle classes in the mid-’30s onwards. So this is a point where, as you know,
Singapore and mainland Malaya were both part of the same, arguably, the
same political entity, and also the same integrated market as well. So a lot of
the advertising, a lot of the material culture was interlinked. After Malaysia and
Singapore achieved independence in the ’50s and ’60s, Nestlé continued its
advertising and sponsorships, but now it took place along national lines in both
states, and Milo was now being seen and promoted as a national drink. It wasn’t
just in the realm of consumption; in production as well, Milo was soon
manufactured in the… by the early ’70s in both Singapore and Malaysia. So,
what does all this mean? In this telling, Milo Dinosaur is ultimately the outcome
of Singapore and Malaysia’s joint colonial legacy as well as their continued
openness to Swiss capital with a bit of an Australian face. But don’t take my
word for all this, okay?
15:27
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Let’s just ask everyone else outside, the rest of the world, where they think Milo
Dinosaur comes from. So in the Philippines, nine-tenths of residents already
consume Milo and some shops do sell Milo D, and they sell it as a Singaporean
offering. One of these shops happens to be a shop that’s run by KF Seetoh:
Makansutra. So he’s doing his job and waving the flag. In Hong Kong, it’s often
served as a Malaysian specialty by a Malaysian F&B [food and beverage] brand
known as PappaRich. In Australia and the UK, you have both Singaporean and
Malaysian F&B businesses that are selling Milo Dinosaur. So you get different
narratives depending on who you go to, and also sometimes consumers
themselves call it the “hot chocolate of the Far East”, which has this sort of
colonial nostalgic sense to it, which is interesting as well. And lastly in New York
itself, the Milo Dinosaur was featured in 2015, thanks in part to the Singapore
6
Tourist Promotion Board and KF Seetoh, who brought it in, and it was written up
as a Singaporean food. So, in short, the answer depends on who’s selling it. In
many cases, national branding efforts often determine the prevailing narrative.
16:45
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Now, to make matters just slightly more complex, we will be moving on to who
are the craftsmen of Milo Dinosaur, this is the fourth origin story that lies with the
families themselves. So we get to the nice, big, popular narrative. So before the
Milo Dinosaur got its official name, families in Australia, Singapore and Malaysia
were arguably already preparing versions of the drink already, but they didn’t
call it that. They didn’t call it the Milo Dinosaur then; it wasn't “branded” in that
sense. The thing about Milo is that many of you will know that it’s actually more
coarse, more gritty, crunchy than a lot of hot-chocolate powder, which is very
fine. And if you try and put hot-chocolate powder in your mouth, hot cocoa, it
just sort of clogs up your whole mouth and it’s almost suffocating because it’s so
fine. Whereas Milo, if you have it in a spoonful, you’ve got a… It’s palatable, it’s
delicious. And in this story, according to Nestlé, Thomas Mayne settled on the
coarse texture of Milo by accident in the early ’30s. He actually found his
children eating a Milo prototype in the family kitchen, and they were eating it
because they couldn’t actually get it to dissolve in the milk properly. So he went,
oh, okay, it’s actually not such a bad thing, I don’t need to make it dissolve fully.
It’s fine as it is, it’s delicious. So I’m going to sell this as a virtue instead. So,
children, maybe children, are the key to the Milo Dinosaur. And certainly we find
that by the ’50s and the ’60s, once refrigeration becomes widespread in homes
in Malaysia and in Singapore, Milo becomes even harder to dissolve in milk
because the milk is often taken from the fridge cold to begin with. It’s not room
temperature, it’s not condensed milk, which is also room temperature. So this
led to many episodes where children, sometimes children who couldn’t boil their
own hot water but just got the milk straight from the fridge, made their own “Milo
Dinosaurs” at home. So both on purpose and also by accident, and we have
testimonials that actually talk about this. So it’s a nice story, you know, it’s about
innovation from the bottom up.
