Eating

Her
Curries
and
Kway
A Cultural History
of Food in Singapore

Nicole Tarulevicz
Eating Her Curries and Kway
 Eating Her Curries
and Kway

A Cultural History of Food in Singapore

Nicole Tarule vicz

Universit y of Illinois Press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
© 2013 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 5 4 3 2 1

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tarulevicz, Nicole.
Eating her curries and kway : a cultural history of food in
Singapore / Nicole Tarulevicz.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03809-9 (hardback)
1. Food habits—Singapore. 2. Food preferences—Singapore. 3.
Singapore—Social life and customs.
I. Title.
gt2853.s56t37  2013
394.1'2095957—dc23  2013031280
For my parents, who taught me the pleasures
of kitchen, table, and plate.
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. Audacious Fusion: Thinking

About Singaporean Cuisine  1
Chapter 1. A Brief History of Singapore  10
Chapter 2. Making the Past the Present:
Food in a Multiracial Port City  24
Chapter 3. Public Spaces, Public Bodies  39
Chapter 4. The Kitchen: Invariably Offstage  59
Chapter 5. Jam Tarts, Spotted Dicks, and Curry  77
Chapter 6. The Pizza of Love  92
Chapter 7. Picked in Their Fresh Young Prime  116
Chapter 8. Food Sluts and the Marketing
of Singaporean Cuisine  137
Conclusion. More Than Just Food  160

Notes 173
Index 199
 Acknowledgments

As with all such projects, this one was made possible by funding.
Generous assistance from Cleveland State University, in the form of Faculty
Start-Up Funding, allowed me to undertake a major initial research trip to
Singapore. I received a New Appointees Research Grant from the University
of Tasmania, which supported the second research trip to Singapore. Seed
funding from the Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath, University of
Tasmania, was especially timely and very gratefully received.
The research for this project was conducted during a number of trips to
Singapore, and I offer my sincere thanks to the staff of the National Library
of Singapore for all their assistance. I also thank the National University of
Singapore Library and especially the university’s Department of History for
their help and welcome.
I have found the process of seeking copyright permission to illustrate the
book to be both challenging and frustrating, and there are a number of im-
ages that I am sorry that I am not able to include. I am, however, extremely
grateful to the individuals and companies who let me reproduce their work.
In particular, I thank Singaporean artist Jiahui Tan, whose work is inspiring
and for whom I predict great things to come.
In writing about a country that is not my own, I have come to rely on my
Singaporean friends. Hundreds of meals were shared—not only in Singapore
but in visits and at conferences (who could forget Fat Matt’s Rib Shack, the
delicious smoky ribs and the inspired songs: “I’ve got my one good eye on
you, and it’s not enough”?). I am sure Dr. Mark Emmanuel and Joanna Tan
will recognize my nostalgia for sharing plates of chai tao kway. I thank them
for their ongoing friendship, encouragement, and help.
x  . acknowledgments

Generously continuing to act as a mentor long after my graduate school

years, Professor Antonia Finnane was instrumental in encouraging research
that captured my imagination. I had been interested in food at the personal
level and am delighted to have found an intellectual home in the study of
food. As always, Antonia’s advice was sound. Associate Professor Rob Shelton
has also been generous in his professional support long after I might have
expected.
When I was at the initial stages of this project I received helpful guidance
from colleagues at Cleveland State University, and I especially thank Associate
Professor Tom Humphrey and Professor Liz Lehfeldt for their help with the
manuscript proposal. Professor Joanna Waley-Cohen of New York University
offered invaluable advice and timely encouragement for this project.
Thanks are also due to Associate Professor Wenqing Kang of Cleveland State
University, who as a visiting scholar to the University of Tasmania not only
did all the things expected in that role but took the time to read early drafts of
several chapters. My most vexing chapter also received some very constructive
feedback from Associate Professor Kristin Bayer of Marist College.
I am also deeply grateful to the reviewers of the completed manuscript
and hope I have done justice to some fine suggestions. The generosity, close
reading of the text, and constructive advice reminded me of the privilege of
being in a supportive academic community. Thank you.
I have been blessed with a range of professional assistance, too. First, I
thank Kendra Boileau, who saw the title of a conference paper I was giving
and was sufficiently interested to seek me out. Second, I thank Dr. Bill Regier
of the University of Illinois Press, who has been so gracious and forgiving
of a manuscript that took much longer than intended. Ted Prassinos has
been a willing assistant on more than one occasion, and I am thankful for
his help and enthusiasm. I also thank Sheila Allison, who has the knack of
illuminating what was hidden in the murk. She has been a joy to work with
and I am grateful for her help.
Big projects are felt by those around us—we are less available, grumpier,
preoccupied, and so forth. So I offer my thanks to my friends and family.
As I was concluding my initial research for this project I had some medi-
cal misadventure. Such things remind us of the importance of friendship,
and there are too many friends and colleagues to thank for their support. I
would, however, like to thank Dr. Kylie Julian, who, as always, went above
and beyond, and Dr. Mary Tomsic, who does so much and makes it seem so
manageable.
 acknowledgments ·  xi

When it came time to write these acknowledgments I realized that I have

been thinking about and writing and editing this book the whole time I’ve
known my partner Dr. Eric Anderson. On one of our first dates we sat at
the lake in front of the President James A. Garfield Memorial at Lake View
Cemetery for so long, reading and talking about the manuscript reviewers’
comments I had just received, that we were locked in the cemetery. This
has been a consuming project, and Eric has offered support and encourage-
ment beyond expectation, be that moving the verb in a sentence or moving
half-way around the world. I am grateful for his intellectual and emotional
support.
Eating Her Curries and Kway
 introduction

Audacious Fusion:
Thinking About Singaporean Cuisine

When I think of Singapore I think of food, not just because I am a

glutton, although I am. For me, Singapore is defined, at least in part, by the
meals I have shared, by specific taste sensations, and by long conversations
about food. It was over plates of chai tao kway (fried carrot cake, a dish of
white radish and egg and no carrot at all), redolent with chili, that friend-
ships were formed. My adventuresome eating served me well in the eyes
of new Singaporean friends who, only half-jokingly, talked of the Western
obsession with bland food and meal after meal of potatoes. My willingness
to try things, to eat the slippery, the lush, and to ask endless questions about
the food marked me as at least interesting.
In what can only be described as an appalling character flaw, I do not eat
fish or seafood, a fact baffling to my Singaporean friends and the cause of
some embarrassment for a scholar of food. I share this, not in a moment of
confessional activity, but precisely because they find it both inexplicable and
impossible to remember. The notion of not eating a category of food such as
fish and seafood is to them quite perplexing—to eat only halal food makes
sense, to be vegetarian is also comprehensible, even a Buddhist diet would
make sense. To avoid a food for religious or cultural reasons fits into their
notion of food; however, to avoid a category of food (an ingredient or series
of ingredients) on the basis of taste fails to make sense. Does the presence of
belachan (a fermented shrimp paste) make a plate of green vegetables fishy?
Are prawns in a pork dumpling seafood? If there is fish sauce in the sambal
(chili sauce), is it still fish-free? For me, fish and seafood form a category of
food; for my Singaporean friends this is not a meaningful taxonomy. And
2  . introduc tion

Singapore is a society in which taxonomies, rules, classifications, codifica-

tions, and regulations matter.
Singapore is a prescriptive society; social and political roles are articu-
lated, defined, defended, and policed. Food somehow seems, by virtue of
its apparently apolitical appearance, to be an area where anything might be
possible, yet as we will see, not everything is really possible. The confusion
about the taxonomy of seafood is instructive. It allows us to ask, What kind
of rules are there about eating, what is comprehensible or not comprehen-
sible to Singaporeans, and what is acceptable and not acceptable? The central
question of the book, then, is: how does food become its own form of rule-
making? The rules about food exist on two planes: they are most obviously
rules about food, but they are also rules that tell us about a society, about
power and identity and much more. Food, as Molly Wizenberg, a writer for
Bon Appetit, reminds us, is never just food.1
The rules I am most interested in cluster around three themes—cultural
heritage, the family, and the body. The Singaporean state has been, and re-
mains, preoccupied by these issues. Singapore’s unique inception as a colony,
a place that was “always already Westernized” and therefore ambivalently
Asian,2 has caused discomfort and, simultaneously, a preoccupation with
cultural heritage. The multiracial migrant composition of the population has
likewise contributed to a fascination with cultural heritage and a wariness of
its communitarian potential. With limited physical resources, the political
discourse in Singapore quickly turned to human resources. Rapid economic
growth was achieved by increased participation of women in the workforce,
and in this context the family came to be an important site of management
for the state. A preoccupation with the body coincided with the state’s inter-
est in the family when, in the 1980s, a policy of pronatalism was introduced.
The bodies of citizens have literal and figurative meaning for the Singaporean
state and are sites in which national ideology can be sculpted, inscribed, and
embodied.
Cultural heritage, the family, and the body are the organizing principles
for the book, and they also represent ways of understanding the history of
food in Singapore. These themes allow me to ask a set of additional questions
about food and its relationship to Singaporean society. First, why are there
so many rules in Singapore, and how is food culture shaped by those rules?
Then, who makes the rules about food and society? Who enforces them?
Who breaks them? And how does Singaporean society respond to people
who break the rules?
 audacious fusion  ·  3

In Singapore, I am a rule breaker—I do not like seafood. Though not a

serious infringement, this dislike breaks a series of rules about food there,
rules that may not be immediately apparent to a non-Singaporean eater.
Our tendency when encountering the food practices of others, whether in
another nation, in another time, or within our own society, is to compare
their practices to our own. I grew up in a home where cooking for others was
important; we often had guests and entertained, and we ate at the homes of
others more than we ate in restaurants. In Singapore, I learned that a meal
in a public place can be as meaningful and as intimate as a meal in some-
one’s home. In an island state with significant geographical limitations, the
frontiers of public and private reflect physical imperatives. A national cuisine
helps define a nation and shape the lived experience of the place. This rela-
tionship between food and nation is especially strong in Singapore, where
eating, planning meals, and talking about food supports the social fabric of
this tiny island state.
For Singaporeans, the universal human experience of eating assumes a
preeminent position in definitions of both the national and the lived, ev-
eryday experience. The hyperbole of the popular “Singlish” phrase “die, die
must try” reflects Singaporeans’ enthusiasm for great dishes. Food provides
them with a memory of home, comfort, and a nostalgic experience, as it
does elsewhere, but in a society that has undergone extraordinary change
in a relatively short time, food also serves as a poignant connection to a
paradoxically ever-changing past. Eating, the how and the what, provides a
unifying experience amid diversity and becomes a metaphor for the fledgling
state’s multiracialism.
The history of food in Singapore—its importation, preparation, consump-
tion, and social-political-national meaning—is a substantially underhistori-
cized area of study. Singapore’s outstanding economic transformation since
independence understandably dominates scholarly attention. Even in the
domain of history, study tends to focus on the economic. With the important
exception of race relations, the social and cultural aspects of the story receive
far less attention. But it is through the bowls and plates of Singapore that
we can read a significant portion of its history. We can see how the actors in
the unfolding story—colonial Britain and the migrants from China, Malaya,
India, and elsewhere—were changed by their interactions in Singapore. Us-
ing food as a category of analysis, this book takes an approach established
elsewhere—especially, but not exclusively, in the West—and applies it for the
first time to the island-state of Singapore.
4  . introduc tion

As a consumer of food, I have long had interest in what is on my plate. As

a historian it took me a little longer to move food from the plate to the page.
My initial difficulties with finding a way of conceptualizing a history of food
in Singapore in part reflected the changes that the study of food itself was
undergoing. The study of food has emerged from an “area of study” to be a
fledgling discipline in its own right. It is the very universalism of food—we
all eat—that makes it such a critical area of study and so very varied. As
food studies pioneer Warren Belasco noted, while food production has a
long tradition of study by economists, historians, and agricultural scientists,
scholars have been more reluctant to study the consumption of food.3 And
in the Singaporean context, that of an island nation reliant on the global
economy for its imported, remotely produced pantry, even the scholarship
of food production is missing.
In an introductory essay to a cookbook, the Singaporean Peranakan (Straits
Chinese) food writer Christopher Tan seeks to answer the question “What
is Singapore food?” His seven-hundred-word answer, too long to quote in
full, is nonetheless deeply revealing—not so much of Tan’s views but of the
way food in Singapore has recently come to be an important site for history
making and nation building. He begins by trying to offer a definition of the
food of Singapore that is more than a “pat” one. In order to do this, he as-
cribes to the food of Singapore a rich and ancient history. It is “the food of
Temasek” (the name of Singapore during the Srivijaya Empire, 683–1286),
the food of the sultanates that replaced that empire, and the food of “the
traders and immigrants from Southern China, Southern India, the Arabian
Peninsula, Indonesia and further afield, who came to call the city a second
or permanent home.” Tan makes that history do ideological work, too; he
links contemporary stories of migration to this ancient history, stating that
“it is the food of a port through which chefs from other countries flow and
sometimes slow down long enough to lay down roots, like the traders of
centuries ago.”4
As with many nations with neighbors who are culturally close, the project
of making Singapore distinct takes on some importance. Tan reflects this in
culinary terms, detailing how Malaysian dishes, while sharing a name and
some similarities, remain significantly different from those of Singapore.
He suggests that this is like an accent—with dishes having a Singaporean
rather than a Malaysian accent, just as American and Canadian speakers of
English, or New Zealand and Australian speakers, have similar yet distinct
accents. Yet the culinary blending of foods and techniques remains critical
to the framing of this cuisine, as Tan explains:
 audacious fusion  ·  5

