“More Revolting Details”: Colonial Anxieties about Meat in Singapore

Food matters in Singapore, and it has for a long time. Eating the “right” foods in the British Empire was gustatory and ideological. The right foods meant lots of meat, the most desirable of which was beef. Alongside the trade and circulation of actual meat, ideas about meat circulated too. Meat was desirable, but also risky. It could make you strong, but if improperly prepared, stored, or cooked, it could make you sick. It was profitable, and therefore subject to fraud and adulteration. Readers of English-language newspapers in Singapore were well aware of these complicated risks, reward, and anxieties about the safety of food, and responses to it were discursively globalized. Newspaper coverage of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, which focused popular attention on American meat-packing, reinforced existing fears in Singapore about meat and created new ones. Contextualizing the reception to The Jungle in Singapore, as this paper does, shines further light on the American influence in Singapore. The role The Jungle played in bringing about legislative change in America has been somewhat exaggerated. Once Pure Food Legislation was introduced in America, however, other parts of the English-language-speaking world looked to emulate it, eventually including Singapore. We can thus see the introduction of legislation as a discursive response to globalized fears about the safety of meat. Despite the Britishness of Singapore, and its essential role as a trading port for the British Empire, anxieties about food safety reveal influences much broader than those of the Empire, and illustrate how imperialisms are entangled and overlap. Ideas about meat, actual meat, systems of meat regulation, and ideas about food safety show that Singapore was configured but not constrained by the British Empire.

Associate Professor Nicole Tarulevicz is Head of History and Classics, at the University of Tasmania. She is a food historian, who works on the history of food in Singapore, including the ideas, practices and institutions historically connected to constructions of Food Safety. Her current book project explores how Singapore, as a free port and historic crossroads of trade, exemplifies and presages various elements of globalized food systems, including the ideas, practices and institutions historically connected to constructions of Food Safety. This research is supported by an Australian Research Council Grant: Search for Safety: Cultural History Lesson on Food Safety from Singapore. She is the author of Eating Her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore, articles and book chapters. Her most recent writing includes a book chapter focusing on ants, flies, and cockroaches in post-war Singapore (in Singaporean Creatures, NUS 2024) a co-authored article about tropical heat in colonial Malaya in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, and an article about food fears and meat in colonial Singapore in the Journal of Social History.