18:55
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
But, okay, we’ll come to that in a moment. So, the history of Milo Dinosaur is
then also a history of eating Milo in rather strange ways. Maybe not strange to
us because we are from this region. So we have generations of children, our
children, our fathers, our mothers, our grandparents who ate Milo when they
could, straight from the tin, often without their parents knowing. We had children
who were sprinkling Milo on bread; maybe the parents would do it for them as
well. So we go from that pre-Milo Dinosaur to Milo Dinosaur itself and we can
actually start to see Milo Dinosaur becoming, in a way, the ideal concoction to
play with. So one vendor in Singapore in the mid-2000s was interviewed about
this drink because it was quite a novelty then. And he said, well, you know why
it’s popular? I see, you know these kids, well, when they get the Dinosaur, the
Milo powder falls all over the ice and then they start to lick it, they roll it and then
they put it over their tongues and enjoy its texture. So you can see this trace
that goes all the way back, decades since.
7
20:00
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Now, what does Nestlé think about all this? They probably love it. It’s been a
new growth sector for them, in a way. It gives you an opportunity to sell lots
more Milo powder, but I think more importantly it also keeps the Milo brand in
the spotlight. And, in fact, in January 2009, there was a news article interview
featuring Nestlé’s then managing director, and he was quoted by a reporter
stating that the Milo Dinosaur’s development took place in a Singapore
coffeeshop. He didn’t give a name, adding to the mystery, and he said that this
development was a partial result of some input from a Nestlé sales team and he
doesn’t give any more details about that, in that sense. So we don’t really know
for sure, but what we can, what we can look, what we can do, is place what they
did in a bigger context of Milo’s tie-ups with coffeeshops, both now, past and
present. So most recently we’ve got things such as the Milo towers, which are
like beer towers but only full of Milo instead. And these are… These have been
a product of close collaboration with Nestlé.
We go further back, we’ve got things like porcelain saucers, which were
distributed to coffeeshops. So these were ways for Nestlé to get its branding out
to the vendors and you didn’t even have to drink Milo to actually know what the
product was because it was featured on the saucers if you had coffee anyway.
And, by the way, the National Museum has got some of these saucers in their
collection at the gallery, so if you want to have a look, [it’s] two more days to the
close of the exhibition. Product tie-in. We also have recipes for households. So
it wasn’t just the fact that Milo was tying up with vendors. They were also trying
to reach out to families in their homes. In the late ’50s, in newspapers that were
circulating in what was still Malaya at the time, both Malaysia and Singapore,
they were featuring something called Milo Delight, which was something urging
families to sprinkle Milo over bread together with condensed milk. And, in the
late 2000s, this came up again but now it was being pushed through vendors
and was being called Milo Toast, in conjunction with Nestlé.
We go back even further to 1940: We have a recipe in, I think it was one of the
papers, the Malaya Tribune, which sounds awfully similar to the Milo Dinosaur.
So, it says… You see this one here. So this is this is the suggestion, what you
can make for your daughter. Let’s make Milo milkshake, pour hot water into a
shaker, add sugar, float Nestlé’s milk powder and Milo on top. So you want to
get that mix and make it hot and make sure it dissolves some of the Milo and
milk powder. Shake it well and then open the shaker and then insert ice to cool
it down. Shake well again and then pour it into a tumbler, and if you like it rich,
add a tablespoon full of Nestlé’s cream. So it’s almost there, not quite – you
don’t have those additional spoonfuls of Milo powder on top. But essentially
you’re getting, you know, a lot of these ideas which are coming from the
company itself. What I haven’t been able to find out yet is whether the company
got the ideas from people outside, and to do that would require a different set of
sources which we unfortunately haven’t gotten to yet.