Singapore food, in the final analysis, is the product of many different lives lived
and cultured side by side. And for so many generations, what other countries
might call audacious fusion, we simply think of as normal. Chinese fried
noodles with belacan-laced sambal on the side, Indian mee goring, Hainanese
kaya on English toast. We think nothing of having dosai for breakfast, cha
siu rice for lunch, Italian for dinner, and a nightcap at a whiskey bar. It is the
natural outcome of a densely packed history and population. It is an openness
to adaptation and combination.5

Tan concludes that Singaporean food goes beyond the media representa-
tion of it, beyond culinary fashions, and that “it is the sum total of every lo-
cal’s personal and family food history and current experience.”6 Food, then,
is the very fabric of the lived experience; it is, if you are a local, what makes
you part of the nation. Food is inclusive precisely because it is universal; it
is much more inclusive than the nation-state but operates at an ideological
level; it does the important work of creating a space for personal experience
within the national narrative. The last sentence of Tan’s essay reads: “It [food]
is important, and it should be important to you, because it is about you.” The
food of Singapore is important to me, even though it is not about me; what
is clear is that it is important to Singaporeans and it has become important
to the history of that nation.
The structure of the book is not chronological in the traditional way, bro-
ken into periods labeled pre-colonial, colonial, Japanese occupation, postwar,
merger, and independence. These eras are, of course, pivotal to an under-
standing of Singaporean history, and that narrative is outlined, to some ex-
tent, in Chapter 1. This book, however, goes beyond those historical blocks.
In using sources relating to food, I am reading Singaporean history across
some of those demarcated periods. After all, we might cook or eat a dish for
different reasons at different times; when we eat a family favorite we are not
constrained by historical periodization. The book is therefore broken into
chapters that address single but interrelated topics drawing on the three
themes of cultural heritage, the family, and the body, and it connects and
builds on these ideas, thereby providing a way of understanding the history
of food in Singapore.
Chapter 1, “A Brief History of Singapore,” provides readers with an account
of the nation’s recent history, a framework by which the following chapters can
be interpreted. A conventional chronology of the occupation of Singapore is
offered, from early nomadic settlement through colonial occupation, Japanese
occupation during World War II, and eventual independence. The complex
steps by which Singapore became a nation-state are traced in order to highlight
6  . introduc tion

the uniqueness of its journey to nationhood. A brief history of more recent

political shifts is also outlined so that readers may gain a sense of the policy
imperatives that have informed Singapore’s recent past. Its history is also located
within a broader world history with particular reference to the Asian Values
debate and the emergence of the Singapore School in the post–cold war world.
Interwoven with this conventional history are key culinary and gastronomic
developments, allowing the two histories to be read simultaneously and to
unsettle the dominance of the conventional periodization.
Chapter 2, “Making the Past the Present: Food in a Multiracial Port City,”
considers the ways in which ideas about Singapore’s food heritage are used to
help Singaporeans negotiate the multiracial nature of the island-state. Rojak
(a Singaporean salad or condiment) highlights the way various foods have
become potent national symbols that simultaneously speak to diversity and
unity and in the process help define the boundaries of what is considered
national food. Though globalization has provided new foodways, old food-
ways remain potent determinants of Singaporean society. Exploring the re-
lationship between the global and the local to explain how cosmopolitanism
emerged as a powerful nationalist discourse, the chapter posits the port as
the key mechanism for this process. It considers the movement of people as
a force for shaping the food of the nation and the way the rhetoric concern-
ing a migrant past is strategically deployed.
Chapter 3, “Public Spaces, Public Bodies,” reads contemporary policies
about the regulation of public space and food hygiene against the backdrop
of colonial policy and anxieties. Sites of food purchase and consumption have
a meaning at the personal and the national levels—these are the spaces in
which Singaporeans spend time with family, colleagues, and friends, where
they form community relationships and meet their neighbors. In a sense,
the shared table or the queue at a favorite stall is the nation. Starting with a
discussion of early Darwinian botanical projects and including evolving city
plans, the chapter suggests that the People’s Action Party shares many of the
concerns of its colonial predecessors.
The regulation of public space, the demands of public hygiene, and the
regulation of food provision, while necessary and practical, also speak to a
desire to regulate public space, the national body, and specific bodies. The
analysis moves to a discussion of personal hygiene, considering bodily waste,
spitting, hand-washing, and littering. A range of sites in which regulation
takes place is examined. With more Singaporeans, regardless of class, eating
meals outside the home than inside it, these public foodscapes form a vital
part of life. By design, and through infusing those public foodscapes with
national and personal identity, the places for eating and the cuisine eaten
 audacious fusion  ·  7

change into representations of the nation, turning the table into the site of
nation making.
In Chapter 4, “The Kitchen: Invariably Offstage,” I consider the marginal-
ized Singaporean kitchen. Although they think hard about where and what
they eat, very few Singaporeans spend time thinking about where their food
is prepared. That oversight means scholars have paid less attention to kitch-
ens and how they reveal the associations between food, social relationships,
and national identity. This chapter begins to fill that gap. The physical space
of the kitchen, with reference to domestic architectural sources, and the
sociological meaning of the kitchen are considered in the colonial and the
post-independence periods. Because of the intimate association between
the state and housing (the Housing Development Board designs the spaces
in which 87 percent of the population lives), Singaporean kitchens provide
a unique insight into the way in which food preparation is conceptualized
by the state. The chapter argues that discussions of kitchens and their rela-
tionship to Singaporean society requires a different understanding of the
categories of gender and domesticity.
Chapter 5, “Jam Tarts, Spotted Dicks, and Curry,” interrogates the written
record. Singaporean and Malayan advice manuals, school textbooks, and
magazines from the 1890s and later are filled with instructions that would
have been virtually impossible to fulfill in Singapore. A series of disjunctures
between rhetoric and reality presents itself, beginning with an analysis of
textual sources showing that young women studying home economics were
taught how to make cakes in ovens they did not have and colonial housewives
were instructed to serve cream of asparagus soup in the tropics. In materi-
als produced within Singapore from 1880 to 2008, especially those for the
English-language-reading population, the rhetoric was one of adaptation but
not reality—a suitable metaphor for the colonial experience.
An additional disjuncture between the colonial and the local appears as
the chapter considers the way these materials were intended to inculcate a
racial and social hierarchy; a 1960s cookbook based on the Malayan school
curriculum, for example, states that the text is intended to “foster and de-
velop those natural attributes of good craftsmanship and artistry posed by all
Malayans.”7 In the cooking of jam tarts, boiled potatoes, royal icing, coddled
eggs, and scones it seems that Malayan artistry had a clearly British framing.
Through educational materials, the colonial authorities, followed by the Sin-
gaporean government, used the domestic sphere to establish specific gender
and racial constructions; to make rules. Via these constructions they sought
to imagine, and thereby define, the nation in alignment with the agendas of
the elites.
8  . introduc tion

The recent proliferation of cookbooks purporting to offer the reader a

guide to cooking authentic Singaporean food is the point of departure for
Chapter 6, “The Pizza of Love.” Cookbooks that claim to represent a national
cuisine provide a unique opportunity to look at the way their authors tried
to use food and food preparation to define a Singaporean national identity.
The chapter considers a range of cookbooks produced by community orga-
nizations (Singaporean and international), chefs, food writers, government
departments, schools, food producers, and retailers. If one reads the range of
recipes—specifically, their method and explanation—across time, a picture
of a shifting national cuisine emerges, reflecting demographic and class shifts
yet working to establish rules about what constitutes national food.
In a society where the kitchen has a diminished role the purchase of a
cookbook takes on new meaning. When a cookbook is not being used to
provide recipes, its function as an indicator of social status or of aspirational-
ism and as a signifier of traditional values becomes more prominent. Some
exceptions such as confinement (post-childbirth) cookbooks are examined,
but the chapter makes the argument that the cookbook in Singapore has
more symbolic value than it has practical culinary outcomes. Finally, the
chapter shows how food gives people an illusion of cultural connection that
ultimately serves the government by endorsing a notion of racial harmony
based on multiracialism, not multiculturalism.
In Chapter 7, “Picked in Their Fresh Young Prime,” the book turns to visual
sources, specifically, food-related advertising. The “local” has been recast in
Singapore to account for an absence of local products. In the case of food
advertising, this is a direct consequence of the fact that the country is not
able to produce its own food or water. Food advertising is thus intimately
bound with foreignness. The obvious foreignness of the foods purchased and
the preparation techniques used have continued from the colonial period to
the contemporary, made possible—and upheld—by Singapore’s status as a
port city.
For many postcolonial societies, buying local goods was a way to express
a fledgling national identity and support the economy. Given the impossibil-
ity of doing so and the geographical limitations of Singapore, an alternative
form of economic nationalism was instituted. It was, then, the consumption
of foreign goods that formed the basis of nationalism. The chapter looks at
the way products were and are advertised and at their availability, suitability,
marketing, and content.
Framing a nation as a tourist destination, especially a foodie destination,
has become standard practice in Southeast Asia, and particularly in Singa-
pore. Chapter 8, “Food Sluts and the Marketing of Singaporean Cuisine,”
 audacious fusion  ·  9

continues the theme of reading visual images by analyzing print and film
tourism advertisements for Singapore. The rubric of the exotic and therefore
the erotic Orient, while clearly evident in Singapore, is being displaced by a
neo-Orientalism of literal consumption.
Unlike its neighbors, Singapore, by way of its English-language public
sphere, is the “knowable Asia.” As a “Westernized” globalized city, it appears
knowable through the consumption of local fare. Tourists are actively en-
couraged to partake of local food as part of the experience of Singapore—to
literally taste the nation. The chapter returns to the earlier theme of reading
space by looking at food courts as sites of constructed nostalgia. Food-related
tourist destinations such as themed food courts serve as sites for visitors
and locals where the past can be repackaged for consumption. In looking at
these spaces the chapter reads the demands of tourism and local nostalgia
in unison.
For diasporic communities, food can serve as a reminder of home, of the
familiar, and of the national, and for Singaporeans who find themselves outside
the borders of their nation-state, local food can become a means to reaffirm
identity. As a consequence of both tourism advertising and the growth of the
overseas Singaporean population, there is a growing interest in Singaporean
cuisine in the West, evident in the pages of food magazines, in the program-
ming of the Food Network, and in cooking classes. The chapter concludes by
examining this material to highlight the way in which Singaporean cuisine has
been appropriated to signify “acceptable” and unthreatening Asia in a post-9/11
world, where Asia seems particularly unknowable and dangerous.
The book concludes by returning to the theme of nostalgia. Singapore has
experienced incredible growth and has emerged as a global city. In an at-
tempt to avoid the resulting sterility the Singaporean state seeks to capitalize
on the people’s growing nostalgia. Nostalgia, always a problematic concept
in new states, is being negotiated by a direct engagement with food culture.
The state, in conjunction with private interests and the public, is actively pro-
moting food nostalgia as cosmopolitanism. But there is also a risk—one that
this book seeks to avoid—of creating an image of Singapore defined only by
its food. Instead of producing a cultural history of Singapore as “knowable
Asia,” this book attempts a more nuanced reading of a unique postcolonial
state in which there are visible and invisible rules, in which there is prescrip-
tion but also subversion, in which there is willing compliance, invention and
reinvention and, lest we forget, deliciousness, magnificent, and exciting food
that is worthy of our attention.
 1
A Brief History of Singapore

Singapore is small in size and population but not in influence. The

island has a land area of only 247 square miles, no land boundaries other than
the causeway to Malaysian Johore, and a total coastline of only 120 miles.
The foundation of Singapore’s geographical constraints thus lies in its small
size. Its population is a little more than five million, and one million of those
are foreign workers. With a Chinese majority (76 percent) coexisting with
Malay (15 percent), Indian (8 percent), and, in the words of the state, “Other”
(1 percent) minority communities, it forms a uniquely Chinese society in a
predominantly Muslim and Malay region. Singapore is often described as a
little red dot, a reference to the manner in which the island state is marked
on many world maps and reflective of its status as a former British colony.
Indonesia’s former President B. J. Habibie is said to have used the term pe-
joratively, impugning Singapore’s size,1 but the phrase has since come to be
used as a pointer to the nation’s success—we may only be a little red dot,
but look at what we have done. Singapore punches well above its weight in
economic, regional, and ideological terms. The history of this one-off little
state sounds like an invention, and, indeed, it was.

