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Lonely Planet named Singapore its top country destination for 2015. An island known as a little red dot on the world map, Singapore has less than 5.5 million people.

But when it comes to tourism, Singapore punches above its weight, with nearly 14 million tourists visiting the island in the first eleven months of 2014. And as a result of a long-term plan by the Singapore government, many of them come for the food.

That food includes meals for about $5 that can be found in Singapore's famous hawker centers, sprawling compounds made up of about 100 stalls under one roof. That's where so-called auntie and uncle food vendors serve Singapore's famous street food, a mix of Chinese, Indian, Malay and Indonesian dishes.

You can find many versions of chicken rice, considered one of Singapore's national dishes, which features steamed or blanched white bird meat. You can also find chili crab, a well-loved seafood dish stir-fried in a tomato and chili-based sauce, and rojak, fried dough that has been grilled over charcoal.

When the government of Singapore decided to make culinary training a centerpiece of its plan to turn the island into a world-class tourist destination, it invited the Culinary Institute of America to open its first international branch on the island. Four years ago, Managing Director Eve Felder moved to Singapore with her family to set up the program — around the same time that celebrity chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali also arrived.

Felder says the culinary institute's Singapore program features the same curriculum as its other branches in the U.S., which teach students to prepare classical cuisine in the European tradition. The basic techniques used in preparing world-class cuisine are the same whether you're making a beef bourguignon or a curry, she says.

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Food offerings including squid dough fritters at Hawker Center, Airport Road, Singapore. The island nation is famous for its street food, a mix of Chinese, Indian, Malay and Indonesian dishes. Carole Zimmer hide caption

itoggle caption Carole Zimmer

Food offerings including squid dough fritters at Hawker Center, Airport Road, Singapore. The island nation is famous for its street food, a mix of Chinese, Indian, Malay and Indonesian dishes.

Carole Zimmer

"Part of our being here is to professionalize and teach the whys of cooking, so it's not haphazard," Felder says." The whys are all the same. The difference is in the flavor profiles."

Those flavor profiles run the gamut from learning to prepare Asia's classic dishes to making pastry cream. One morning in January, 19 students wearing chef's aprons and tall white hats gather in the institute's pastry kitchen. Teacher Yvonne Ruperti lines up the ingredients for mixing pastry cream. "Pastry and baking" is part of the institute's 18-month course.

Student Yan Iskanear watches Ruperti closely as she mixes cornstarch, milk, butter, salt and vanilla. Iskanear, one of 200 applicants who vied for 33 places in the culinary institute's fall semester, says he's proud of his country's food.

"Singaporean cuisine is a mixture of so many cultures, so many traditions," Iskanear says, adding,"With the culinary institute here, we learn the trade, we learn the expertise and we use the Singaporean culture, the Singaporean food. And we elevate ourselves to be on a par with all the bigger culinary countries of the world."

Nathaniel Jodin, who graduated from the Culinary Institute's Singapore branch in 2013, says everybody on the island calls themselves a foodie: "They go around and eat. They critique the food."

Jodin is now head chef at GastroSmiths, a small restaurant in downtown Singapore that borrows from cuisines around the world to create its signature dishes, such as scallop seviche and a rib-eye rice bowl.

Jodin says his parents were not happy with his choice to become a chef rather than a doctor or lawyer, because they worried he wouldn't earn enough in the kitchen. "They were very concerned," he says. "And it's a very Asian culture kind of thing. They want you to get good jobs."

But these days, some of the best jobs in Singapore are in the restaurant industry, according to Ryan Clift, who owns the Tippling Club. "This is a career where you will never be unemployed for the rest of your life. It's a universal language. It's food. It's cooking, you know."

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A food vendor at Hawker Center, Airport Road, Singapore Carole Zimmer hide caption

itoggle caption Carole Zimmer

A food vendor at Hawker Center, Airport Road, Singapore

Carole Zimmer

Clift has been cooking since he was 13. He used to run a restaurant in Australia and opened the Tippling Club here in 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, managing to stay in business by selling a lot of what he called "FU-the Subprime Cocktail" for $100 each — a drink that he says was big enough to share among several people.

Now, Clift prepares meals that consist of modernist gastronomy dishes, such as edible charcoal and peppers that look like hot coals. Some of those meals can cost $5,000 for a 32-course dinner that serves up to 12 people. He says at least 45 percent of his bookings each night are international guests who come for one reason: "They are flying here as gastro tourists, and they are coming here just to eat."

Felder of the Culinary Institute's Singapore branch says she hopes she is training students to attract more gastro tourists and to earn accolades from the passion they display in the kitchen.

The way Felder puts it, "We teach them how to make people's dreams come true. A kitchen is high pressure. It's hot. Your hands smell like shrimp or whatever. But you must do it with grace. It is grace under pressure."