8
23:11
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Now, so far, I’m not sure how this works, but the knowledge of how embedded
Nestlé is in our food culture. I’m not sure how it bothers people, whether it’s an
issue for people or not. But we’re talking today about food heritage and one-
third of us here are quite happy to say that Milo Dinosaur is already part of our
food heritage. So in both Singapore and Malaysia, it’s been embraced,
arguably, as a drink bringing people together, typically consumed at hawker
stalls, coffeeshops, Indian Muslim eateries. It’s been essentially naturalised like
teh tarik, bandung, kopi-O, teh-C. The most high-profile episode from Milo
Dinosaur so far, arguably, has to do with Joseph Schooling in 2016. As many of
you will know, he was Singapore’s first-ever Olympic gold medallist in
swimming. And when he set off on his victory parade in Singapore after coming
back from the Olympics, he took a tour of the country to thank his fans – and I
think many of you may still know this – he made sure to stop by a hawker centre
at Marine Terrace Market. And there in front of Singapore’s entire media scene,
and he was crowded in by his fans, he had a short, quick gulp of his childhood
favourite, Milo Dinosaur, made by the drink store vendor who had been serving
Schooling and his family as regular customers for the past seven years. So
Schooling didn’t have time to finish the whole mug, of course. It was a strategic
decision, arguably, and it paid off for him, for the vendor, and for Nestlé as well.
And Milo’s been happy to sponsor him since the Olympic Games. This scene
and Joseph, I think, are a winning combination of sportsmanship national
achievement, homegrown talent and someone whom the general Singaporean
public can relate to through food habits. Also, just another short diversion again.
25:45
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
If you look at the packet that features Joseph and you go to the left, you can see
Nestlé’s been marketing the Milo Dinosaur. I don’t know whether any of you
have these, these are plastic collectibles, about this size. But it’s not just the
Milo D as well. They’ve got other things you can collect. You can collect the Milo
van, you can collect the Milo van uncle, and you can also collect Milo soccer
boy. And these three are all, in a way, nostalgia. They are trading on memories
of past times because, quite frankly, our soccer is not quite what it used to be
anymore.
26:25
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Okay, so this again brings us back to Milo, a much longer history of community,
consumption that the Milo Dinosaur actually draws from. I don’t want to talk too
much about Milo because this is really about the Dinosaur itself, but we can’t
ignore Milo itself. It’s been promoted in Singapore and Malaysia since the 1930s
as something that was quite rare at the time. It was seen as a hygienic,
nourishing, relatively affordable drink – at least for the middle classes at first.
And that was something that was not easily found. And certainly, by the ’50s
and ’60s, doing Milo with cow’s milk had become a habit for growing numbers of
families wanting to raise healthy children.
In Singapore, especially, most families started having children in the ’50s and
’60s because that was when we had more women in Singapore; before then it
was very much a male-dominated society. So, Milo comes in at a point where
families are starting to be part of the natural landscape. Children are starting to
9
be part of people’s aspirations, and investments as well in a way. But also in
places like Singapore at the same time, in a situation where more women are
going into the formal workforce in the ’60s because of industrialisation. Incomes
are rising for households, but at the same time, time within the family is
becoming increasingly scarce. So an instant drink and instant food, which could
be stored away easily for future use and was yet tasty and also full of healthful
goodness, became something that was the right product for the right times. And
I love this particular advert here. This came out in 1952. I don’t think it was
specifically marketed for an Asian market because the aesthetics don’t look like
they are. We’ve got others which are comic strips which talk about the rubber
plantations and fishing industries in this region. But I like this one because it just
really captures that sense, I think, the marketing reps really knew what they
were doing. They were targeting mothers, housewives. You can see, you’ve got
the clock that’s going crazy – time is going out of control. You’ve got a mother
who’s maybe, I don’t know, what she’s doing, mirroring herself as a puppet on
strings, so she doesn't have much control over time as well. And the way to gain
back that control, in a way, is to try some Milo and get that time back in a way,
without sacrificing the health of your kids.
But this wasn’t just a middle-class thing: Nestlé was also sending free samples
to all sorts of communities including remote communities in Singapore,
Singapore’s outer islands, some of whom were what we, I guess, call the Orang
Laut. And in these communities, it was seen not as an everyday drink but as a
prestigious, luxury item. And for many people in the mainland as well, it was
something that was a luxury. But certainly in the outer islands, it was seen as
that. And what happened there was that when they had guests over, visitors,
nurses coming over, they would actually take out the Milo and put in a lot of
sugar and serve it to them. So it was a sort of special-occasion drink –
prestigious, modern, something you wanted to impress your visitors with. Very
social. And then there were still children who somehow weren’t in this loop.
They weren’t accustomed to having Milo.