Starting from Scratch

Though culturally and geographically distinct from its Asian neighbors, Sin-
gapore has much in common with them, including experiences of colonialism
and Japanese occupation. Like Hong Kong and Taiwan, Singapore is an island
with a predominantly Chinese population. The similarities with Malaysia are
 a brief history of singapore  ·  11

also obvious. Both are former British colonies with histories of authoritarian
leadership. They share with many Asian nations the pursuit of capitalist eco-
nomic development, evolving from export-oriented manufacturing to high-
tech industries and, more recently, to information technology and value-added
service industries in which Singapore has been notably successful.2
The multiracial nature of the nation creates necessary links with other so-
cieties and also makes its history more recognizable. The third-largest port in
the world and an economic powerhouse in Southeast Asia, Singapore com-
mands a standing more often found in larger nations, especially with regard
to technology and regional leadership. While the historical construction of
the city-state might reach into the past, for example, to Renaissance Venice,
Singapore offers a contemporary example of a truly modern city-state. Sin-
gapore relies on the global pantry to feed itself, and though this seems like a
particularly twenty-first-century situation, for Singapore this has long been
the case. It does not have, and has never had, an agricultural hinterland; if
the port is the city, then so, too, the city is the port. The port functions as a
bread basket for Singapore; it feeds the nation, bringing in the food that fills
the bowls, while also providing the income that allows people to buy the
food—a function as true in the colonial era as it is today.
The history of this remarkable island is familiar but also unique and ex-
traordinary. Singapore’s unusual path to nationhood (including a reluctant
expulsion from the Malaysian Federation) and its great economic success
give it some unusual characteristics. That it was largely uninhabited until the
nineteenth century perhaps most clearly differentiates the place, because it
gives pre-eminence to Singapore’s colonial past. Most colonized nations have
a distinct pre-colonial history, but Singapore was a colonial society at its very
inception. Before the arrival of the British in 1819, it was not a national entity
by any possible criterion. That is not to say that the island had no historical
presence, because it had a place in ancient trade routes.
It is thought that during the seventh and tenth centuries the Sumatran
Buddhist Srivijaya kingdom used Singapore as a trading outpost. There is
archeological evidence to suggest that the island was used between the thir-
teenth and fifteenth centuries by Muslim traders based in Malacca. During
the period of Portuguese rule in Malacca, a Sultanate was established in
Johore, just across the causeway from Singapore, and again there is some
limited archeological evidence of trade activities. Malacca and its surrounds
were held by the Dutch from 1641 until the British seized Dutch colonies
in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, and from 1875 the British were firmly
established in the region.
12  .  chap ter 1

It is less clear that there was any sustained settlement in Singapore. The
aforementioned archeological remains hint at periodic inhabitation, tempo-
rary trade hubs, and the possibility of small fishing communities.3 The ethnic
makeup of these communities may have changed as much as the settlements
did. In the case of Singapore, we are not looking at an island with a steady
indigenous population that could form the foundation of a pre-colonial heri-
tage. In culinary terms, then, Singapore’s pre-colonial history is a story of
trade and of fish, fish caught in waters without national (or royal) ownership.
Colonialism, under the direction of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who is
credited with founding Singapore in 1819, gave it form, first as a colonial ter-
ritory, then as a Crown colony. Raffles acknowledged the rights of the Johore
Sultanate, simultaneously avoiding the need to negotiate with the Dutch, and
signed a treaty with the Sultan granting the British East India Company the
right to establish a trading post on Singapore in return for an annual pay-
ment. By 1824 the British had extended their control over the whole island,
making it a formal British colonial possession. In comparison to other such
holdings, especially India, the occupation of Singapore was relatively brief.
Yet it still holds a particular place in the colonial imagination.
After the transition from trading post to Crown colony, trade and the
port continued to define Singapore. The foundation of the economic and
population growth of the island was, and to some extent remains, its port.
Singapore was run by the British as an entrepôt port within Malaya. Because
of its tax-free status it quickly became one of the largest ports in the world,
emerging as a center of exchange where different cultures and goods met.
Port cities such as Singapore are spaces “sustained,” as the historian Tan Tai
Yong put it, “by the flows of peoples, goods, cultures and ideas across the
regions connected by water and the dynamics of trade.”4 Trade came to both
legitimate Singapore and to define its character.
Much of this trade was in consumables. Foodstuffs are central to the story
of Singapore’s settlement, economic development, and growth. More broadly,
consumables are central to the story of historic and contemporary Singa-
pore. The built environment reflects these imperatives. Telok Ayer Market,
also known colloquially as Lau Pa Sat (“old market”), is one such space. Like
Singapore itself, the market has undergone significant transformation from
a place where raw ingredients were sold to a place where finished meals are
sold, but consumption remains key to its purpose. The market, Singapore’s
oldest, did not start in its current location; in 1820 it was on the banks of
the Singapore River. It was moved when that land was acquired by the colo-
nial government. When it moved to Telok Ayer Street in 1825 the structure
 a brief history of singapore  ·  13

stretched out over the sea, allowing boats to load and unload directly at the
market. By 1836 a bigger market was needed, reflecting the rapid expansion
of trade in Singapore, and the Irish architect George Drumgoole Coleman
designed an ornate octagonal structure. With the opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869 and the consequent increases in the volume of trade and continued
growth throughout the island, land by the sea was now even more desirable
than land by the river, and the market was once again acquired by the colo-
nial government.
In 1894 a new market, architecturally inspired by Coleman’s octagonal
design, was built under the guidance of Municipal Engineer James Mac-
Ritchie. The land on which it was built, and on which it remains today, was,
fittingly, reclaimed land, serving as a metaphor for the literal remaking of
Singapore that takes place yearly as its borders morph through reclamation.
The parallels continue because the market has been closed, redeveloped, and
reopened multiple times, giving way to tunneling and station work for the
Mass Rapid Transport (MRT). It has become a branch of Kopitiam (a local
food center brand); the building has been gazetted as a National Monument
and has been featured in tourism advertisements. That is, like the nation,
this market has been transformed, remade, and repurposed. The changes
have been geographic, structural, and functional. The change from a market
where boats pulled up to a nationally recognized and branded food center
represents the story of one institution and that of the nation (see figure 1).
The rise of Kopitiam from its establishment in 1919 to its current iconic
status is part of this national tapestry. Likewise, the opening in 1926 of the
coffee shop that was to become Ya Kun Kaya Toast represents the inter-
weaving of economic history with culinary and national history in Singa-
pore.5 The centrality of private enterprises to the national story is a feature
of many consumer capitalist countries. Taking a culinary perspective gives
even sharper focus to these endeavors. The opening in 1903 of the Cold Stor-
age Company, for example, heralded significant change in culinary as well
as economic terms.6 Cold storage—the ability to ship and store refrigerated
and frozen goods—literally changed what was in the bowls of the nation;
further, the company of that name became an iconic supermarket chain and
a producer of major products such as Magnolia brand ice cream. The story
of Cold Storage, the corporate entity, can be mapped onto a conventional
national history, but more significant, it highlights key moments in the na-
tional narrative that are often neglected.
The presence in 1905 of fresh dairy products and frozen meats from the
antipodes speaks directly to Singapore’s engagement with the economy of
14  .  chap ter 1

Figure 1. Lau Pa Sat food market, 2012. Photograph by Sandra Hudd. Used by permission.

the British Empire and sets the foundations of culinary trends and a deep
connection to the global economy. That Singaporeans were regularly eating
Magnolia ice cream (made with imported dairy products) from its establish-
ment in 1937 is important in terms of culture as well as food. In a crude sense,
licking frozen dairy products connected Singaporeans to a wider cultural
frame. The pursuit of slow-melting ice cream, especially desirable in the trop-
ics, is also the story of Singapore’s ongoing attempts to control and order the
physical environment by way of technological innovation. The newspaper
columnist Cherian George infamously described Singapore’s political culture
of comfort and control as being a product of the “air-conditioned nation,”7
and slow melting ice-cream can be understood in these terms as well.
The relentless regulation and adaptation of space and place is one of the
consistent themes of the nation’s history. The 1898, 1905, and 1919 River Com-
missions and the 1954 River Working Party highlight the ways in which this
waterway cum foodway has been central to the economic development of
Singapore and simultaneously subject to regulatory and physical reinvention.8
What was traded, how it was moved, who worked the river, the conditions of
that work, and the very water and riverbanks themselves were all subject to
regulation and to massive change. The Singapore River was critical to food
 a brief history of singapore  ·  15

provision, first as a source of food, then as a locus of trade for the boats on
the river, and finally as a pathway to the port.
Attempts to grow crops, first by Raffles in 1822 with a spice garden and
then by other colonial officials, failed, and this failure was hugely significant
in Singapore’s development. While I am reluctant to engage in counterfac-
tual history, it is perhaps worth speculating how different things might have
been in Singapore if viable crops had been found; certainly the foodways and
colonial economics would have been different. The agricultural failings do
not stop the desire to command space, to make land productive, and (for a
small colonial population) to have control over place. The hyper-regulation
of space and place is important precisely because the British population
remained small in the trading port, and Singapore did not become a settler
society like the colonies of Australia and New Zealand.
Population growth did not come from the British but was spearheaded
by nonwhite migration, predominantly of male Chinese, Malay, and Indian
laborers. Initial Chinese migration to Singapore came not from China but
from Malacca and Penang—the Straits Chinese population.9 Eventually this
was followed by the migration of laborers from a variety of provinces in China
itself. Until the 1830s, the Malays formed the majority of the population, a
fact explained in part by female and family migration.10 The Indian popula-
tion peaked in 1860 at 15.9 percent but generally stayed below 10 percent.
From the 1840s the Chinese clearly dominated, constituting between 50 and
77 percent of Singapore’s population.11 Nonetheless, it is the colonial and not
the immigrant population that dominates representations of the food during
this period.
Images of Somerset Maugham throwing peanut shells on the floor of the
popular Long Bar at Raffles Hotel furnish the colonial imaginings of Singa-
pore. The establishment of the hotel in 1887 is a marker of Singapore’s trans-
formation into a colonial destination. The legendary spot remains a popular
place for visitors to temporarily live a colonial fantasy, even if only over high
tea. The sweet cocktail called the Singapore Sling, not actually devised until
1915, is nonetheless symbolically linked to the hotel and underscores the way
in which a single culinary item can be imbued with an ahistorical meaning.
The gin and tonic “sundowner” drunk at the end of day, rich in malaria-
preventing quinine and redolent with symbolism, can be understood as, to
use Tulasi Srinivas’s phrase, “liquid colonialism.”12 Drunk across the tropics
of the British Empire, the gin and tonic connects Singapore to that broader
world and locates the island in a particular and ongoing imperial fantasy.
Maugham himself is reputed to have described the hotel as the legendary
symbol for “all the fables of the Exotic East.”13 For those in the colonies of
16  .  chap ter 1

New Zealand and Australia, Singapore was the first port of call of the East, a
destination for some but also a port on the way to Britain. Singapore was not
India, not the jewel in the crown, but it was nonetheless an important part of
the system of empire, not least of all as a passing-through point. Many of the
colonial administrators had served in India, and Anglo-Indian influences in
architecture and social policy and at the institutional level were apparent.
At a spatial level, British administrators in Singapore, as in other colo-
nial contexts, felt the need to separate colonizer from colonized. 14 With
its architecture of empire—churches, post offices, hotels, and civil service
buildings—Singapore looked the part. It featured tennis clubs, private clubs,
the race course, and other exclusively white spaces of empire. Aside from
social institutions, the commerce of empire made Singapore a key spot in
the “fables of the Exotic East.”
As a free port, Singapore facilitated the flow of goods around the world.
Items from Europe, not just Britain, flowed into Asia via Singapore. Cotton,
munitions, and consumables from Europe sold at inflated prices. Goods of
every sort from Asia flowed in and out of the port. Spices, edible bird nests
and shark fins, mother-of-pearl, gold, tin, rattan, and camphor flowed in from
the Malay Archipelago. From China, Siam, and French colonial territories
such as Cochin-China cargoes of dried and salted foods, medicines, silk, and
tea arrived. Singapore was defined by its economic activity, being first and
foremost a commercial space, a place where goods were sold and bought.
And from its inception, commerce and colonialism were intertwined. As
Raffles himself noted of his intentions: “Our object is not territory but trade,
a great commercial emporium, and a fulcrum, whence we may extend our
influence politically.”15
People came with that trade and sometimes were the trade. Although Sin-
gapore never had a slave trade, the trade in labor was significant. Migrant
workers came through on their way to work in the region, and some stayed
to work in Singapore. Unlike its neighbors, it was not, as we have seen, able to
establish successful agriculture, so there was no work on rubber plantations
or in other forms of cultivation. There was building work, there was domestic
work, there were sexual services to be provided, and there was commerce.16
Before World War II, Singapore was one of the most successful ports in the
British Empire—and in the world.
But it was an empire stretched too thin, and it was perhaps as a symbol
of the setting of the sun on the British Empire that Singapore was for a time
infamous. Its humiliating capture by the Japanese, via bicycle, during World
War II epitomized an empire in decline, its glory fading. For Australians, the
Japanese prisoner-of-war camp Changi provides a dominant image of Sin-
 a brief history of singapore  ·  17

gapore, one that is regularly refreshed through popular culture, for example,
the 2001 six-part television series Changi.17 The popular series following the
experiences of six fictional POWs elicited considerable public discussion
and prompted many Australians to visit what remains of the site of the camp
when they go to contemporary Singapore.
The bicycle capture took many by surprise and, at first, many commercial
food producers were unsure how they would be affected. When the Brit-
ish surrendered to the Japanese Imperial Army on February 15, 1942, Cold
Storage stores, for example, stayed open for business, and they traded on
the next day as well. On the morning of February 17 they were closed by the
Japanese order that all British people, Australians, New Zealanders, and allied
Europeans be interned. This quintessentially Singaporean enterprise is said
to have been the last shop to be open on the island.18 Like Singapore itself,
Cold Storage was taken over by the Japanese, and although they attempted
to keep the refrigeration technology going, limited maintenance had been
done and, after their defeat, it took some time to reestablish the company.
During the occupation, Cold Storage provided for the Japanese population,
not the colonial or local population.
Food scarcity, something Singapore confronted only during the Japanese
occupation, marks the culinary history of this period. That this period stands
in such remarkable contrast to the rest of Singapore’s culinary history serves
to reinforce the centrality of the port to its food security and very existence.
In the lead-up to the war, the British encouraged Singaporeans to grow their
own food, as they did at “Home” and across the empire. This policy was
continued by the Japanese during the occupation. Despite the provision
of seeds by both imperial forces, crops did not thrive. The problems that
beset Raffles in his spice garden—disease and pests—also confronted civil-
ian planters. When pesticides and commercial fertilizers ran out, human
excrement was traded and used to enrich the soil, with a consequent rise in
cholera and typhoid.19 Given its tropical climate, Singapore seems strangely
reluctant to produce its own food—a constant theme in its history. Unique-
ness, be it in the absence of food production or in its post-colonialism, is
another historical constant.
For Singaporeans, the 1942–45 Japanese occupation was also a political
watershed. In contrast to many colonial holdings, Singapore had shown
little interest in nationhood until the war. Independence, however, became
a significant political issue after the failure of Britain to defend the island
against Japanese occupation; many felt there was “no going back to the
old order.”20 The racialized violence that took place during the occupation,
with the Japanese focusing on the Chinese because of their association with
18  .  chap ter 1

anti-Japanese fighting in China and on Indians because of their support of

Britain, further entrenched the racial categories already established by the
British. Although the Japanese occupation was a relatively brief period of
Singapore’s history, it is significant, not least at the ideological level, with
the fear of scarcity deeply entrenched.

