Sensing safety in Singapore, 1900–2015

Abstract

Food safety has material, symbolic, experiential, and sensory elements that create ways of thinking and acting, resulting in knowledge that is embedded in institutional practices and discourses. This knowledge—contextual, contested, and changing—shapes the discourse and practice around the perception and regulation of food safety. Taking the city-state of Singapore as an example, this paper draws together elements of food safety discursive practice, culturally and temporally specific symbols of safety, with its sensory experience to show how governmental, cultural, and private actors have worked across the Singaporean food system to create “senses of safety.”

Keywords:

• Singapore
• food safety
• sensing
• semiotics

Acknowledgements

Eric Anderson and Sheila Allison provided much appreciated critiques of drafts of this article. The two anonymous reviewers provided generous and constructive feedback based on thoughtful close reading. The author hopes she has done justice to their very helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. I use materiality here as anthropologist Paul Kockelman suggests, as a “multidimensional, graded and ontology-specific phenomenon.” Paul Kockelman, The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala’s Cloud Forest (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 41.

2. For example: “How to Tell Pure Olive Oil,” Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser, July 19, 1907. Article reproduced from the New York Herald.

3. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for the language here.

4. White Rabbit is a popular milk-based Chinese candy.