30:03
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
So Nestlé made sure that they gave out plenty of free samples – at amusement
parks, at schools, and of course, we can’t not mention the Milo vans. They
introduced generations of school kids to ice-cold Milo at special occasions, like
Sports Days. So, with each… oh, sorry about this. With each successive
generation of Milo drinkers in Singapore and Malaysia and elsewhere, we get a
situation where in the ’50s you get the first generation, in the ’70s you get a
second generation, in the ’90s a third. Milo Dinosaur comes in by the third
generation, and now you have a fourth generation who have had their
childhoods, arguably, with Milo Dinosaur, like Joseph Schooling. And this is
what heritage is about: it’s one generation to the next. It’s drinking a cup of Milo
that makes you think about, perhaps, what your grandparents were drinking
when they were growing up as well. And you connect to them through time in
that sense, you’re going back in history. And for your grandparents, for your
parents as well, they are making this drink in a way which triggers their own
memories and it connects them with their kids as well.
10
31:22
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Now, what are the limits of this narrative which Nestlé would love? Who does a
Milo Dinosaur actually exclude? Who’s left out? This is something which I’m not
quite sure about. As far as I know, there are no religious prohibitions on drinking
Milo. Quite the opposite, as far as I know. So, in Malaysia we have a case quite
recently where a local ustaz [Islamic religious teacher] in Malaysia was scolding
traders who were delivering Milo to vendors to stop adulterating Milo, stop
selling fake Milo to customers because you are not being honest. You need to
sell the real thing to your customers. But aside from religion, aside from custom,
there are also genuine biological concerns for quite a lot of us. And one of the
reasons why Milo, I think, is often seen as a drink of the young is not just
because it’s sold that way, but it also contains a lot of lactose. About one-eighth
of Milo’s composition is made up of lactose, which is, some of you may know, a
sugar found in milk. It’s a naturally occurring sugar. And many Asians,
especially ethnic Chinese, start to lose the ability to digest lactose by young
adulthood, including myself. And I have a theory about this actually, that I just
wanted to float for all of you and see what you think. The adults who can’t drink
Milo but grew up drinking it and can still remember its taste, end up passing on
this inheritance to their children because they want their kids to have what they
did growing up. Or, to put it crudely, they want to actually live through their
children, in a way. I don’t know what you think but I’d just like to float it out.
The other issue of course is a more general health concern more recently about
junk food. So in both Singapore and Malaysia, in the last three to five years or
so, we’ve had very highly publicised concerns about rising levels of diabetes
and obesity in both countries. And this is part of a swing against sugar and
sugary foods, including Milo and the Milo Dinosaur. And this is a bit ironic when
you consider that Milo has long been marketed for its health benefits as many of
you know. It’s not like Cheezels. It’s not like some obvious junk food where it
doesn’t pretend to have any nutritional value. It does contain useful protein, it
does contain calcium and it is fortified with vitamins and minerals. And,
historically, it’s good to remember that Milo was a way to get kids to drink milk.
By making it sweeter, making it more palatable, giving it a chocolatey taste. That
was how you got milk to go into kids and make them grow up stronger and taller
as well. But, you know, we live now in a part of the world where cheap nutritious
food is now abundant, so this argument doesn’t really hold to some extent. And
also I don’t think people really drink the Milo Dinosaur for its health benefits,
right? Does anyone do that? Sorry if you do, but it’s not really healthy. People
obviously are not in it for health; they’re in it for pleasure, for gastronomy. It’s
like food that we eat for recreation. We eat it to socialise, to reminisce, to
celebrate, and also just to escape from the tedium of daily life. And that, in a
way, is one of the definitions of food heritage: It brings people together.