Transitioning to Independence
In the postwar era Britain made numerous attempts to hold on to its colonial
possessions and especially to Singapore, since it was considered too small
to be independently viable, and its port too valuable to lose. Yet it was a co-
lonial administration that remade Singapore as a state. Singapore had not
been included in the Malaya Union, a collection of Malay states that existed
from 1946 to 1948. Nor was it part of the Federation of Malaya (1948–57).
Nonetheless, change was afoot in Singapore, as it was around the globe.
World War II, with its dismantlement of empires and the ascendancy of the
United States, created a new world order, one acutely felt in Southeast Asia.
The pathway to full independence was convoluted, with Britain bestowing
political rights incrementally and, in the context of Singapore, as part of a larger
political entity: there were fledgling elections in which British subjects could
vote for six of a possible twenty-two seats in 1948; by 1951 Britain had bestowed
on Singapore the status of “City”; and the Rendel Commission Report of 1954
provided for partial self-government. It was in this context that the People’s
Action Party (PAP) formed later that year. Contesting, but not winning, the
1955 Legislative Assembly election, the PAP prepared for future elections. The
agreement on Singapore’s autonomy was signed in 1958, with the British Par-
liament passing the State of Singapore Act, changing Singapore from a colony
to a state, and general elections were planned for 1959. The movement toward
political autonomy was mirrored by change at the consumer level. Cold Stor-
age supermarkets, for example, introduced self-service shopping for the first
time in 1959—a rather fitting metaphor for broader political changes. The PAP
won the 1959 election and has remained in power ever since.
Within Singapore, the merger with Malaya and independence had “become
one inseparable idea” and developed as a key platform for the PAP.21 In 1963 a
new federation encompassing the states of the Federation of Malaya, as well
as Singapore and the Borneo-based states of Sarawak and Sabah, was estab-
lished. Singapore’s role in the federation was brief. To some extent, race was
the core issue of conflict. Singapore, with its majority Chinese population, did
not embrace the 1965 campaign vision of “Malaysian Malaysia.”22 Moreover,
within the federation, state leaders could be nominated as national leaders,
 a brief history of singapore  ·  19

a problem for some given the popularity of Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of the
PAP. It was possible, given the overwhelming support for Lee in Singapore,
that if the remaining states’ Chinese population voted along racial lines, Lee
could gain sufficient political support to be a viable national leader. The vi-
sion of Malaysia with a Chinese leader troubled some Malay nationalists.
Tensions over this and other issues ultimately led to the 1965 expulsion of
Singapore from the Malaysia federation.
Singapore’s birth as a modern nation was unique in that it was an unwilling
one. Only months before it was expelled from the new Malaysian Federation,
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had spoken of Singapore’s viability as possible
only within the context of the federation.23 When, in 1965, he announced the
news of independence to the citizenry of what was to become the nation-state
of Singapore, he did so with regret. With tears in his eyes he said: “All my life
. . . the whole of my adult life . . . I have believed in merger and the unity of
these two territories.”24 From this inauspicious start, the PAP, led by Lee Kuan
Yew, set about making a nation. From the beginning, Singapore’s validity
and authenticity as a nation-state were insisted upon by the ruling PAP as it
undertook the task of bringing the nation to maturity. The “encouragement
of free trade” and “encouragement of local and foreign investment” became
defining characteristics of PAP rule.25 At the physical and economic levels
Singapore underwent phenomenal change, described by its architect, Prime
Minister Lee Kuan Yew, as a transition from third world to first world.26
The transition has unquestionably been the work of Lee Kuan Yew and
the PAP. Albert Lau, a historian of Singapore, pointed out that a post-1965
history of Singapore would be almost “synonymous with the history of the
PAP and distinguishing between the two is next to impossible.”27 While Lau
may be overstating the case, the tendency in the scholarship is to conflate the
two, perhaps in part because of the PAP’s success and subsequent popularity.
Infamously characterized by the outspoken academic and writer Russell
Heng as the binary “Give me liberty or give me wealth,”28 Singaporeans ap-
peared willing to sacrifice political diversity for rampant economic growth,
sensibly invested in social development and infrastructure. The PAP’s re-
markable development of Singapore aroused the envy of many postcolonial
states. The material circumstances in which independent Singapore found
itself by the 1980s were notably different from those of many postcolonial
states—and for one key reason. At the point when many such nations were
burdened with a neo-imperialism caused by a lack of diversification in their
economy, in turn allowing former colonial powers to continue to exercise
influence and hence leaving them vulnerable to global shifts in production,
Singapore had a distinct colonial legacy: the port.
20  .  chap ter 1

This geographical phenomenon, coupled with the infrastructure of the

port, now greatly developed, gave Singapore an advantage. The PAP also com-
fortably navigated the new world order, playing an important role in regional
associations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
and overcoming hurdles such as the British withdrawal of military support
by cleverly introducing national service in a way that actually strengthened
the economy. There is another parallel between consumer matters and po-
litical matters: In 1972 Singapore took a very significant step in becoming
responsible for its own protection, and this was also the year Cold Storage
introduced self-service pharmacies—in one sense a tiny consumer step, in
another a metaphor for national self-reliance.
The 1970s and 1980s are decades defined by economic growth and Sin-
gapore’s remarkable development of identity. Hawker centers (food courts)
that were to come to dominate the public imagination, such as the Newton
Circus Centre, opened in 1971. The Satay Club, famous for its smoky satay,
cooked outside, was relocated as part of broader urban redevelopment activi-
ties. And in 1974, the first efforts were made to recycle water in Singapore.
Though not initially successful, this is still an important milestone in what
can be understood as a commitment to technological innovation and to
overcoming a mammoth geographical obstacle.
In 1985 the first air-conditioned hawker center was opened. Though not
something that appears in history textbooks, it was a major moment in the
history of Singapore. Its meaning goes beyond the culinary and speaks di-
rectly to a change in the lived everyday, in the type of tourist destination Sin-
gapore is, and in the “evidence” of modernity that has become so important
to Singapore’s self-definition as a nation-state.
The pursuit of development and modernity defined Lee Kuan Yew’s rule.
This is the man who claimed that air conditioning was one of the most im-
portant inventions, changing “the nature of civilization by making develop-
ment possible in the tropics.”29 In 1990, Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of the nation
since 1959, stepped down from the position of prime minister. He had made
it clear that Goh Chok Tong was not his first choice for his replacement. Ill-
ness among the other candidates, however, made Goh Chok Tong the only
viable choice.30

From Cold War to Capitalism

The transition from Lee to Goh coincided with a major transformation in
the outside world—the end of the cold war. The political scientist Francis
Fukuyama famously characterized this period as the end of History.31 In
 a brief history of singapore  ·  21

response, fellow political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted a “clash

of civilizations.”32 Within Southeast Asian studies, the impact of the Cold
War received assessments ranging from positive to polemical.33 Less atten-
tion has been paid to this issue in relation to Singapore, either internally
or externally. Singapore’s singular economic success could not help but at-
tract attention when the end of the Cold War created a renewed interest in
capitalisms. Singapore was even proposed as an Asian model for develop-
ment and modernity.34 The Singapore School, as it became known, was, ap-
propriately, headed by Lee Kuan Yew and strongly supported by the PAP.35
Confucianism, or to be more precise, neo-Confucianism, provided models
for economic modernity that were simultaneously post-colonial and en-
gaged with global capitalism. Or, as the historian Arif Dirlik put it: “What
the Confucian discussions produced was not a critique of capitalism, or of
Orientalism, but their affirmations.”36
In 2005 another political transition took place. Goh Chok Tong stood down
and made way for Lee Hsien Loong, the son of former Prime Minister Lee
Kuan Yew. For some, this was a moment of national discomfort, and it was
widely commented on in the international press. The Economist, for example,
noted that because Lee Hsien Loong was handed the prime ministership on
a plate, “it is touchingly public-spirited of him to show any concern for his
image at all.”37 Although the majority of Singaporeans had long prepared
themselves for Lee Hsien Loong’s move to the position of prime minister, it
was not until the National Day Rally of 2003 that the transition was officially
declared.38 In a CNN interview, Goh acknowledged the “impression” that the
Lee family was controlling Singapore but stressed that transparency was still
necessary: “[As for] Lee Hsien Loong, who will be my successor, his promo-
tion or his appointment, his selection, will be done on a transparent basis.”39
The discourse of meritocracy in Singapore, when coupled with eugenic family
planning rhetoric according to which the successful are expected to repro-
duce at a greater rate, served to make all of this unremarkable.
The food producer, the hawker, the family store owner who has humble
beginnings, works hard, and innovates to become successful is the emblem of
an ideal Singapore citizen. The myth of meritocracy—the dream that anyone,
if good enough, can get ahead—is inculcated in the citizenry. The education
system is a key site in the process and, as Christopher Tremewan, a special-
ist on social regulation in Southeast Asia, has suggested, “The experience of
meritocratic educational sorting processes produced the ideological effect in
students that they were being sorted correctly according to their own abili-
ties.”40 In other words, the process of sorting students makes them believe
22  .  chap ter 1

they have been appropriately sorted, so their place in society is evidence of

appropriate sorting. The myth of meritocracy extends from the educational
to the political realm. The PAP argues that government in Singapore is guided
by the principle of meritocracy.41 By extension, PAP politicians must be the
most “appropriately” able Singaporeans. One of the functions of the educa-
tion system is, of course, to reveal innate leaders. To be the son of Lee Kuan
Yew, an evidently effective leader, and to have succeeded in Singapore and
abroad (he holds degrees from Cambridge and Harvard universities), made
Lee Hsien Loong’s selection as prime minister a lot less remarkable within
Singapore than outside it.
The democratic nature of the Singaporean system is effectively shown not
only through direct electoral participation, although that is an important func-
tion (voting is compulsory), but through regular citizen participation in local
governance matters. The PAP has increasingly talked of transparency, feedback,
and greater community involvement at the grassroots level.42 Singapore is often
described as a soft authoritarian state. It is democratic, but in a limited way.
It is still a place where dissent, particularly that of a political nature, can get
people in trouble. It is socially conservative by global standards. It is a place
where the assumption of modern-therefore-Western should be questioned.
That said, the government makes numerous attempts to make Singapore
seem “cool” in a recognizably global way. The attempts are not always suc-
cessful—think politicians dancing at nightclubs.43 The food culture has, how-
ever, been more successful in making Singapore “cool.” The establishment in
1994 of the first Food Festival and in 1997 of the International Food Summit
represent sustained efforts at connecting Singapore to a global food culture
via tourism, television programming, and magazine articles. Singapore has
emerged as a culinary destination, not just as a way of marketing the nation
to visitors but as a way of marketing the nation to its citizens. That is, food
has become a way of validating the nation precisely because the viability of
the nation-state needs to be insisted upon.
The physical limitations of Singapore, of course, cannot be excluded from
this analysis. Procuring, preparing, and consuming food in Singapore reflects
the geographic realities of its size. The island has other geographic challenges.
Although when it was first settled the riverways were among the factors that
compelled settlement,44 with population growth Singapore no longer has suf-
ficient water to supply its needs because its land area is too small to collect
enough rainwater. Without the port, it cannot feed or water itself. It has been
buying dirty water from Malaysia, cleaning it, keeping half, and selling half
back; this “new water,” however, still leaves Singapore in a vulnerable position
 a brief history of singapore  ·  23

because it is dependent on another nation-state for an essential resource. In

its attempts to rid itself of this dependency, Singapore is emerging as a world
leader in water conservation, reclamation, and desalinization.
In 2011 Singapore began a series of food security initiatives and is position-
ing itself to be a global leader in this field. Once again, we can see how the
history of food tells us the national story as well. As anyone who has lived in
a small country or a small town knows, the smallness of a place informs the
politics and the lived social experience. Singapore is an island, and a small
island at that. The historical and political logic of that fact is evident in the
everyday. Even without agriculture, Singapore provides a remarkable example
of a city of the future. As an example, it poses real challenges to the logic of
localism and offers new thinking about sustainability. Singapore does not, of
course, hold all the answers, but it does offer a point of departure for revisit-
ing some of the current assumptions in the study of food, past and future.

