Pig’s blood is back on the menu. But is Singapore hungry for it?

Thomas Koh was 11 years old in 1999 when he watched his grandfather’s world collapse. Since the 1950s, the Koh family has run Koh Brother Pig’s Organ Soup stall at Tiong Bahru Market. Its signature dish was a clear Teochew-style broth simmered with pork bones, offal and salted greens. At its centre were dark, jelly-like cubes of pig’s blood.

Koh remembers the routine. Every morning, buckets of fresh blood would arrive at the stall.

Left to set, the blood became soft, curd-like blocks. When customers ordered, the blocks were sliced, blanched and added to the soup.

“It’s rich, and full of umami. The texture is similar to tofu,” recalls the 38-year-old, who took over his parents’ stall in 2018.

For him, pig’s blood was not an exotic ingredient. It was comfort food, and his family’s legacy.

Then, almost overnight in 1999, it disappeared.

Across the Causeway, the Nipah virus, which spread from infected pigs to humans, caused severe neurological illness, and in the worst cases, even led to paralysis and death.

On March 13, 1999, Singapore recorded its first patient with Nipah virus. Over the week that followed, more people here developed high fevers and severe neurological symptoms. Investigators quickly discovered that every single patient worked in the pig industry, and they traced the outbreak directly to sick pigs imported from Malaysia.

That same month, the then Primary Production Department suspended all imports of live pigs into Singapore. A serious blow, since Singapore had relied entirely on imported pork after its last local pig farms closed in 1989.

According to a 1999 article in the Singapore Medical Journal, this total ban appears to have been the decisive step that brought the outbreak to an end.

Pig imports resumed at the end of April 1999, but only from a single accredited farm in Indonesia that had tested negative for the virus.

Even though experts emphasised that the virus could not spread from human to human, or through eating pork, panic spread anyway. According to reports in The Straits Times at the time, pork consumption in Singapore fell by 40 per cent.

Animal blood products became a particular concern. When an animal is infected, viruses like Nipah – along with bacteria – can be present in the bloodstream.

Traditional blood curd posed an added risk as raw blood was left to set at room temperature, then only lightly heated, not always enough to kill harmful pathogens. This also made it vulnerable to contamination during preparation.

As a precaution, Singapore also halted the supply and consumption of blood from locally slaughtered pigs.

For grandfather Koh, this meant the removal of a defining ingredient from the family recipe. He closed the stall for three months to rework it.

“He added meatball, stomach, pig’s heart into the soup,” the younger Koh recalls.

Customers reacted warily, not least because offal was seen as high in cholesterol and unhealthy. But the hawker persevered. The business survived, and to this day, long queues still form at the stall. What vanished from the bowl was the pig’s blood.

Nearly three decades later, that ingredient is making a comeback.

A Singapore Food Agency (SFA) spokesman tells ST: “Following this cessation, there was periodic interest from industry stakeholders to resume pig’s blood product supply through imports.”

Risk assessments were also conducted in 2018, leading to new requirements for the safe collection and processing of blood for food purposes.

In April 2026, the SFA approved heat-treated pig’s blood imports from Thailand’s Bangkhla Pig Slaughterhouse, the first application received and approved since the new requirements were introduced.

The approval does not revive the old system the younger Koh remembers. It authorises a very different product: one made under controlled industrial conditions and subject to approval, export documentation and health certification.

At the slaughterhouse, blood is collected through a closed pipeline immediately after slaughter, filtered, poured into trays and steamed for 45 minutes to kill pathogens. The finished curds are then chilled and packaged for export. Bangkhla Pig Slaughterhouse produces CP Foods’ pasteurised pig’s blood curd.

Unlike the buckets of raw blood Koh remembers from his childhood, this updated product arrives neatly packaged like boxed tofu.

“CP has been selling pig’s blood in Thailand for six years, and we are confident our technology and processes meet SFA requirements,” says Joyce Yap, director of CP Foods Singapore.

The pasteurised blood curd is now available in Singapore in supermarkets, hawker stalls and popular hotpot chains, including Haidilao. Whether Singaporeans still have an appetite for it remains uncertain.

The state and the palate

Pig’s blood became unavailable during a public-health crisis. Its long disappearance also raises a broader question: How do food-safety rules shape what a society comes to regard as normal, clean or edible?

Food historian Nicole Tarulevicz traces the roots of Singapore’s food-safety laws to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In a 2025 study published in the Journal Of Social History, she argues that these laws were never simply about protecting public health. They also served colonial interests, regulating trade, commercial practices and local food cultures.