11
34:44
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
So, just to conclude, one way we can anchor the definition of food heritage is to
look at UNESCO’s guidelines for what we call “intangible cultural heritage”. How
many of you are unfamiliar with the term “intangible cultural heritage”? It’s the
same category that Singapore’s hawker culture bid is being put under. So it’s
about heritage that’s in knowledge and all that. I just want to go through the
definitions briefly because they also apply to food heritage. Intangible cultural
heritage is traditional, contemporary and living at the same time. It’s not only
inherited traditions from the past but contemporary practices. It’s inclusive, it
contributes to social cohesion, encouraging a sense of identity and
responsibility, which helps individuals to feel part of different communities. It
also is representative because it thrives on its basis in communities and
depends on their knowledge, their traditions, and skills, and customs being
passed on to the rest of the community from one generation to the next. So,
despite being synonymous with the corporate brand of Nestlé – the world’s
largest food company today, I repeat again – the Milo Dinosaur does appear to
fulfil these criteria. So that provokes another question: What role can and should
corporations play in food heritage today? And I just want to end by suggesting
that we need to look beyond just worrying about our traditional Asian food
heritage becoming mass produced and watered down, and we need to start
thinking about heritage that has its roots in recent history in a time when
multinational corporations do dominate much of what we eat today. And we like
it in a way, we like what we eat; otherwise you wouldn’t eat it. And that’s all for
now. I look forward to questions and having a discussion. Thank you.
37:36
(Speaker:
Audience)
Thank you, this was very enlightening. I won’t torture you or the audience with
academic questions, but I have a couple of minor questions. And one thing, I
mean, I’m from Europe, not from the island in Europe but from continental
Europe. And Milo is something that you normally don’t get there – maybe you
get it in a special shop – so do you have any idea why Nestlé actually made this
decision not to sell Milo in continental Europe? I mean, it’s very much a British
Empire thing but this company is not necessarily the British Empire. So that’s
one thing and the other question is: Did you actually see connections to Horlicks
because that’s also, to a certain degree, something that you would… in Europe,
not necessarily get as a drink. I mean, there is no Horlicks Dinosaur and so on,
but it still has this touch of baby food, healthy food and so on that, as you
mentioned, it’s maybe not necessarily something you’d link to a Milo Dinosaur.
But at least the idea that you would actually eat large amounts of Milo powder is
already an idea that I think is not necessarily something that… a European
culture [that] would be promoted. I mean, it would be seen as a luxury or at least
be seen as a kind of, sign of decadence, I would even say. So I mean, when we
talk about Thomas Mayne and so on, these stories about 19th-century culture, if
you're drinking hot chocolate every day then you’re already a decadent person
so to speak.
12
39:17
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Hello. Well, is this on? Thanks. Sorry. You’re Stefan, right? Yes. I sort of have to
ask the question, are these… are you talking about adults eating the powder or
children eating the powder, generally? Well, what we’ve done with Milo
Dinosaur today is just that we are doing a very small study in what is I guess a
much bigger field of drinks, which are malted drinks. And as you’ve rightly
mentioned, you’ve got Horlicks, you’ve got Milo. The other one that came before
Milo in this region was Ovaltine and that started off in the early 1900s and that
was marketed also by a Swiss company. So it is peculiar that the Swiss are
making these malted beverages. Horlicks, I think, was an English brand
actually, is a British brand. But the Swiss were exporting initially Ovaltine and
then after that Milo to many parts of the world, and including Malaysia and
Singapore. The… sorry, I am rambling. One thing that’s been suggested to me
is that we don’t actually have a beer-drinking culture in this region. And
beverages like Horlicks would be more symmetric with that. It’s easier to go with
that because people don’t have that… they’re not accustomed to something so
sweet in their diets. But I really think that the more interesting question for me in
a way is when did we actually get interested in chocolate in our region?
Because it's not something that is part of, it is not indigenous to our culture. It’s
when did chocolate, when did drinking chocolate, as well solid chocolate,
become something that we just assume is naturally a part of our desserts, the
sweetness in that sense. The chocolate sweetness itself, that’s something I’m
interested in. Sorry, we can talk more about it later, for sure.
42:09
(Speaker:
Audience)
Thanks for the presentation. I’m just curious about Indonesia. Why hasn’t Milo
taken off or has it taken off already? Because the cultural and the culinary
context of Indonesia is actually quite similar to Malaysia and Singapore.
42:26
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
I didn’t mention Indonesia for various reasons. One is that this was really
supposed to be a talk about Singapore to begin with, and I didn’t want to take it
too far away. But the Indonesian case, we didn’t do very much research on it.