Singapore hopes that grace under pressure and skills in the kitchen will help make it the gastronomic gateway to Asia.

gastro tourism

Singapore

If you were to try and list the biggest game-changers for the American food system in the last two decades, you might note the Food Network, or the writing of Michael Pollan, or maybe even the evolution of Walmart.

But you'd probably overlook NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

And that would be a mistake, according to a lengthy report out early February from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In one fell swoop, the report finds, President Bill Clinton's 1994 landmark legislation unleashed a dizzying array of market forces on agriculture, with vast long-term impacts. And with greater access to the neighboring markets, farmers and other food producers in the U.S., Mexico and Canada have helped reshape diets in some pretty significant ways.

The Salt

The Fruits Of Free Trade: How NAFTA Revamped The American Diet

The Salt

Mexican Megafarms Supplying U.S. Market Are Rife With Labor Abuses

If you take the report at face value, NAFTA has greatly increased the "economic integration" between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Instead of giving preferential treatment to domestic products by imposing tariffs on imports, the three NAFTA countries let goods flow relatively freely between them. And that includes food — a lot of it.

Today, Americans consume twice as much fruit, and three times as many vegetables, from both Mexico and Canada as we did two decades ago, according to the report. A parade of greenhouse tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers now come down, often by truck, from Canada. From Mexico, we've seen huge increases in imports of seasonal fruit.

Mexican berries are an obvious example, but 20 percent of the imported watermelon we consumed in 2010-2012 also came from Mexico, compared with 5 percent in 1991-1993. As for imported avocados, 49 percent now come from Mexico, up from 0 in 1991-1993. Lots more tomatoes and papaya are coming from south of the border, too.

This produce trade boom, says the report, is only partly a product of tariff changes. It's also a result of the improved food safety standards now in place in Mexican fields, which allow more produce to get past U.S. inspectors.

But while NAFTA has largely meant that we're getting more of our favorite fresh foods from our next-door neighbors, the USDA suggests that NAFTA is profoundly transforming the food system in Mexico, sometimes in less healthful ways.

While Mexico is now the largest market for American apples and pears, U.S. meat exports to Mexico have doubled in the last two decades. Our exports of feed corn for livestock also now account for nearly one-third of the country's supply — meaning that even when Mexicans eat domestic meat, it's often been fed on American corn.

But the biggest change is how much more processed food and American-style supermarkets our neighbors have been importing. Indeed, American investment in Mexican food manufacturing — rather than agriculture, for example — has tripled since 1999, as have sales of American processed food products there.

American companies are also sending Mexico the ingredients to make foods like high-fructose corn syrup; HFCS exports to Mexico are now 863 times what they were before NAFTA. And all of that ends upon the shelves of supermarkets, whose business model relies heavily on processed food. Walmart, which opened its first Mexican store in 1991, four years after it began selling groceries, now operates 2,114 stores that offer food in Mexico.

You've likely heard that America's in the middle of a craft beer revolution. Well, we're also, apparently, swooning for cerveza de Mexico. In 2013, we imported about 2 million tons of Coronas and Modelos, making beer Mexico's largest agricultural export to the U.S.

The Salt

With Cartels On The Run, Mexican Lime Farmers Keep More Of The Green

While we may be glad that Corona is now plentiful across the U.S. (and that we're washing down more guacamole made with Mexican limes and avocados with it), there is a dark side to how NAFTA has reshaped the region's food systems: working conditions. And you won't find much exploration of that in the USDA report.

While the USDA report discusses immigration and guest worker programs, it does not address the disconnect between improved attention to produce without a corresponding attention to workers' welfare. As a recent Los Angeles Times investigation of Mexican farms growing tomatoes bound for the U.S. market found, "The contrast between the treatment of produce and of people is stark."

Mexico has also likely paid a price for opening its gates to so much processed food laden with high-fructose syrup and other not-so healthful ingredients. As the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minnesota-based think tank, has shown, Mexico's recent spike in obesity and soda consumption correlates with the passage of NAFTA.

Tracie McMillan is the author of The American Way of Eating, a New York Times bestseller, and a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. You can follow her on Twitter @tmmcmillan.

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farmers

NAFTA

agriculture

Mexico

She's the brains and showrunner behind two hit BET series — The Game and Being Mary Jane. He's a producer and director with credits including Jumping The Broom and Sparkle.

Together, Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil make a powerhouse Hollywood creative team and couple who have created some of the most iconic African American characters on television.

They shared their "must-see" lists with Morning Edition Host Steve Inskeep — shows and movies that Salim Akil says, "really represent being an American."

Middle of Nowhere

The 2012 film from Selma director Ava DuVernay follows the story of a woman who is faithfully waiting for her husband's release from prison after an eight-year sentence. Then she finds out that her husband had an affair while in prison.

