Haptic heritage and the paradox of provenance within Singapore’s cottage food businesses

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a “more-than-representational” understanding of how heritage value is reproduced by cottage food businesses in Singapore. It advances the notion of haptic heritage to highlight the importance of touch and feel in inculcating food with a sense of heritage value. Haptic heritage is reproduced through the physical handling of ingredients in ways that contribute to more “authentic” products. However, it also foregrounds food production processes that are more tactile, time-consuming and thus unscalable than their automated counterparts. Accordingly, the reproduction of haptic heritage is becoming increasingly unviable in Singapore’s competitive economic landscape. These ideas are explored through a supply-side analysis of interviews conducted with owners of cottage food businesses in Singapore. We highlight the importance of provenance in passing on haptic knowledges over multiple generations of business owners, the affective value and inefficiency of haptic knowledges, and the present-day politics of provenance. To conclude, we call for research to continue to explore the ways in which sensory forms of heritage are understood and (under)valued in the contemporary world.

KEYWORDS:

• Haptic heritage
• culinary heritage
• provenance
• cottage businesses
• Singapore

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Yogaanathan s/o Thera for fieldwork assistance. Please note that any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Heritage Board, Singapore.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use the term “cottage food businesses” instead of “heritage food businesses” for two reasons. One, we prefer to use “heritage” in a specific sense, and in relation to the “haptic” processes that contribute to the production of heritage value; two, food has traditionally been treated as separate from (or an informal part of) public heritage discourses in Singapore (Sullivan 1993).

2. “Peranakan” is a Malay word that has come to be understood to mean locally born people that are not indigenous. Most commonly, it refers to the Chinese Peranakan communities located throughout the Malay Archipelago.

3. Satay babi are skewers of pork that are marinated, barbecued and served with a peanut sauce.

4. Kueh are bite-sized snacks and desserts that are typically made from glutinous rice.

5. Tau sar piah are pastry biscuits that traditionally have either a sweet or salty mung bean filling.

6. Suffixes like lah are commonly used in Singapore to add emphasis to speech.

7. In Singapore, popiah and kueh pie tee are examples of Nyonya cuisine, and, respectively, are vegetables and prawns rolled in a thin pancake (the popiah “skin”), and pastry shells filled with sweet and spicy vegetables, and prawns.

8. Soon kueh are a mixture of shredded bamboo shoots, turnip and dried shrimp; they are steamed and wrapped in a skin made of rice flour.

9. Ba zhang are triangular-shaped bundles of glutinous rice that are stuffed with various fillings, wrapped in bamboo leaves, and steamed.

10. Ah gong and ah ma are Chinese terms for grandfather and grandmother respectively.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Heritage Research Grant of the National Heritage Board, Singapore.

Notes on contributors

Orlando Woods

Orlando Woods is Associate Professor of Humanities at Singapore Management University. His research interests span religion, urban environments and digital technologies in/and Asia.

John Donaldson

John Donaldson is Associate Professor of Political Science at Singapore Management University. His research interests span poverty, agrarian political economy and local politics, with a particular focus on China.