* * *
The conventional periodization of Singapore’s history into the pre-colonial,
colonial, Japanese occupation, merger, independence eras highlights some
of the forces that have shaped the nation, but it also privileges state actors.
For scholars of Singapore, the state looms large—not so much the elephant
in the room but the lens through which everything is seen. From the early
colonial period onward, the ordering of space and place has been a priority
that has been demonstrated at the bureaucratic, regulatory, and physical lev-
els. In the past 200 years Singapore has been multiply and radically remade.
Technological innovation has been one of the mechanisms by which order
is achieved. Singapore’s engagement with the global economy, be that the
economy of the British Empire or of the twenty-first-century world of food
security fears, has been relentless, and food has been central to the process.
Embedding food into the national narrative has been an important national
project and one that has involved a range of nonstate actors. It was not the
PAP but the Lai Wah Restaurant, for example, that invented the tradition of
Yusheng, also known as lo hei (撈起), or the Prosperity Toss, which involves
tossing a fish salad at Chinese New Year to obtain prosperity. Yet this tradi-
tion, which dates from 1964, just a year before Singapore became a nation
in its own right, is one that most Singaporeans would recognize. Placing
important culinary and gastronomic moments within a conventional linear
narrative history of Singapore allows us to begin unpacking these historical
constructions and start the process of reperiodizing that history.
 2
Making the Past the Present
Food in a Multiracial Port City

The story of migrants as told through food is writ large in Singapore.

In fact, it almost dominates the narrative of migration, rivaled only by the
narrative of the hard work and sacrifice of migrants. Food evinces Singapore’s
cultural legacy, its origin, history, and identity. In contrast to the sacrifice
and hardship narrative of nonwhite migration, the colonial narrative em-
phasizes ease; it also features food but in a considerably more muted fashion,
allowing the colonial discourse to remain remarkably glamorous given Sin-
gapore’s postcoloniality and the general trend of postcolonial states’ viewing
the colonial past negatively. Singaporeans reflect their multiracial character
at table, making it a site that reveals the complicated history of the island
state. Permanent migrants, foreign talent, and temporary migrant workers
continue to shape both the food eaten and the society in which they find
themselves. This chapter shows how ideas about the island’s food heritage
help Singaporeans negotiate the multiracial demography of Singapore. We
see how ideas of the nation determine what counts and does not count as
Singaporean food.
Although globalization has provided new foodways, older foodways remain
potent determinants of Singaporean society. Historically speaking, Singapore’s
cosmopolitanism was created by its port status, and the port remains a place
of massive movement of goods, people, and ideas. During its colonial era, the
island attracted economic migrants from all corners of the globe, developing a
solid multiracial foundation dominated by Chinese and Indians. This historic
movement of people is mirrored by a complex web of contemporary migration.
Singapore’s population of five million includes a migrant population of more
 making the pa st the present  ·  25

than one million people. Foreign workers represent a wide spectrum—whether

considered by class or occupation—including day workers who sleep in Ma-
laysia and work in Singapore, Western and Chinese “foreign talent” working in
Singapore at high salaries for a limited period, domestic workers on five-year
maid contracts, and construction workers on one-year limited visas. Migra-
tion has thus historically promoted cosmopolitanism in Singapore, and to an
extent continues to do so. Yet only some migrants are allowed to impact the
national story.

Traversing the Heritage-Modernity Bridge

Large bags of rice, butting against the usual array of baggage sliding into
the carousels at Changi International Airport, signal the arrival of migrant
workers. Occasionally the bags split and the fine rain of basmati rice that
spills over the carousel is quickly tidied up, as are the migrants themselves.
Coming to Singapore on contracts that last for a maximum of one year, the
predominately South Asian construction workers are both highly visible and
invisible in modern Singapore. Their labor is critical to the endless develop-
ment of the physical environment. These are the people who build the malls
and the new train lines, and, working through the night, remake the physical
landscape at a staggering pace. Yet they are also anonymous.
On Sundays, the construction workers congregating in Little India are
highly visible, but they are read as a crowd, not a community. They fill the
streets, food markets, and food stalls, but there is surprisingly little culinary
adaptation to their presence. Many workers come from Bangladesh, but there
are few Bangladeshi eateries. Domestic workers, maids from Indonesia and
the Philippines, make up a significant percentage of the foreign workers in
Singapore, but again, there are remarkably few Filipino eating establish-
ments. For some commentators, this culinary exclusion of migrant workers
“also signals a lack of a foothold on the metaphorical spaces” of civil society.1
Generally speaking, contemporary workers are yet to have a sustained effect
on the culinary landscape of Singapore, despite the national rhetoric about
the impact that migrants of the past have had on the country’s cuisine.
For Singapore, the colonial era has a strikingly romantic cultural resonance.
It is embodied in the romanticization of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who is
honored by statues, scholarships, and institutions, none more enduring than
the famous Raffles Hotel. Raffles, the man, has become synonymous with the
protective intervention of and an ongoing romance with the British Empire,
a relationship that was perhaps at the heart of the reluctance to formalize
26  .  chap ter 2

Singapore as a nation. The framing of this man as central to the narrative of

Singapore begins with Raffles himself, whose biography, A Memoir of the Life of
and Public Service of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, by his widow Sophia, could
be seen as Singapore’s first history since it incorporates his extensive papers
and correspondence.2
Raffles contrasted his administrative failures in Java with his success in
Singapore, describing the occupation and British settlement of the latter as
“a pleasing part of the duty” he had to perform.3 The biography’s section on
Singapore largely describes how Raffles came to take power and focuses on
his heroic efforts, framing him as a “just colonial” and documenting in detail
how he prevented slavery from taking hold there.4 For Raffles, the admin-
istration of the island was a personal success, which allowed the means of
wealth and power to be accrued by his own country.5 In his view, his actions
brought Singapore into existence—the story of Singapore is thus the story of
Raffles.
The conflation of nation and leader continued with Lee Kuan Yew. But even
that national narrative relies on Raffles, as pointed out by the theater arts scholar
William Peterson, who takes as his example Robert Yeo’s play The Eye of His-
tory.6 The play centers on a fictionalized meeting between Lee Kuan Yew and
Raffles in 1981 whereby the two men are simultaneously placed in the past and
the present. As the drama unfolds, “Raffles, the ur-coloniser at the height of his
power and influence,” ultimately confers “legitimacy on his rightful successor.”7
The play characterizes Raffles as a great man who had a vision for Singapore.
In Peterson’s words, “by demonstrating that Lee has fulfilled a sacred national
dream, Yeo upholds one of the great myths that provides a foundation for the
nation of Singapore,” that of realizing a dream.8 In this way, the new nation
can be read as a continuation of colonial fantasy.
When the men have their fictive meeting, Raffles congratulates Lee Kuan
Yew, not only for a job well done but for the way Lee remembers the past. “I
am ever grateful,” Raffles claims, “to have in you a ruler who takes a long and
enlightened view of history and places the contributions of people like myself
in perspective.”9 Yeo has Raffles speculate about a worse future: “Who knows
what will happen if someone else should come along, some anti-history,
anti-British demagogue and altogether denies my part in the founding of
Singapore.”10 The colonial era takes center stage in the remembering of Sin-
gapore’s history, with the rapid pace of change heightening the importance
of this act of remembering.
There could be no more obvious example of this physical reinvention of
Singapore than the reclaimed land around Raffles Hotel, which still sits on
 making the pa st the present  ·  27

Beach Road, though the water no longer laps the fringes of the road—it is
now many kilometers distant. Yet Raffles Hotel remains a symbol of the un-
changing, a romanticized historical space kept central in such a way that it
becomes part of the present. The hotel relies on this relationship in its self-
description: “Raffles Hotel is one of Singapore’s most graceful landmarks.
More legend than hotel, this luxury Singapore hotel celebrates a tradition of
unwavering service excellence spanning more than 120 years. Immortalized
in the novels of Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling, Raffles Hotel,
Singapore’s colonial-styled architecture and lush tropical gardens exude an
atmosphere of timeless elegance.”11 Colonial writers such as Maugham sig-
nify the cultural importance of the hotel, not only because they were elites
(being “stars”) but because of their position as symbols of empire. They did
not just describe the hotel in their work; they slept there, drank there, and
ate there, immortalizing the implied glamour of the place.
Including the Empire Bar, the hotel now provides twelve places to eat or
drink—spaces for celebrating colonialism and empire, not just in nomencla-
ture but also in culinary custom. The practice of high tea, much valorized in
Singapore, is entrenched at Raffles Hotel. Another practice, one that locates
Singapore in the British-Indian tradition, takes place in the Tiffin Room.
Tiffin was first offered by the hotel in 1889, and the hotel notes that “for most
of this century a mild chicken curry was one of the few Asian mainstays on
the hotel’s daily menu as the partaking of Sunday tiffin curry was an essen-
tial aspect of colonial life.”12 Yet the Tiffin Room was not actually so named
until 1976. Tiffin now has a symbolic value beyond its culinary definition;
the menu, rather than offering the traditional idea of a light meal, is actu-
ally a buffet of predominately Northern Indian foods. In this context, tiffin
signifies British Empire and reflects Anglo India as the epitome of empire.
The hotel describes the Tiffin Room as reflecting the “hotel’s glory days
from the turn of the century to the 1930s” and attempts to make the space
“feel” colonial. The furniture and tableware designs and the uniforms of the
staff who serve in the restaurant replicate those worn in the “glory days,”
and even the badges on the waiters’ uniforms reference the past. The con-
cern with dress extends to patrons, who must adhere to a dress code that
excludes sandals and shorts but is still defined as “smart casual.” Not all the
spaces are historically themed—there are contemporary Chinese and Japa-
nese restaurants, an ice cream parlor, and a New York–style deli—but all
the spaces do embody luxury. Champagne brunch at the Bar and Billiard
Room, “the epitome of gastronomic pleasures,” is consciously international:
“an extensive medley of gourmet antipasto and hors d’oeuvres unfolds into
28  .  chap ter 2

a colourful parade of live stations and carvings such as Blinis with Aquitaine
Caviar, Australian Prime Rib and Herbs Dusted Rack of Lamb. Enchanting
rows of endless sweet creations end the brunch on a perfect note.”13 So, while
being consciously historically themed, historical can be substituted for non-
Singaporean and legitimacy can still be maintained in this bridge between
heritage and modernity. Understanding how this process takes place requires
some analysis of the broader Singaporean relationship with colonial and
European history.
History is a trope of knowledge, an established, if metaphorical, way of
thinking about society, and therefore is critical to understanding a society.
Drawing on the work of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, the French
historian Marc Ferro maintained that the study of history “pinpoints the
problems of its own times more fully even than those of the era about which it
is supposed to be concerned.”14 For the feminist scholar Anne McClintock, na-
tions, and in particular postcolonial nations, “are historical practices through
which social difference is both invented and performed.”15 Thinking about
history and history making reveals much about contemporary concerns. The
Singaporean scholar C. J. W.-L. Wee noted that “Singapore’s own cultural his-
tory, naturally, is mediated by British imperialism and thus British history.”16
And the subaltern historian Dipesh Chakrabarty took this point a theoretical
step further when he wrote that all histories “tend to become variations on a
master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe.’”17 With regard to
Indian history, Chakrabarty noted that “even in the most dedicated socialist
or nationalist hands,” history “remains a mimicry of a certain ‘Modern’ sub-
ject or ‘European’ history and is bound to represent a sad figure of lack and
failure.”18 If it is difficult to remove the colonial narrative from the histories
of postcolonial nations such as India, the problem is even more acute for
Singapore.
Whereas most colonized nations have a pre-colonial history, Singapore’s
very inception was colonial. It is generally accepted that prior to the signing
in 1819 of the Treaty of Alliance, the local population was approximately 150
people, mainly engaged in fishing.19 The island, administered by the sultan-
ate of Johore under Temenggong Abdul Rahman, did not even comprise
a province. After a dispute over the succession to the throne of the Johore
sultanate, Raffles helped install Sultan Hussein and in so doing “created a
‘Singapore sultanate’ where there had been none,” allowing Sultan Hussein to
rent, and subsequently cede, the island to the East India Company.20 By 1824,
when the British took the first census, the population had risen to 10,683.21
Without ignoring the 150 fisher people, the fact remains that the notion of
 making the pa st the present  ·  29