"It's about sort of her journey to let go and choose herself," Mara Brock Akil says. "Also I love how Ava [DuVernay] explores the hardship of what the prison system has done [to] families.

"It's not just punishing the criminal," she says. "It's punishing the whole family."

Do the Right Thing

In Spike Lee's 1989 film, Radio Raheem is a young black man who carries around a giant boom box playing "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy.

"When you talk about young black men walking around with radios blasting their music, all of a sudden it becomes a threat," Salim Akil says.

"I have two little black boys," Akil says. "And a film like Do the Right Thing can help illuminate the times for them with great storytelling.

"When I tell my 10-year old that 'Hey look man, you can't run through that wealthy neighborhood [...] Because if you do, a police officer may see you and he's not thinking you're outside having fun, he's thinking you're running away from something, that you've done something.'"

Do the Right Thing, Akil says, shows those types of conversations and in a way that still feels relevant today.

Getting On

HBO's Getting On is a dark comedy series about life in the geriatric ward of a hospital. "It's a place where people go to die," says Mara Brock Akil. "Who are the people caring for these patients?"

One of them is played by Niecy Nash, who Brock Akil says breaks the mold of the "sassy black woman" stereotype. "Her portrayal of the character is just so beautiful. Although it's just a job in some ways for her, she's reminded that [the patients are] people, and I think that's a good message to always remember."

Cooley High

"Michael Schultz's Cooley High is a classic," says Salim Akil. "Often times we don't get to see films about coming of age, especially for young African Americans."

Set in Chicago in the 1960's, the movies is about two black high school students at Edwin G. Cooley Vocational High School. Their lives change dramatically after they meet a pair of career criminals and get falsely arrested in connection with a car theft.

Akil says one of the powerful issues in the film is how young people's paths diverge. "Most guys have to go through this: When do you separate yourself from your friends?" Akil says. "Some of them are going to go left, some of them are going to go right, some are going to go straight. And you have to go on your path."

Akil remembers he had a really good friend in high school who wound up in the drug trade.

"You have to make those sorts of decisions and I think Cooley High really illuminates in a fun way but also in a dramatic way, the idea of growing up and making choices," Salim Akil says. "And we need those kinds of films."

This is the latest story from the NPR Cities Project.

In an abandoned building near Spain's Mediterranean coast, someone softly strums a guitar. Chord progressions echo through empty halls.

It's an impromptu music lesson, offered among unemployed neighbors in Alfafar, a suburb south of Valencia. The town was built in the 1960s for timber factory workers. It's high-density housing: tidy, identical two- and three-bedroom apartments, in huge blocks — some 7,000 housing units in total.

But the local timber industry has since collapsed. More than 40 percent of local residents are now unemployed. A quarter of homes are vacant. Apartments that sold for $150,000 decades ago, are going for just $20,000 now.

That guitar lesson is just one way residents are using their free time and empty space creatively. And it's here that two young Spanish architects saw potential.

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The Improvistos architects' plans involve revamping the apartments, with minimal structural changes. Neighbors would be able to trade rooms, and share kitchens, roof gardens and office space. Improvistos hide caption

itoggle caption Improvistos

The Improvistos architects' plans involve revamping the apartments, with minimal structural changes. Neighbors would be able to trade rooms, and share kitchens, roof gardens and office space.

Improvistos

While still in architecture school, Mara Garca Mendez and Gonzalo Navarrete drafted a plan to re-design a high-density area of Alfafar, called Barrio Orba, using the principle of co-housing — in which residents trade and share space and resources, depending on their needs.

"It's like up-cycling the neighborhood — connecting existing resources to make them work," Garca explains. "For example, all this work force that's unemployed, all these empty spaces that are without use, all these elderly people that need help, all these natural resources that are not being taken care of — making a project for all these things."

Through their architecture startup Improvistos, Garca and Navarrete submitted their Orba design to U.N. Habitat, a United Nations agency holding a competition for urban mass housing. And they won.

Redefining Public And Private Space

The architects, both in their 20s, were relatively unknown, working in a Spanish region — Valencia — that's famous for soaring space-age designs of museums and other public infrastructure — which have bankrupted the local government.

Valencia's native son is Santiago Calatrava, the famous Spanish architect who's now working on the new Ground Zero transit station in New York.

In contrast to Calatrava's work, the Improvistos architects sketched out a humble plan to revamp some 7,000 nearly identical apartments, with minimal structural changes, to adapt the current structures to residents' changing spatial needs. Neighbors can trade rooms, and share kitchens, roof gardens and office space.

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Architects Mara Garca Mendez and Gonzalo Navarrete sketch out plans to revitalize high-density urban housing in Alfafar, Spain. Courtesy of Improvistos hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Improvistos

Architects Mara Garca Mendez and Gonzalo Navarrete sketch out plans to revitalize high-density urban housing in Alfafar, Spain.