But the sense is that, because it was a Dutch colony, the marketing channels
were a bit different. And Van Houten was actually one of the companies that
had privileged access to the market in Indonesia at the time. I have to fact-
check this, of course. But clearly there was a question of what we call “imperial
preference” coming in by the mid-1930s and certainly around the same time that
Milo was being marketed. So you start to see goods being marketed along
national empire lines in that sense. That’s not to say that Indonesia doesn’t
have a thing for Milo, but I think it’s seen as a sort of latecomer to the process.
They don’t… Milo Dinosaur isn’t really a big thing there, but we’ve got what we
call a “Milo ice kepal”, which is Milo ice kachang essentially. It’s a Milo ice ball,
rather. So it’s Milo syrup poured on top of an ice ball. So you get these
incredible fusions which are taking place – you’ve got ice kachang coming in
from the region, but you’ve got Milo being brought in in a new way as well. But
that came from Malaysia, apparently; it was made by some vendors in Selangor
and then somebody in Indonesia took up the idea and it started spreading in
Jakarta as well.
13
44:12
(Speaker:
Audience)
Hi, Geoffrey. Thank you for your talk. I enjoyed it. I’m just wondering, do you
actually have conversations with local Singaporeans about how they actually
see Milo Dinosaur as part of Singapore food heritage? And, if yes, maybe you
could talk more about that? Thank you.
44:39
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
We have talked to a few people. Nothing too formal, nothing too structured. I
mean, one of the reasons why I chose this case study to begin with was that
people I was asking generally seem to say I would consider it part of our food
heritage. But I didn’t ask them why. And maybe that’s something that we could
do in future, if we had more money, or more time, to put it in a nicer way. But I
mean this is one of the reasons why I’m so glad we’re here in a way because
we need to have these conversations and the more people we can talk to, the
better. There will be something that’ll be published out of this and maybe that
will get a bit more circulation as well, a bit more feedback. We have a few more
talks but about other food items as well that are on our checklist of our project.
So we have to sort of balance our time out between different items as part of the
research.
45:57
(Speaker:
Audience)
Milo seems to have edged out Ovaltine as a competitor as a chocolate malt
drink, right? Does it have to do with better branding and efforts like the Milo
Dinosaur?
46:11
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
To answer that, we need the Nestlé rep here. I was hoping they would come.
We need the archives, actually. We need the marketing archives. The archives,
I mean, they’re in Switzerland, but I’m sure there’s documentation here as well.
Maybe some of you might know people who work for Nestlé and you can ask
them the questions as well. Don’t do it on my behalf, please, but just ask
around. You know, one of the things that historians love to do is to find out
where these sources are. It’s a community effort in a way. And, you know,
you’re absolutely right. It’s a fascinating question because Ovaltine, as far as I
could see from the newspaper records, was neck and neck with Milo up until the
’80s and even the ’90s. It was often mentioned in the same breath; it was part of
the “holy trinity”. Forgive me, forgive the term. Milo, Horlicks and Ovaltine were
always those three that were mentioned. You could have those if you didn’t
want coffee or tea. Those were the three, but those sorts of references start to
die off in the newspapers by, after the ’90s, after that. So it could be a marketing
tactic. I don’t know. The other thing is that – I don’t know how many of you know
this – Wander, which is the company that was producing Ovaltine, that held the
trademark for Ovaltine, Swiss company, they were producing Milo on behalf of
Nestlé in Singapore during the ’70s. Whereas Nestlé was producing Ovaltine for
Wander in Malaysia during the ’70s. So they had a production sharing
agreement going on. They didn’t build factories of their own in both countries.
So what I said there was not quite the full story. And one of the reasons why
they did it, I suspect, was to avoid catastrophic competition. You kind of want to
do a production sharing agreement when your markets are still developing, and
the region itself is still developing. And now they’re producing, now Nestlé is
producing on both sides because the market is a lot bigger, and they’ve got their
14
R&D facilities in Singapore as well. But the world’s biggest Milo factory is in
Malaysia.