“The British Empire was preoccupied with specific kinds of hygiene,” Tarulevicz explains.

But “hygiene”, she says, was not a neutral concept. It often carried racial and ideological assumptions that gave the colonial authorities a rationale for intervening in local practices.

The 1894 municipal abattoir offers a telling example. The authorities regulated the slaughter of cattle and pigs but largely ignored poultry, despite its importance to the local diet.

Cattle received careful inspection to ensure a reliable supply of fresh beef for British elites, who associated it with strength and status.

Pork proved more contentious. When the authorities tried to force Chinese butchers to slaughter pigs at the state facility, the butchers responded with a boycott.

The Government retaliated with fines and prison sentences. In one instance, officials even seized a dead pig hidden inside a rickshaw.

The rules were enforced most heavily against non-white residents, even as serious public health problems such as dysentery among coolies received far less attention.

Part of the reason was cost. Improving sanitation meant investing in public infrastructure. Policing food sellers, punishing adulteration and controlling who could handle food were cheaper and gave the colonial state greater control over commerce and everyday life.

Food safety, in other words, became a way to decide not only what was “clean”, but who was allowed to participate in the food economy.

Singapore inherited this regulatory logic at independence. Tarulevicz notes that its colonial-era framework reflected “specific British Empire ways” of defining and regulating food.

The food historian adds: “It is more complex than drawing a straight line from colonial legislation to post-independence bans on specific foods.”

Still, that history offers useful context. Food regulation is not only about protecting public health – it also shapes which practices are considered acceptable, manageable and compatible with the society a government wants to build.

Singapore’s modern food-control system evolved in response to its own circumstances: land scarcity, heavy reliance on imports, dense urban living and the need to prevent disease outbreaks. Yet older ideas about hygiene, inspection and control remained embedded in the regulatory landscape.

By 1999, when the Nipah virus outbreak prompted Singaporeans to give up pig’s blood, a broader transformation was already well under way.

The country was burnishing its image as a clean, modern First World destination for investors and tourists. In June 1997, the Government introduced a public grading system for hawker stalls based on cleanliness and hygiene.

That same year, French retailer Carrefour opened Singapore’s first hypermarket at Suntec City, signalling the arrival of a new era of large-scale, modern food retail.

The strict regulation of blood products addressed a genuine public-health risk. But it also reflected Singapore’s preference for clear, enforceable food-safety rules, especially for highly perishable products that are difficult to monitor across many small businesses.

“Governments use food policy as a form of soft power to shape social behaviour,” says food researcher Jenny Dorsey, a Fulbright scholar and National Geographic explorer who spent two years with the National University of Singapore studying how government policy affected hawker centres.

Neighbouring countries also experienced the same Nipah outbreak, yet pig’s blood remained readily available in their markets, even during the crisis.

“Singapore draws a strict line in the sand,” says Dorsey.

Another reason for the ban was a different approach to risk management.

Taiwan and China faced similar public health threats in 1999, yet they chose a different path. In places where blood and organ dishes are deeply woven into everyday food culture, the authorities opted to test and manage the blood supply rather than eliminate it altogether.

“Singapore is multicultural,” explains Ivy Yeh, an anthropology professor at Nanyang Technological University.

“Unlike Taiwan, where eating organs and blood is so deeply embedded in the dominant culture that people refuse to give it up, the Singapore Government prioritised risk management.”

In a dense city-state, an outright ban was simply easier to enforce than regulating a perishable product across hundreds of hawker stalls, says Yeh.

But the decision did more than address an immediate health risk. It also changed what Singaporeans grew up eating.

Research suggests children may need repeated exposure to unfamiliar flavours before learning to enjoy them.

By not allowing pig’s blood – and later ending the sale and slaughter of live turtles and frogs at wet markets in 2020 – Singapore also reduced opportunities for younger generations to encounter and develop a taste for such foods.

Traditional staples can become unfamiliar not because they taste bad, but because fewer people grow up seeing, smelling and eating them.

The shift is visible across Singapore’s food landscape. The Government is positioning itself as a global hub for alternative proteins and cultured meat, pouring over $300 million into sustainable food research and development.

In 2020, Singapore made global headlines as the first nation to approve lab-grown meat for commercial sale.

By March 2026, the SFA had published a formal list of 14 approved novel foods: lab-grown chicken, algae biomass and precision-fermented ingredients, all cleared for local import and sale.