“Singapore” is a colonial construct—it is impossible to write about Singapore

without reference to its colonial origins. Returning to Raffles Hotel, it is the
centrality of the colonial to Singapore’s national history that works to make
the international flavor of the Bar and Billiard Room champagne brunch
historical yet Singaporean.
The beliefs, practices, and trends in a culture affect eating practices. In
Singapore, the emphasis on food as culture accentuates this point. If we
understand popular culture as including the ideas and objects generated
by a society, including commercial, political, media, and other systems, as
well as the impact of these ideas and objects on society, we can see that food
represents a vital form of popular culture. We not only eat it, we use it to
define ourselves; in other words, what we eat is a marker of power, cultural
capital, class, and ethnic and racial identity. Popular culture reflects our rela-
tionships with food and constructs those relationships; food is both a site of
popular culture and a point of representation of popular culture. Yet it is, as
the historian Fabio Parasecoli points out, the very ubiquitous nature of food
and its representation that “makes their ideological and political relevance
almost invisible, buried in the supposedly natural and self-evident fabric
of everyday life.”22 Underpinning the representations of colonial food are a
series of ideas about Singapore’s colonial past that need to be made visible.
Much of the literature about Singapore during the colonial period gives
the impression that because it was a free port for goods, all peoples were
welcomed there as well. The journalist and author Iain Manley described it
as a great emporium: “Established by a nation of shopkeepers, it welcomed
anybody who came to work or to trade: opium dealers, prostitutes and coo-
lies, along with merchants and tradesmen from Europe and every corner
of the East.”23 The notion of welcoming anybody, if not accurate, has been
pervasive. The port emphasized transience, making Singapore not a final
destination but a stopover.
In 1880, Jules Verne described Singapore as “simply one large warehouse,
to which Madras sent cotton cloth[;] Calcutta, opium; Sumatra, pepper;
Java, arrack and spices; Manila[,] sugar and arrack; all forthwith dispatched
to Europe, [C]hina, Siam & c.”24 The reduction of Singapore to a commercial
space—a place people go to shop, to pass through on the way to someplace
else—still happens today. It may be by plane, not by boat, but the theme of
transience remains. One goes to Singapore to shop, not to experience some-
thing specific, or as one traveler in 1885 put it: “It is like a big desk, full of
draws and pigeon holes, where everything has its place, and can always be
found in it.”25
30  .  chap ter 2

Each year the country hosts “The Great Singapore Sale,” a tourist event
that began in 1984 in which stores stay open until midnight and nonresidents
are entitled to shopping discounts. Iain Manley sees nothing new about this.
For him the Singapore of the past “was the greatest emporium in Asia, and
perhaps the world—a city organized like an immense department store, in
which you could buy and sell just about anything.”26 At the center of its com-
mercial diversity was, and is, the port. The essayist George Hamlin Fitch wrote
in 1913: “Of all the places in the Orient, the most cosmopolitan is Singapore,
the gateway to the Far East; the one city which everyone encircling the globe
is forced to visit, at least for a day.”27
People and goods flowed into Singapore, providing a diversity that trans-
lated into cosmopolitanism. The people brought with them food traditions
and food items, and because it was such an important port, food passed
through Singapore on its way to many other destinations. Literature fre-
quently represents Singapore as akin to the “last homely house,” or as the
satirical author George MacDonald Fraser put it in one of his Flashman
novels: “Singapore was the last jumping off place from civilization into a
world as terrible as it was beautiful, rich and savage and cruel beyond be-
lief.”28 Singapore emerged as a hybrid East-West space, exotic enough to be
different but similar enough to be manageable.
The Australian cultural studies scholars Ien Ang and Jon Stratton argue
that Singapore’s ambiguous status as “both non-Western and always-already-
Westernized” is a natural product of its unique colonial history.29 The ambi-
guity about its definition as an “Eastern” state, they suggest, derives from its
obvious “Western” inception. The Singaporean government unequivocally
projects an image of Singapore as “Asian.” Ang and Stratton recognize this,
describing the nation as a contradiction: “On the one hand, its very existence
as a modern administrative unit is a thoroughly Western occasion, origi-
nating in British colonialism; on the other hand, the Republic of Singapore
now tries to represent itself as resolutely non-Western by emphasizing its
Asianness.”30 It is in this context of contradiction that we can consider both
commercial enterprises and Singaporean foodways.

Constructing a Cosmopolitan Globalism

Nationalism and globalism tend to be framed as contradictory terms that
nonetheless coexist. Of course, the paradox of globalization is that, at the
point where the boundaries of the nation-state are dissolving, there has often
been a simultaneous rise in nationalist sentiment. For Singapore, being global
has emerged as a characteristic of being Singaporean, allowing globalization
 making the pa st the present  ·  31

to be regarded as a unique nationalist project and one deeply bound with

cosmopolitanism.
The idea of a cultural melting pot, a blending of many diverse cultures, has
never gained currency in Singapore.31 In fact, as late as 1992 Khaw Boon Wan,
Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, made it very clear that it
was both undesirable and unobtainable, describing as “far fetched” the idea
that “we can mix and match values picked from Chinese, Indian and Malay
cultures, and blend in other values taken from other cultures from around the
world, both Eastern and Western, to produce a unique homogenized Singa-
porean brew.”32 Instead, he suggested that values should be updated cautiously
and incrementally, concluding that “this is what remaining an Asian society
means.”33 “Asian,” then, is simultaneously an inclusive category that defines
Singapore as not Western and one that allows for separate cultures within that
framing. Multiracialism, the idea that racial harmony can be brought about
in Singapore by creating a space for ethnic and national identity, facilitates
the embracing of difference in the past while simultaneously rejecting dif-
ference in the present. And at its most basic, it is expressed as a hyphenated
identity: Singaporean-Chinese, Singaporean-Malay, Singaporean-Indian.
The early colonial authority viewed the country’s multiracial composition
as problematic. Its solution was to divide the races physically in order to mini-
mize potential tensions. The Singapore scholar David Brown has argued that
in the period of self-government before full independence, the Singaporean
elites adhered to the colonial view that Singapore was an “inherently unstable
ethnically plural society” where “ethnicity was a ‘problem’ to which the state
was the potential solution.”34 That society was portrayed almost exclusively
in terms of its racial diversity because of its perceived fragility.35
When the People’s Action Party came to power in 1959, it inherited a mul-
tiracial society and a series of colonial race policies. Rather than initiate new
policies and approaches to race, it modified the existing strategies for racial
management. From the time of independence, the management of ethnicity
posed a problem for the PAP in the management of Singapore. Ethnicity is
simultaneously an important part of identity and a threat to national identity.
The PAP’s solution to this conundrum has been strong intervention in areas
such as language practices, housing, and community organizations. Although
this policy has been successful in containing ethnic tensions and racial violence,
Singapore remains a stratified and classified society. Nonetheless, the PAP has
demonstrated remarkable flexibility in its race-relations policies, altering them
to respond to a changing society and emphasizing multiracialism.
Its multiracial composition is critical to the construction of Singapore as
cosmopolitan, by which I mean that Singaporeans, supported by the state,
32  .  chap ter 2

self-consciously embrace a sophisticated and dynamic multiculturalism, one

that simultaneously reifies and transcends Westernized notions of what is
local and what is global. At times, cosmopolitanism is used as a synonym for
the middle class and is contrasted with the term heartlander, which denotes
an “ordinary Singaporean” who is less sophisticated than a cosmopolitan
Singaporean. There are culinary markers of these terms, with certain places,
such as specific hawker centers, signing heartlander identity just as elite
ethnic restaurants sign cosmopolitan identity.36 The port facilitated the cos-
mopolitanism of the past via the movement of goods, people, and ideas, and
the ongoing commitment to this movement has fostered a continuation of
cosmopolitanism, even if it has only recently been named as such.
In linking a global agenda with a nationalist agenda, the Singaporean
government is remaking Singapore into a city that embraces what the glo-
balization commentator Stan Stalnaker described as “hub culture,” an urban
consumption culture that is unique but shares features of the built environ-
ment.37 Although urban centers worldwide frequently form part of a national
identity, the whole is often tempered by a rural identity. In the United States,
for example, although much of the population lives in urban environments,
the rural identity remains strong and meaningful.38 For many nations the
rural identity, though actually marginal, remains a symbol of the authentic
nation.39 As a city-state, Singapore has only its urban identity. The aforemen-
tioned hyphenated identity helps some people negotiate ethnic and national
identity, but this framing does not bridge the rural-urban divide, and Singa-
pore remains a quintessentially urban space, producing an urban identity.
Markedly different relations to the production of ingredients make for
markedly different ideas of the local. Yet these ideas are still bound by the
relationships between “culinary regionalism, colonialism, and the global
economies of tourism.”40 The “local” includes personal, national, and eco-
nomic functions in Singapore, and consequently these categories are them-
selves reinterpreted through food. The vibrant food culture has created what
we can call a Singaporean foodscape. The culinary anthropologist Pauline
Adema notes that, broadly conceived, foodscape refers to the deep concep-
tual and physical relationship between food and landscape and can be on
any scale, from the personal to the societal. More specifically, “foodscapes
are symbolic of real and desired identities and of power, social and special
relations articulated through food.”41 The Singaporean foodscape is espe-
cially complex, incorporating in its history diverse ethnic legacies as well
as more recent constructions of Singapore as a global and cosmopolitan
space. Singaporean repurposing of the meaning of local, of nostalgia, and of
 making the pa st the present  ·  33

Singaporean exceptionalism is used by the public and the state to embrace

a dynamic multiculturalism that both reifies and transcends Westernized
categories of “local” and “global.” In this sense, the foodscape of Singapore
is both immediately recognizable and more nuanced than it first seems, and
it is intimately linked to the history of its cosmopolitanism.
Singaporeans regularly use food as a metaphor for the nation. A classic
example of this is the description of the ethnic mix of the nation as being
like rojak, a kind of chopped salad usually made with a mix of cucumber,
pineapple, jicama, and onions with a sweet-sour dressing. These ingredients
are cut into bite-sized pieces, tossed in a bowl with the dressing, and topped
with chopped peanuts. The word rojak is Malay for “mixture” and is also
used as a colloquial expression for any kind of mix. In Singapore people
talk about multiracialism as being like rojak—all the pieces are in the same
bowl but separate. It is a potent national symbol that simultaneously speaks
to diversity and unity.
The unity in the rojak example comes from the state, which goes to con-
siderable lengths to emphasize the global nature of the young city-state. In
linking a global agenda with a nationalist agenda, the government is remak-
ing Singapore into a city that embraces an urban consumption culture.42 The
government binds the chopped salad together, and the dressing is part global
culture and part cosmopolitanism. Although the notion of Singaporean cui-
sine as reflecting hybridity is a constructed one, the metaphor resonates.
Singaporean food may not be, as the National Museum of Singapore states,
the “original fusion cuisine,” but it does reflect the idea of a multiracial state
with a history far longer than that of the nation it represents.

Upgrading Nostalgia
The absent national past of the new nation, when coupled with a discourse
of global cosmopolitanism, may prompt nostalgia, but nostalgia is not new
in Singapore. For a half-century commentators have been mourning the
sanitization of the port city and feeling nostalgic about a grittier and more
colorful past. In 1936, R. H. Bruce Lockhart, who’d had a brief youthful career
in the region, lamented the changes in Malay Street, where he was brought
“face to face with the new Singapore,” where street prostitution had been
diminished.43 And in 1941, Life magazine reported:
The city has long since ceased to be the wicked city of waterfront dives of the
movies. Since the white men’s wives arrived after World War I, it has gone
respectable. The yellow and brown people (75% Chinese, 12% Malayan, 8%
34  .  chap ter 2

Indian) go to three innocent, well policed amusement parks called the Happy,
the New and the Great Worlds. The whites (1.5%) listen on Sunday night to
regimental bands playing ancient jazz and folk songs at the Raffles Hotel.44

The anxiety expressed is not so much about change (which Singaporeans

have to come to terms with on a daily basis) but about sanitization, by which
I mean moral cleaning up as well as physical cleaning, the removal of dirty
places, sexual freedoms, and illicitness.
Lost Images, a film containing color footage from the 1950s and 1960s by
Ivan Polunin, a British doctor living in Singapore, shows an acute longing
for the British past. In 1951, as Polunin captures boat races on the Singapore
River, he is longing for the races of a half-century earlier, for the fantasy of
empire even as it is being lost. This is nostalgia for what never was. The com-
mentator in Lost Images notes that the Polunin collection “is no longer lost
images of the past but is preserved as a bridge to the present and a legacy for
the future.”45 As the practices of fishing and farming in the past are detailed
in the film, the past itself is given legitimacy precisely because of its engage-
ment with food culture.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the government undertook what it saw as the
cleaning up of Singapore, but what others have described as the steriliza-
tion of Singapore.46 Areas such as Chinatown, Kampung Glam, and Bu-
gis Street were particularly affected.47 By the late 1980s, some believed this
modernization had gone too far—not only was Singapore “soulless,” it was
too Western. Although numerous attempts have been made to reinvigorate
Singapore architecturally,48 the same lamenting for the past is heard today.
The Singaporean writer Cherian George made the suggestion in 2000 that
the quintessential T-shirt slogan, “Singapore: A Fine City,” a reference to the
copious fines and punishments, should be replaced by “Singapore: Work in
Progress,”49 a comment on the constant construction, upgrading, and rein-
vention. “The cost of all of this,” George observed, “is an unsettling imper-
manence. Singaporeans will build and build, faster and more efficiently than
other cities, but Singapore will never be finished.”50 Physical changes bring
about a constantly new environment—Singapore is always a new city. The
language of development and progress is very much a part of the rebuilding
project; public housing provided by the Housing Development Board needs
to be upgraded, non-heritage-listed buildings need to be made bigger, and
priority needs to be given to new industries. The government frames these
changes in terms of progress: “We are upgrading to serve you better.”
Upgrading frequently results in buildings’ being pulled down and demoli-
tion of suburbs, actions that are usually accepted despite occasional tension
 making the pa st the present  ·  35

