Guest Perspective with Darren Teoh: We Traded Sovereignty for Efficiency

Darren Teoh is chef-patron of Dewakan in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's only two-Michelin-star and Green Star restaurant. Over a decade, Dewakan has become a reference point for what a deeply local, ingredient-led fine dining practice can look like, built around indigenous Malaysian produce, long-term relationships with farming communities, and a kitchen culture that prioritises curiosity over convention.

The failure of modern food systems is not simply nutritional, but structural. By outsourcing food production and decision-making almost entirely to markets, societies have traded sovereignty for efficiency. While this has increased availability, it has also created fragility. Access to adequate nutrition is mediated by systems that individuals and communities do not control.

Food sovereignty should therefore not be understood primarily as a nutritional intervention, but as a structural correction. It reintroduces agency at multiple levels of society, allowing communities to participate in defining and shaping their food systems. Nutrition, in this model, is an emergent property of systems that are more locally accountable, participatory, and resilient over time.

This framework is inherently normative. It assumes that individuals and communities ought to play a more active role in sustaining themselves, even if this requires a shift away from convenience-driven behaviours. Markets are not rejected, but repositioned and constrained to serve human interests rather than define them.

The goal is not immediate optimisation, but long-term stability and autonomy. Such systems may be less efficient in the short term, but they reduce the risk of total dependency on centralised structures whose priorities may shift, e.g., political governments. In this sense, the way food is produced and accessed is inseparable from the outcomes it generates. Systems that preserve agency are themselves a form of security.

Years ago, in Machang, a woman took me around her village compound to show me ulam. We picked from trees and shrubs, some planted, some growing wild, functioning almost like a living garden embedded into the space of the home. That garden would not sustain a household completely, but it consistently supplied fresh, nutrient-dense food alongside daily meals. It did not replace the market. It reduced dependence on it. As people moved into cities, that layer was gradually lost. Fruit trees and productive spaces gave way to convenience and external sourcing. What was once integrated into daily life became something you had to purchase, often without visibility into its origin. These are not complete systems, but they are evidence of a different relationship to food, one where some degree of agency and proximity is maintained.

At its core, this is not only about food. It is about re-embedding essential systems into social life, rather than outsourcing them entirely to markets. The Green Revolution succeeded in increasing caloric output across many regions, but it also tied farming to external inputs and narrowed crop diversity, making systems more uniform and less locally adaptable. Over successive generations, responsibility for food production has been reorganised into systems that prioritise efficiency and scale, often at the expense of local control. Food becomes the entry point through which communities can begin to reclaim participation, responsibility, and control over the conditions that sustain them.