I have a question. Sorry, if I can ask the audience about this. I talked about Milo
not having religious prohibitions but I’m always curious: Is Milo supposed to be
heaty? It is, right? Does having it at a certain time of the day have any effect on
heatiness itself? Whether at breakfast or at bedtime? Does anyone know
anything about this? Because this is really an area which we could know more
about.
49:11
(Speaker:
Audience)
From my understanding, usually you don’t want to eat heaty stuff at night. So
the TCM [traditional Chinese medicine] doctors usually recommend that, for
example, if you want to do a jog it’s preferred that you do it in the morning.
Because if you jog at night, it’s too much on your liver. So, for the same reason,
you do not want to take heaty stuff at night. So [for] things like ginger, which is
also heaty, it is preferred that you take it in the morning. So, before Milo
Dinosaur, my understanding of… Milo is usually drunk in the morning, at home
especially, because I was given Milo as part of my breakfast when I used to go
to school. So, that’s my understanding.
50:10
(Speaker:
Audience)
Thank you so much for the fascinating presentation. This is more of a comment
than a question. So I found it really interesting in your presentation that,
especially concerning the marketing of Milo, the earlier marketing has this very
obvious gendered approach – focus on the mom, focus on the family, and how
to, basically, by serving a cup of Milo to the kids, will allow you to achieve this
kind of ideal womanhood, to become a good mother. And later on I found this
very dramatic shift towards, oh, you know, consuming Milo is all about, you
know, sports, athletic and then healthiness in a sense. Well, according to the
marketing, right? So I wonder, though, let’s say… whether anyone you have
talked to or in any of the archive has any specific gendered narratives about,
let’s say Milo being healthy or Milo being part of, you know, social life and such.
So that’s just a comment plus question. Thank you.
51:26
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
Thanks. That’s a great question. What we didn't have time in a way to show
here was the history of advertising, with Milo itself. And our sources mainly were
NLB’s [National Library Board] digital newspaper archive, which is a great
source especially for English- and Chinese-language newspapers. There are
some interesting breaks in the way the marketing develops. In the ’30s, in the
mid-’30s, it was marketed primarily towards Europeans. And it only started to be
marketed towards Asians after World War II for reasons that we can make good
guesses about. Like you said, it starts off being marketed towards families and
towards women, but it’s really interesting because it covers such a wide spread
of the demographic. Even though this is a middle-class demographic that we’re
talking about to begin with – we’re talking about traders, middlemen, rubber
dealers, fishing dealers, people in ties, women who are going not just into the
workforce but also women of leisure as well, meeting their friends for a movie.
Milo’s being targeted at all these sorts of people, and the comic strips that come
up from the time really talk about these scenarios. Where it’s great to have Milo
15
after a movie, it’s great to have Milo before you go off to work, as a man. It’s
great to have Milo with your kakis [kaki is Malay for “friend”] after work, before
you start your badminton game. And then the sports thing starts to come up
actually by, I think, the mid-’50s, into the ’60s. It starts to really ramp up. But it’s
not really an abrupt shift; it’s more of a gradual thing. You get the professional
sports element of it, where you get the sponsorships of sports events. I can’t
really remember which ones. Maybe you know more stuff about this. But then
you get people who are doing sports as recreation as well, so it all ties in. You
get women who are playing badminton, men who are playing other racket
sports. This whole idea of active, energetic people wearing Western clothes, no
longer in cheongsams [a traditional Chinese female dress] or other sorts of baju
[Malay for “clothes”]. So there’s something very… that they’re tapping into, I
think, a very aspirational ethic, which a lot of other advertisements were doing at
the time as well. But somehow… Oh, the other thing was, Nestlé’s marketing
reps went for a lot of courses after World War II to learn how to be better
marketers. So it’s in a book that this guy wrote, Swiss in Singapore, and I can
give you the reference later.
54:21
(Speaker:
Audience)
Alright. Thanks for the talk. It’s very, very interesting. I’m from the UK, so I was
more familiar with Ovaltine and Horlicks. And obviously the climate is very
different in this part of the world. So those sorts of drinks, I’ve only really known
them as hot drinks, and generally something adults have at the end of the day.