about particular buildings.51 George argued that such change has an “effect
on the Singaporean psyche” in that “it turns Singaporeans into a nation of
nomads.” Yet it is not, he notes, “the movement of the people that make it
such, but the shifting of the land. Even if they stay put, the country moves
around them, and Singaporeans find themselves eventually in a new place,
clinging only to ghosts.”52 As another commentator, Wei-Wei Yeo, noted, this
has an implication for Singapore’s collective memory because “the speed of
change in the city ensures the loss of places, in themselves and in the people’s
remembrance of them.”53 The term heritage has almost come to stand in for
the word history in Singapore. Attempts are being made to shift personal
memory to a public memory of place. And food emerges as a safe and un-
contested site of national memory.
As Singaporeans responded to globalization with expressions of nostalgia
for the past, the state responded not with censorship but by trying to co-
opt that sentiment for nationalist purposes. In transforming nostalgia from
something that could undermine the policies and rhetoric of development
to a positive part of a broader and multilayered nation-building project, the
state is acting in a typically adaptive mode. Citizens are actively drawn into
the process of producing historical knowledge. In so doing, the state makes
citizens more aware of Singaporean history but simultaneously creates the
framework for personal narratives, thereby containing personal histories
within a state-controlled framework of national history. Culinary memories
are especially appealing because they are not obviously political.
Nonstate actors have also seen the popular appeal of nostalgia. Ya Kun
Kaya Toast, a local Singaporean coffee-shop chain specializing in kaya toast
(an egg and coconut jam served with butter and toast), both engages with the
global economy and privileges the local, giving a sense of how cosmopolitan-
ism and nostalgia are negotiated. The walls of the coffee shops are adorned
with posters echoing poster art of the 1940s but with very contemporary
content. In one poster a half-full cup of coffee with a slick of milk in it takes
center stage. The text above the cup asks, “Want a skinny latte?” in a clear
reference to contemporary low-fat tailored hot beverages. The reply to the
question, “Stop at half a cup,” makes it clear that such fancies are not to be
had at Ya Kun Kaya Toast. Reinforcing this attitude, the text continues: “One
size, one coffee. Since 1944.” In reality, Ya Kun Kaya Toast offers a variety of
coffee drinks (with milk, without milk, hot, cold) as well as other beverages,
including tea and barley. The tough talk also appears in a poster describing
how the coffee is made: “Screw the French Press. We’ve got the sock.” It is il-
lustrated with an image of a Chinese man in a white singlet proudly holding
the coffee sock, followed by the text, “Coffee prepared the same since 1944.”
36  .  chap ter 2

In an era of differentiated mass-market products, Ya Kun Kaya Toast can

be understood as offering a critique of globalization. In another poster con-
sumers are asked whether they would like their eggs cooked “wet and runny”
or “runny and wet.” Again, the invariance of the coffee shop is stressed (“the
same menu since 1944”). Tradition and heritage have been important com-
ponents in the brand story and in public recognition of the company—it
received a Heritage Award in 2005, for example. The company Web site uses
the slogan, “The toast that binds. Kinship, Friendship, Partnership,”54 a refer-
ence to the women’s organization AWARE, whose 1996 book The Ties That
Bind: In Search of the Modern Singapore Family, was popular in Singapore.55
The life story of the company’s founder, Ah Koon, a migrant from China in
the 1920s, speaks both to the foodways that make Singapore what it is and to
the centrality of the migrant story to the branding of products. As with similar
migrant tales, Ah Koon’s journey from Hainan Island is the starting point of
the brand story. The strict boundaries of this narrative are adhered to—Ah
Koon goes back to China for a wife—maintaining the domestic boundaries
along racial lines. Where people come from and how they keep a cultural and
culinary heritage alive (or at least how they imagine these) plays an enormous
part in inventing a past for Singapore. The inclusion of family photographs on
the web site continues to personalize the story, that of a single migrant who
worked hard and overcame adversity to build the business from scratch. In
telling this story, the company also tells a national story. Through hard work
and sacrifice the nation was built from nothing, or, as reflected in the title
of Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography, Singapore transformed itself from third
world to first world.
As I have argued elsewhere, Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiographies and political
biographies hugely influence Singapore’s historical practice.56 Most notably,
they have a specific social function: to reinforce the national narrative. Politi-
cal autobiographies have become central to the scripting of Singapore’s his-
tory, a linear national history “in which a unified actor—the nation—moves
forward in time and conquers uncharted territories.”57 In drawing a parallel
between the making of a nation and the writing of a life, Lee Kuan Yew’s
autobiographies write a “national narrative,” or in the words of the literary
scholar Phillip Holden, “a national autobiography.”58 The function of Lee’s
autobiographies goes beyond the writing of a national narrative; they actively
participate in the construction of the imagined nation.59
The way in which Ah Koon’s story is told mirrors the way Lee Kuan Yew’s
personal story is told and is evidence of the impact of this kind of historical
template. Ah Koon’s story is reflected in the brand story and the company
 making the pa st the present  ·  37

history, The Top Toast: Ya Kun and the Singapore Breakfast Tradition.60 The
Singaporean audience is receptive to the brand because of the familiarity
of that narrative structure. In this sense, even the brand story of a humble
kaya toast coffee shop both tells us about the nation and reinforces national
narratives.

Food and Memory

Much has been written about memory and food, including the infamous
madeleine episode from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Rose Arnold, writing
about Proust, suggested that “food and drink references, as both metonymy
and metaphor, have been important ingredients in the miraculous spell by
which Art can annihilate Time.”61 In the Singaporean context it is not so much
the annihilation of time, as it is the strategic deployment of time, that is sought
by the state. Vasiliki Kravva, exploring the food memories of Thessalonikan
Jews, sees food as “a mnemonic device, as basic ingredient in the process of
creating sameness and solidifying the sense of belonging to a group.”62 Food,
then, is simultaneously an aid to memory and means of identity formation. It is
this duality of function that makes food so powerful and appealing in the Sin-
gaporean context given the state’s interest in negotiating and managing both
national history and identity formation. Ethnicity and race are deployed and
policed in order to create and contain categories that can be managed. And, as
Kravva noted, the recollection of family culinary life reproduces boundaries
and reaffirms their identity in a rapidly changing world.63
The association between food and culture is well established. Using the
United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as his examples, Philip Iddison de-
scribes food memories as the “main recording medium for the maintenance
of cultural heritage.”64 For Gerald and Valerie Mars it is the transient nature
of food that imposes a burden on memory—a meal or a cuisine can be fleet-
ing, existing in memory longer than it does on the plate.65 If cultures are, as
they suggest, the repositories of knowledge about cuisine, then change poses
an inevitable threat to both cuisine and culture. The connection between
food, culture, and memory for migrant communities is, likewise, well-tread
ground.66 Food has the power of self-discovery via discovery of a community
identity, but it is not without its perils.
Ferda Erdinç, tracing her memories of a Kurdish childhood in Turkey, cau-
tions us that the conscious process of using food memories to think about self,
identity, and home leads to reinvention: “At each instance of remembering,
events and feelings of the past are re-ordered: each is a new configuration.”
38  .  chap ter 2

Remembering is an act of the present, not just of the past, and as she notes,
the phrase “remembrance of things past” reveals memory but also “conveys
to us the perceptions and feelings of now.”67 If food has the power to, “like
the pebbles in the Hansel and Gretel story, take me home,”68 and yet is subject
to reinvention, it should come as no surprise that food memories would be
deployed in the nation making of a new state such as Singapore.
The stories we are told about food do not need to be true in order to be
powerful. Drawing on the work of Richard Dorson on “fakelore,” Andrew F.
Smith extended the concept to coin the delightful term “culinary fakelore.”69
For Smith, the phrase does not refer to errors or changes in traditions but
“specifically refers to invented stories that serve purposes other than historical
accuracy.”70 Yisheng, or lo hei, the Singaporean Chinese New Year tradition
of tossing a dish of fish salad to generate prosperity, discussed in Chapter 1, is
a good example. The Prosperity Toss was started by the Lai Wah Restaurant
in 1964 and it is now seen as a traditional Chinese New Year practice. That
the practice started just a year before Singapore’s independence highlights
the need for and inevitability of national culinary stories.

* * *
The foodways of Singapore, the city’s port, and its multiracialism have
found their way into a national narrative. The colonial past, uncontested and
infrequently deconstructed, dominates understandings of the national past
and brings about a celebration of an empire in the culinary arena. Despite
contemporary ethnic diversity, the rhetoric of migration as evidenced by
food was more powerful in the past than it is in the present. In attempting
to focus attention on sites of nostalgia that are less contentious, especially
food, the Singaporean state is still seeking to control the meaning of the past.
Both the state and the private sector work to turn nostalgia into something
that is contemporary, not historical. In so doing, the Singaporean state si-
multaneously negotiates the production of historical knowledge and seeks
to de-politicize history. If, as the novelist L. P. Hartley suggested, “the past
is a foreign country,”71 then making the past into the present makes it less
foreign.
 3
Public Spaces, Public Bodies

Each year more Singaporeans, regardless of class, are eating meals

outside the home than in it.1 These public foodscapes, sites of food purchase
and consumption, have a meaning at both the personal and the national levels
and form a vital part of Singaporean life. These are the spaces in which people
spend time with family, colleagues, and friends, where they form community
relationships and meet their neighbors. By design, and through infusing those
public foodscapes with national and personal identity, the places for eating and
the cuisine Singaporeans eat transform into representations of their nation,
turning the table into the site of nation making. The regulation of food hygiene,
personal hygiene, and public spaces such as hawker centers, wet markets (fresh
food markets), restaurants, and the streets has long been a concern for colo-
nial and postcolonial governments in Singapore—contemporary policies are
easily seen as having a backdrop of colonial policy and anxieties. As we will
see, and as with all things Singaporean, this reasonable desire for order (and
regulation as a way of achieving it) began under colonial authority and swiftly
moved from the macro-level management of gardens and town planning to
the micro-level management of hand washing and gum chewing. But always,
the unwavering objective is to be an exemplary civilized society.

Gardens: Symbols of Luxury and Order

The Singapore Botanic Gardens occupy the site of one of the earliest attempts
at the regulation of space. Like colonial subjects, the land was unruly and
initially resistant to regulation. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles established the
first botanical and experimental garden on the island at Government Hill
40  .  chap ter 3

(Fort Canning) in 1822, with the explicit intention of testing viable crops.
That garden was not economically successful, and it met its demise with the
death of its founder. For the following thirty years there were no botanical
gardens. Attempts to catalog and codify local flora and fauna continued, but
the tropical land was being claimed reluctantly.
In 1859 another attempt at a botanical garden was made, this one by the
Agri-Horticultural Society. The intention of the society was to regulate the
space, not so much for commercial purposes as for leisure; it was in fact called
a leisure garden and ornamental park. The society organized flower shows
and fêtes, which kept the garden, manicured and regulated, a symbol of or-
der. In 1874 the management of the gardens was transferred to the colonial
authority, and the theme of order was enhanced by a new scientific agenda.
The colonial authority employed Kew-trained botanists and horticulturists
to administer the gardens, focusing on economic productivity coupled with
naming and cataloging. The gardens became a typical nineteenth-century
natural sciences project of ordering space through its exploitation, regula-
tion, and cataloging.
In 1928 Professor Eric Holttum, director of the gardens for almost twenty-
five years, began an orchid breeding project based on hardiness and hybrid-
ization. (Again, the parallels with Singapore’s later reproductive policies are
startling—Lee Kuan Yew announced in 1986 that the nature versus nurture
debate had been decided in favor of nature and ushered in a raft of eugenic
social policies to produce hardy citizens from migrant stock.) The orchid
work was highly successful, and the flower industry now forms the basis
of much of Singapore’s limited agricultural output. Reflecting new policy
objectives in the independence period, the botanical gardens played a role
in the greening of Singapore: “To meet the need for urban landscapes and
recreational areas, the Gardens’ staff became involved in supplying plant-
ing material and in plant introduction to increase the variety and colour in
roadside and park plantings.”2 Again, the botanical gardens were playing a
role in the regulation of space. The division between botanical garden space
and public space became blurred, just as the divisions between private spaces
and public spaces more broadly were being blurred.
More recently, the botanical gardens have been recast as both a major at-
traction for tourists, just as the island state itself has been, and as a leading
international institution for tropical botany. And as the historian Emma
Reisz notes, it “survives partly as a historical theme park,”3 the colonial ori-
gins of the gardens being part of their appeal. The gardens offer continuity
with the colonial past and can be read as icons of colonial mastery, as can
 public spaces, public bodies  ·  41

Raffles Hotel, with a clear message of consumption that is conspicuous but

still sophisticated. A garden in a city-state with limited space and resources
is a symbol of luxury, and for Reisz the “oversized garden provides a site
where the Aristotelian objective of using money and leisure to fund wisdom
is given a physical form,”4 a logic that is as applicable to the colonial era as
to the contemporary.
“Like all museum-type institutions,” Reisz reminds us, the botanical garden
“both displays its contents (in this case flora), and also implies an intellectual
framework within which such objects (plants) can be understood both inside
and outside the physical space of the garden.”5 From being concerned about
the regulation of public space in Singapore to looking beyond the island to
global interests, the botanical gardens can be read as both an early site of
regulation and as a mirror of broad policy initiatives.