Tarulevicz says high-tech food innovation could inadvertently narrow the local palate. She also raises a question: Which parts of the animal are likely to be reproduced, and which will be left behind?

“The economics of lab-grown meat tend to focus on prime cuts – eye fillet, chicken breast,” she notes. “Does it make sense to lab-grow tendons, tripe or intestines? Probably not.”

By prioritising premium Western cuts, Singapore’s futuristic food agenda risks accelerating the loss of traditional offal and organ dishes.

Brain masala, anyone?

Yet, Singapore has not stopped eating foods that unsettle many diners.

One of the big draws at Bar B Q Tonight, a Pakistani restaurant in Little India operating since 2011, is brain masala, a rich, intensely spiced dish made with goat brains.

Restaurant manager Zakir Khan does not regard the ingredient as alarming. It simply requires careful and meticulous handling.

Kitchen staff first parboil the brain with turmeric for 10 minutes before removing the internal nerves by hand. It is then chopped and quickly fried in olive oil with fresh ginger, garlic and house-ground garam masala.

“The texture feels exactly like tofu,” Khan says, describing it as velvety, rich and deeply savoury.

The dish is a delicacy. Each goat yields only one brain, and limited supply can push wholesale prices to $40 a kg.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, when supply chains were disrupted, customers repeatedly called the restaurant asking when it would return.

Mid-conversation, Khan’s phone buzzes with a message from a diner reserving a portion for evening pickup.

In addition to South Asian expatriates, his regulars include Malay, Indian and Chinese Singaporeans. Some of his most loyal customers are local medical staff from the nearby Farrer Park Hospital, who frequently stop by to scoop up spiced goat brain with hot naan.

Their appetite complicates any easy story about inevitable aversion to offal.

If brain masala shows an organ dish sustained through cultural familiarity, Dirty Supper in Tiong Bahru reveals what happens when similar ingredients are presented for contemporary dining.

Chef Peter Smit – who grew up in Australia and has worked in London kitchens – opened the restaurant in 2024 as a whole-animal operation. He is committed to “whole animal” cooking, the philosophy of using every part of the animal.

“We had a farm in Cornwall where we reared our own pigs. We knew all the butchers; we knew all the farmers,” he says.

The kitchen breaks down whole lambs, ducks and sides of pork. The results land on an ever-changing blackboard menu: grilled pork heart and kidney treated like steak, smoked pork tongue, duck heads and feet, duck-neck sausages stuffed with liver and heart, and house-cured lamb ham.

There is usually just one beef steak, from a secondary cut to “please the masses”.

Supply cost and the skill required discourage most restaurants from committing to such a menu. Smit does so out of “pure stubbornness”. He also keeps “fun cuts” like hearts and kidneys under $10 to encourage diners to take a chance on them.

“I would rather people try this stuff and go, ‘Oh, this is actually really good,’” he says. By his account, around 95 per cent of diners do.

But he sees a double standard. Duck head, pork kidney or pork heart can appear cool and adventurous when served at a “sustainable whole-animal dining experience” for $80 alongside natural wine. “But if you go to a Chinese restaurant, it’s everywhere, and everyone is eating it. So the only difference is it’s a white boy cooking it.”

Yeh agrees: “It completely depends on how you present the exact same thing. If you brand it well, the price, and the psychology of disgust, changes entirely.

More than just biology, that psychology is shaped by class, setting, memory and aspiration.

In post-war Singapore, offal, animal blood, and even reptiles were ordinary foods. Poverty and wartime shortages made intestines, tripe, and frog meat affordable sources of protein, not exotic choices.

As incomes rose, wet markets and butcher stalls gave way to supermarkets and neatly packaged cuts of meat, putting more distance between consumers and the whole animal. Ingredients once valued for their affordability gradually acquired a stigma as “peasant food”.

The reverse can happen, too: Foods once associated with wealth can become unfamiliar or even unappealing.

At Tan Ser Seng Herbal Soup in Geylang, third-generation owners Allan and Vivian Tan are preserving their grandfather’s turtle soup recipe.

A Teochew immigrant, Tan Ah Sai began selling turtle soup after World War II. He would carry the soup pots on a shoulder pole through the streets.

“He wanted to be different from other chefs,” Vivian says.

His turtle soup – a herbal broth slow-cooked with a blend of Chinese herbs and freshwater turtles – quickly attracted everyone from labourers to wealthy businessmen.

In China, Vivian says, turtle soup was traditionally served at banquets and weddings as a sign of prosperity.