So could it be, you know, before-bedtime-type drink, and probably quite
seasonal, so they’d be more popular during the winter time than the summer. So
I wonder if part of the appeal here is that you can drink it with ice anytime of the
day, any social occasion, throughout the whole of the year. So, the Nestlés, the
big companies, probably think they’ve got much more scope as to the type of
marketing that they can make it appeal to. I sort of wonder why this similar thing
wasn’t done in colder countries because, as far as I’m aware, there hasn’t been
marketing towards children, the sort of equivalent would be something like
Lucozade or Gatorade, and I wonder how those sorts of drinks compare to how
Milo is marketed here.
55:33
(Speaker: Dr
Geoffrey
Pakiam)
When did get Gatorade and Lucozade come into the picture?
55:35
(Speaker:
Audience)
Probably in the ’80s?
55:38
(Speaker: Mr
Geoffrey)
I do wonder whether it’s something to do with timing as well because Milo, I
guess, sort of started off in the ’50s, really, as a mass instant food then. Maybe
there was less choice at that point in time? I think that you hit on a really good
point about the fact that we, I mean, we have a wet and a dry season here, but
we don’t have those extremes of temperature, and we don’t have long nights
and long days, like in temperate countries. But again the iced Milo thing, it’s a
16
bit tricky because it wasn’t... It plays into that narrative about the
democratisation of food to the masses, so iced Milo was something initially that
could only be consumed by those who could afford to go to milk bars. Some of
them, Nestlé, one Nestlé [rep], she set up a milk bar in Singapore to get, you
know, essentially these were taste workshops to get people to try iced Milo
there besides hot Milo. So they were trying all these different combinations, and
the advertisements also were targeting different times of the day as well. From
the, I think as early as the ’30s, they had already started. And they would make
it quite clear that Milo was both a calming drink and a stimulating drink as well.
You can have it both ways essentially, depending on what you think about the
drink. It’s, in a way, all in your head. So, again, it goes to this idea of trying to
get people to the widest possible market. The Milo vans, I think, are such an
important narrative for a lot of us because in a way that’s, for many of us, that
was our first taste of iced Milo, in quite a creamy form as well. Did they use
condensed milk? I’m not sure, but it’s quite hard to get that kind of Milo at home.
I mean, you’ve got this case in Malaysia where this mother and father chased
down the Milo vans so they could get the iced Milo for the daughter who was
craving it because she was pregnant. So, it’s that, you know, strange sort of
thing.
58:09
(Speaker:
Audience)
My question may not relate directly to Milo Dinosaur but what I understand
about Milo based on a news article a few years back… and, I think, I just went to
Wikipedia and checked it again. I think it tends to be very popular in certain
parts of the world, like South Africa, Oceania, Southeast Asia. I just want to
understand, do you have any idea why these other countries, and even South
America, that they are more popular about Milo? It’s also another thing that is
quite common among these countries is that they were colonised. Is there a
colonisation kind of history towards Milo? That’s why it’s actually in these
countries.
58:58
(Speaker:
Audience)
Hong Kong is a colony but we drink Ovaltine.
59:00
(Speaker: Mr
Geoffrey)
And in Britain it’s… I mean, you can’t really go by the British map of the Empire
either because in Britain it’s Ovaltine. That’s the big thing there. In New
Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and as you said South Africa, South
America as well, the Philippines, yes. I don’t know. I mean, I suspect it’s
marketing. I think it’s a production and marketing sharing agreement between
the big food companies about how they divide up the world so to speak. But we
need somebody to do these global histories of multinationals and that will give
us a bigger picture of these things. We can… As far as I can do, we are just
covering this region. And that, in a way, I think is useful to bring out some of the
local texture. And maybe in future we can look at other parts of the world as
well.
17
About the speaker
Dr Geoffrey Pakiam is a Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, where he
researches and writes about food, farming and commodities in Southeast Asia. He is the Principal
Investigator for Culinary Biographies: Charting Singapore’s History Through Cooking and
Consumption, a two-year research project funded by the National Heritage Board. He is the author
of several articles and book chapters on agriculture and food history, including a forthcoming article
in the Journal of Global History on the culinary journey of palm oil in Southeast Asia.