Grappling with tariff turmoil and pricier chicken rice in US

S'porean writer based in New Jersey describes how her family is moving with the times

- Grace Ng

NEW JERSEY - There is one catastrophic scenario I worry about with US President Donald Trump's second term in office: bad food.

I had read about the unimpressive cuisine associated with Mr Trump's establishments, from Thanksgiving platters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida that resembled frozen TV dinners to gala dishes deemed worse than budget airline food by crypto investors in the President's meme coin.

But I was not chuckling during a recent meal at a cafeteria in Pennsylvania, which served pale yellow turds.

"Eggs," pronounced the server. As I stared in confusion, he whispered: "Powdered eggs with some tofu. Good stuff - soybeans made in the USA."

This unpalatable swop of protein sources was accepted without controversy - possibly because I was attending an Asian church retreat, where tolerance for tofu and austerity is not in short supply.

Expectations of egg substitution may also have been baked into consumers' expectations, since egg prices in the US have risen about 49 per cent in one year and could get nudged up further by tariffs on imports from markets such as Brazil, Mexico and Turkey.

But it was also a sign that all of us, from the sheepish server to second-generation Asian-Americans and relative newcomers such as myself, have accepted that higher tariffs and wider price substitution are an unavoidable part of our foreseeable future.

Price substitution, as I explained to my two little kids, inevitably takes place when the price of Hainanese chicken rice goes up by about US$3 (S$3.90) to US$15.99 on my food delivery app.

So now, instead of that beloved Singaporean dish, we are ordering invented-in-America General Tso chicken with grown-in-America white rice for US$11.99, which increased in price by only $1.

Alas, the only lesson learnt about economic trade-offs was this: saving US$4 was not worth the wailing and flailing that ensued.