For Allan, turtle was never unusual. “I grew up eating turtle. It’s just another meat. It tastes just like pork,” he says.

But he understands why first-timers hesitate. When the restaurant sold only turtle soup, some diners brought friends or family who refused to try it, and sometimes left without eating.

The family eventually expanded the menu with other soups and dishes, including ginseng black chicken soup. Even that can prompt hesitation.

“Some people think chicken shouldn’t be black,” Allan says.

Vivian recalls children who happily ate turtle meat until their parents told them what it was.

“It tastes like pork. It’s just scarier in your mind,” she says.

Today, the restaurant has a steady base of local regulars and tourists, mostly from China and Indonesia, even if the long queues of its heyday are gone.

Dorsey sees a generational shift: Millennials embraced photogenic food, while Gen Z places greater value on experiences that are “real” and “unglamorous”, making once-shunned ingredients fashionable again.

For younger diners, eating organ meat can be both private enjoyment and a public signal: evidence of curiosity, adventurousness or cultural fluency.

“How we eat is an expression of what we feel comfortable with, but also what we aspirationally want to be,” Dorsey says. For younger diners, ordering organ meat can signal identity – “wanting to eat it publicly because they want to be seen as adventurous”.

Take baker Jeslyn Chow. The 32-year-old enjoys offal and pig’s blood; her favourite local dish is kway chap, flat rice sheet served in a broth and with an assortment of pork cuts including offal, intestines and ears.

For years, her access to pig’s blood was limited to trips abroad to Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan. Now that it is making a return to Singapore’s food scene, she is eager to enjoy it closer to home.

“I’m a strong proponent of using every part of an animal or even fruit or vegetable,” Chow says. “Since it’s already there for us to eat – the farmer already grew the veggie or slaughtered the pig – why should some parts be considered ‘disgusting’?”

Disgust can be durable, but it is not fixed. A travel experience, a trusted recommendation or a single unexpectedly good meal can change a diner’s mind.

Koh sees this at first hand at his pig organ soup stall. When young customers play it safe with lean meat and meatballs, he encourages them to try the intestines, recommending them as the house speciality.

“We clean our intestines really well. It might be different from others you’ve tasted before,” he tells them.

As Yeh puts it: “In childhood, we might be taught to dislike something. But when we mature and gain the ability to explore, we realise, ‘Oh, this is actually so tasty.’”

The question is whether Singapore’s food culture will give younger diners enough opportunities to make that discovery.

The challenge extends beyond pig’s blood. Hawker culture is already losing the workers and businesses that keep its more unusual dishes alive. The median age of a hawker is 59, while rising costs, long hours and a shortage of younger successors are forcing many famous stalls to close.

Government efforts to bring in new hawkers have had limited success. Of the 566 aspiring entrepreneurs who completed the 2020 Hawkers’ Development Programme, only 16 stalls remained operational by April 2024.

For those who do enter the trade, economics can also push tradition aside. As Makansutra founder K.F. Seetoh notes, hawkers have to make a living, and labour-intensive heritage dishes are often harder to justify.

The change is already visible in newer hawker centres: Stalls serving offal, turtle soup or beef lung are increasingly replaced by Chinese mala, Japanese donburi and Korean hotplate dishes.

The result is a narrowing food landscape. Some diners still seek out traditional flavours, but the mainstream is moving towards dishes that are more familiar, standardised and easier to produce.

Magazine editor Lynette Koh, 45, is nonchalant about pig’s blood making a comeback.

She had never tried it in Singapore, having been barely a teenager when it disappeared from menus. Her first taste came years later on a trip to Taipei, when she decided to see what she had been missing.

“What’s the big deal? It doesn’t even taste like anything, aside from tofu. Then I might as well eat tofu since it’s actually healthy,” she says, adding that she has not been tempted to try it again since its return to Singapore.

It is one reason why, despite requests from older customers, Koh hesitates to add it back into his family’s recipe.

A big hurdle is cost. Buying a box of pig’s blood for around $7 – with each bowl needing half a portion – would push his prices up significantly. He also doubts younger diners would eat it.

“After 30 years, it’s hard to reintroduce it,” Koh explains. “If I add it now, people might react poorly and go, ‘Ew, what is this in my soup?’”

He may be right. Thirty years is long enough for an ingredient not just to disappear from menus but from collective memory.

But Koh has also watched a table of young customers leave having ordered intestines for the first time, and come back the next week to order them again.