Courtesy of Improvistos

"We're trying to redefine the limit between public and private," Navarrete says. "So the way you walk on your street, and where your house and your private space finishes or starts."

"A thing as simple as creating a new door — having a room with two doors — can give enormous flexibility," Garca chimes in. "So that this same room can be used by one or another, depending on the need."

Their plan also has a time bank element, trading space for services.

"For example, you have an 80-year-old person who needs some help once or twice a week, [living alongside] a family with three children that doesn't get enough income," Garca explains. "So maybe [someone from] the low-income family can help the elderly person once a week, and get, in exchange, one room. It's like an exchange system — so every house can gain or give out some space. And that can change with time."

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About 15 people live at the Threshold Center at Cole Street Farm, a shared living space in the Dorset countryside. Ari Shapiro/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Ari Shapiro/NPR

About 15 people live at the Threshold Center at Cole Street Farm, a shared living space in the Dorset countryside.

Ari Shapiro/NPR

The Improvisto architects in Alfafar plan to sit down with residents and sketch out how their buildings can adapt to different families' needs. They can add doors, retractable walls and shared space.

Garca and Navarrete, the Spanish architects, came up with the idea on a study trip to rural India — watching how a poor family would enlarge their thatched hut for new children, and share cooking areas with neighbors. The architects think that system can work in the Western world as well.

Collective Living In Rural England

One place it's already working is on England's southwest coast, amid picturesque rolling fields. A decade ago, Jane Stott helped create the Threshold Center at Cole Street Farm, a community that consists of a central 300-year-old farmhouse surrounded by small, low houses and about 15 residents.

The goal here is quite different from in Spain: This isn't about revitalizing an existing neighborhood. It's about creating something new. People have come to the Threshold Center for a variety of reasons, ranging from a desire to live in an environmentally sustainable way to the meditative aspects of living with others.

There are some echoes of life on a commune at the Threshold Center, where there's an optional group meditation each morning and the residents raise chickens.

But everyone also has a day job: among the residents are a nurse, a gardener and a social worker, for instance.

More broadly speaking, each co-housing community is different: Some are very religious; some are very environmentally friendly; some have lots of children; some have lots of seniors.

And the movement is growing: Stott says that when she founded the Threshold Center 10 years ago, she could count on one hand the number of British co-housing arrangements. Now there are more than 35.

Real Solutions For Real People

But the idea is a newer one in Spain, and residents in Alfafar have many questions. Over a traditional Valencia paella, residents of the Orba neighborhood discuss the plan. Some ask, how would the value of a home change, with the addition or subtraction of a room?

But in general they say they're intrigued by the plan — and flattered that the two architects chose their neighborhood for it. Most of Orba's residents have been living side-by-side for decades. They're not strangers.

Take Nacho Campillo and Patricia "Patri" Sanchez, a couple in their early 30s. They've lived in Orba for eight years, and took over Sanchez's grandmother's apartment there when she died. The flat hasn't been renovated since the 1960s.

But the young couple wants to stay in the neighborhood. Sanchez spent her childhood there and loves it — but they need more space. They have a small two-bedroom on the fourth floor with no elevator — and Sanchez is three months pregnant.

"Going up and down four flights of stairs is tiring now, and I'm not sure I'll be physically able to do it when I'm nine months pregnant!" Sanchez exclaims. "And what about the baby's stroller?" she says, exchanging a look with her partner, Campillo, and laughing.

But co-housing may help. The couple may "borrow" a ground-floor bedroom from a neighbor for the last few months of Sanchez's pregnancy — or for stroller storage afterward. The couple currently uses their second bedroom as a home office. But the addition of a shared co-working hub in the apartment complex would free up space for the baby's nursery.

Fusion Of Architecture And Social Policy

People in working-class Alfafar aren't used to getting attention from award-winning architects. The local mayor, Juan Ramon Adsuara, says he's surprised and bewildered by all the interest — but proud his town has been chosen by the architects and awarded the U.N. prize.

"It's not just an architecture project. It's a fusion of architecture and rehabilitation. It's social policy," Adsuara says. "Architecture is not just for big star projects like museums. It's for the slums around them, too."

The big question, though, is how to pay for all this. The U.N. award comes with fame, but no funding. The mayor says the town hall is struggling to pay for basic services — let alone a progressive architecture revamp.

"I need to make payroll for municipal employees — the cleaning staff, the garbage collectors," Adsuara says. "But our economy is improving. We need to think about what model we want for our town's future. And that's where this project comes in."

The Improvistos architects have no price tag for their design. It's adaptable — based on what residents want. They all hope to begin workshops to sketch that out, this spring. The mayor is applying for funding from the European Union, to help launch this project — and also add bike lanes throughout the city. Garca and Navarrete are also thinking about launching a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Residents have volunteered to even do some of the renovation work themselves.

Among all of them, they're determined to change this neighborhood, for the better.