Ordering a Colonial City

As a colonial enterprise, Singapore was a trading port rather than a settler
society. The British population remained small, but the regulation of race
was a high priority. Population growth was driven by Chinese, Malay, and
Indian labor migration. Until the 1830s, the Malays formed the majority of
the population, a fact partly explained by female and family migration.6 The
Indian population peaked in 1860 at 15.9 percent but was generally below
10 percent. From the 1840s the Chinese clearly dominated, constituting be-
tween 50 and 77 percent of Singapore’s population.7 Spatial organization of
the ethnic communities was a major strategy employed in the management
of ethnic relations.
Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles set about creating an ordered colonial city,
employing a grid design of his own creation. Using first a Land Allotment
Committee consisting of local and British merchants and then a Town Com-
mittee, formed as the local society began to acquire substance, Raffles began
implementing his master plan for Singapore’s geography.8 His plan “inscribed
spatial order in terms of the laying out of streets and houses” and of public
space.9 Spatial order also meant racial order, and Raffles demarcated the city
into sections for racial and occupational groups, prioritizing the British and
the merchants.10
Hygiene, water, and sewerage policies were important mechanisms by
which race and space were regulated and ordered in Singapore. In a tropical
environment, preventing the spread of waterborne diseases, the management
of human waste, and the regulation of household waste are critical tasks.
42  .  chap ter 3

In the provision of infrastructure, rules and policies concerning hygiene

also do ideological work. The colonial fear of the native body has been well
explored—from the diseased body to the sexualized body. In the historian
Warwick Anderson’s words, colonizing Americans in the Philippines, for
example, were confronted with “an open grotesque Filipino body.”11 The in-
tersection of colonial and colonized bodies posed a particular threat; the
postcolonial historian Ann Stoler notes the perceived threat of interracial
liaisons and of the half-castes in such contexts, especially in French and
Dutch colonies.12 Michael Bourdaghs, writing in the Japanese context, notes
that although hygienic nationalism celebrates the national body, it simulta-
neously constructs individual bodies within a nation as “requiring extensive
state intervention.”13 That is, both the colonized and the colonizing body are
subject to intervention and regulation, albeit in different forms.
Colonized bodies inhabit colonized spaces, and the spaces themselves are
subject to regulation. As the French author and psychoanalyst Dominique
Laporte notes in his History of Shit, the city is subject to purification.14 For
Laporte this is not the colonial city specifically, but his arguments about pu-
rification and regulation are especially apt for colonial cities. Waste, bodily
and otherwise, must be regulated for fear of disease and social contamination.
The historian Nayan Shah’s work on the Chinese in San Francisco speaks
directly to the connection between literal and social contamination. He ar-
gues that the health officials in nineteenth-century San Francisco used space
and disease to define “Chinatown as the material manifestation of the alien
within the modern American city, emphasizing Chinese difference from,
deviance from, and danger to white society and the American nation.”15 As
the subaltern historian Depesh Chakrabarty observed in the context of India,
discussion of hygiene and the management of public spaces are intimately
bound with modernity. For Chakrabarty, discourse about public health and
hygiene cannot be separated from the language of modern governments,
colonial and postcolonial, because “it is the language not only of imperialist
officials but of modernist nationalists as well.”16
British rule divided Singapore into ethnic enclaves with consequent over-
crowding and sectional disadvantage. When the PAP campaigned in the
1950s, it focused on the need for public housing in order to provide a solution
to both the housing crisis and urban poverty. That is, it deployed the pre-
cise strategies outlined by Chakrabarty. On coming to government, the PAP
established a statutory authority, the Housing Development Board (HDB),
which oversaw land purchases as well as the building of public housing.
Initially, state housing was a safety net, a short-term solution to an immedi-
 public spaces, public bodies  ·  43

ate problem. The HDB, however, grew both in size and influence to a point
where approximately 87 percent of people now live in HDB accommodation.
This statistic underpins the power of the PAP to organize the racial balance
in any particular residential area.
In 1989 the Singaporean government introduced a policy to regulate the
racial composition of HDB buildings. All new buildings had to reflect the
ethnic makeup of the community, and when residents vacated apartments,
space was allocated to new residents according to the new policy. Ostensi-
bly the policy was designed to increase cultural diversity by avoiding ethnic
ghettoization,17 but it is also possible to read it as a response to increasingly
hostile Malay attitudes toward the PAP.18 Integrating ethnic minorities with
the Chinese majority diminished the capacity of Malays to vote along ethnic
lines for non-PAP candidates. In undermining the effect of ethnic voting,
the PAP engaged in what has been described as gerrymandering.
Since the 1980s Singaporeans increasingly have owned rather than rented
their HDB apartments. Access to housing, and, in particular, to homeown-
ership, is viewed by the government as contributing to social and political
stability because it gives citizens a “stake” in the nation.19 Although Singa-
pore’s elite tends to live in condominiums by choice, if not single dwellings,
public housing in Singapore does not bear the social stigma associated with
such housing in Britain or Australia.20 Since the late 1990s the HDB has at-
tempted to integrate the private and public housing sectors in a series of new
towns.21 One such new town is Punggol 21, where private condominiums have
been integrated with “high-quality” HDB flats to minimize the distinction
between private and public housing.22 Smaller flats were converted to larger
dwellings in a further attempt to make HDB flats more like private-sector
housing.23 Even more recently, attention has been paid to the integration of
green design, residential use, and shopping in developments such as Pin-
nacle@Duxton.
The main difference between private and public housing in Singapore is
access and regulation. Only those who meet strict requirements may ap-
ply for HDB accommodations. In addition to the obvious financial criteria,
there is a series of social criteria. Applicants must, for example, have “a fam-
ily nucleus,” precluding individuals from renting or buying HDB flats24 and
encouraging the family as the primary form of social identification.25 This
policy constructs family in a way that excludes unmarried women, who, if
under the age of thirty-five, are expected to reside with their families. This
could mean living with their parents or with their siblings in the role, for
example, of additional caregiver to a brother and his family. No exception
44  .  chap ter 3

is made for unmarried women with children because, the HDB argues, that
would send the message that it condones illegitimate children.26 Public hous-
ing has thus emerged not only as a way of regulating racial spaces, but also
of regulating sexual and social practices.
Other policies also function to reinforce the connection between housing
and family. The Multi-Tier Family Scheme, for example, allows for upgrades
and relocation in order to bring extended families into the same housing
block.27 So, while ethnic diversity is maintained within a block, the consoli-
dation of family groupings is paradoxically encouraged. Such strategies have
led a number of scholars to identify the public housing system as a form of
social engineering in Singapore.28 A major 1990 study identified public hous-
ing as “a key element of the overall political strategy of the PAP to build the
hegemonic state.”29
In post-independence Singapore, extensive efforts were made to alter the
colonial spatial separation, but specific areas have retained an ethnic iden-
tity.30 Contemporary tourism policy in fact emphasizes “ethnic areas” in or-
der to provide visitors with easily accessible cultural experiences within the
multiethnic state.31 Race was privileged in the colonial context as the category
by which social stratification was determined. Spatial divisions underscored
social divisions.32 Formal racial categories were established by the colonial
authority and modified by the PAP. Now every citizen and permanent resi-
dent in Singapore is allocated a racial category, which is rigidly imposed. The
four possible categories, the same as those first articulated in the 1950s, are
Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other, giving rise to the abbreviation CMIO.

Running the Marathon of Courtesy

“Be clean, neat, punctual and well-mannered,” Lee Kuan Yew implored the
citizens. In Singapore, matters of cleanliness and etiquette are conflated and
then emerge together as a discourse about good behavior. Cleanliness and
neatness are constructed as an issue of morality. The orderly and “civilized”
citizen needs to be understood in the context of Singapore’s history as a
postcolonial state. Being punctual is elevated to more than just etiquette;
it is evidence of a commitment to the broader economic goals of the state.
Noncompliance with edicts about clean, orderly spaces and bodies can be
read as a sign of betraying the long-term goals of prosperity and develop-
ment for the nation.
The visual representation of the nation and the citizen constitutes an im-
portant part of the rhetoric of developmentalism in Singapore. In order to
 public spaces, public bodies  ·  45

“progress,” both citizen and nation must look the part. Clean streets, neat bod-
ies, regulated food spaces, and punctual service are all read as steps toward a
“developed nation” and evidence of both the journey and the destination—the
pleasures of development require appropriate behavior. As then Prime Minister
Goh Chok Tong urged, “To have a gracious living environment that matches
our material prosperity, we must improve our social behavior,”33 implying that
while the Singaporean government has the ability to remake the environment,
real success is contingent on the acquiescence of the citizenry.
Lee Kuan Yew made the connection between development and cleanli-
ness explicit. When asked to reflect on the challenges he had faced in “tak-
ing Singapore from Third World to First World” he talked about the need of
citizens to cooperate and fit into “the First World Structure.” Ultimately, he
said, “It depends on the amount of discipline they [citizens] are prepared to
observe.” He described the Singapore of the past as an untidy city with “lit-
ter, filth, people urinating in the streets. To stop all that, to have a litter-free
city and no vandalism, no graffiti, you need discipline.”34
The Singaporean government has overseen a radical and rapid remak-
ing of the physical environment. One of the many policy documents that
shaped this redevelopment describes the changes in glowing terms: “Elegant
glass-and-steel skyscrapers have taken the place of city slums. High-rise sat-
ellite towns have replaced fishing and farming villages. New parks, towns,
gardens and modern amenities, including an efficient infrastructure and a
comprehensive transport network have been put in place to serve an expand-
ing economy.”35 The erasure of dirty spaces, farms, and fishing villages has
been in the service of expanding the economy, not of serving the citizens.
Although many have benefited immensely from the economic development,
some remain ambivalent. As one taxi driver put it: “[Lee Kuan Yew] has made
us efficient. He has made us profitable. He has made us energetic. He has
made our living standards the highest in Southeast Asia. He has also torn
down everything in the city I remember from my childhood. He has made
Singapore unrecognisable. But he has made us profitable.”36
Being made energetic and profitable are key requirements in the devel-
opment of a postcolonial state. From the early independence period, the
Singaporean state tried very hard to counter colonialist rhetoric about the
lazy native. As the sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas suggested, the image of
“the indolent, dull, backward and treacherous native” allowed the colonial
power to view the native as a dependent, “requiring assistance to climb the
ladder of progress.”37 Both the image and the ideology influenced the post-
colonial state. Embedded in the idea of the lazy native is an also influential
46  .  chap ter 3

raced ideology. Class and race are used to explain why Singaporeans need
to be coerced and cajoled into good behavior. The Singaporean writer Koh
Buck Song, for example, asserted that they “are migrant people descended
from coolies, traders and merchants, not the cultured scholar classes. Some
of the old poison still courses through Singaporean blood today.”38 The old
poison (of class) in the blood of contemporary Singaporeans implies that even
if the appearance of clean bodies and orderly behavior exists, the potential
for a reversion is possible. Regulations are deemed necessary to ensure that
class roots do not betray the development of the nation.
The more recent past is also deployed as an explanation of Singaporean
behavior. In an article in the national newspaper, the Straits Times, for ex-
ample, the author suggested that “Singaporeans could be behaving boor-
ishly because they still have a complex web of values which helped them
survive poverty, especially in the Japanese Occupation and the hardships of
the early post-war years.”39 Poverty and hardship are not quite the same as
class, but nonetheless are framed as producing boorish behavior. The past
may be the explanation, but the government is working to overcome it, and
as Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said at the time, “Having survived a dif-
ficult period, Singaporeans should begin to behave differently.”40 In order to
make this transition, citizens have been subjected to a range of government
campaigns paired with private-sector endorsement. Much of this has been
done through “courtesy campaigns” and, since 1994, the Courtesy Council.
Courtesy is much more than adding a please or thank you when you are
served a meal; courtesy can be used in any part of living and is about a wide
range of etiquette and values.
Being punctual is something that people still have to be coerced into do-
ing. A 1998 bridal magazine, for example, ran a feature article on lateness
to weddings, offering extensive advice about how to get guests to arrive on
time.41 Three years earlier the Courtesy Council had an eight-month-long
focus on replying to invitations. The RSVP drive, directed by a punctuality
subcommittee, was run in conjunction with a series of hotels and community
centers. These institutions offered incentives and disincentives for punctuality
or lateness, such as lucky draws for punctual guests and reminder posters.
If guests have to have social expectations explained to them, citizens more
generally also need to be directed into the correct behavior. Courtesy moni-
tors, citizens anonymously deployed to observe public behavior and report
it to the Courtesy Council, draw attention to good behavior. A child thus re-
ceived a courtesy award for giving to a beggar, and giving up seats to pregnant
women on public transportation is an often-rewarded activity. Ideas about
 public spaces, public bodies  ·  47

social hierarchy (age, gender, or class) are embedded in these examples—it

is courteous for a man to open a door for a woman, for a child to give up its
seat for an older person, and so forth.
Good manners and correct behavior involve specific behaviors for men and
women. At the gym, for example, women must still uphold a series of social
expectations about orderly and clean bodies. An article in Female magazine
tells women that they must keep a check on their body odor and ensure that
they regulate the sounds they make: “Grunting a la Monica Seles is at worst
vulgar, at best irritating. Pushing yourself to the limit is noble, but keep the
noise level to the barest minimum.”42 Women are encouraged to make their
bodies thin, but soft—the housewife, the wife, the mother should be fit, at-
tractive, and strong, but still regulated and refined.
Courtesy, however, is not something that can ever be achieved. When
asked what the timeline was for Singapore to be a “truly courteous nation,”
former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew answered, “This is a marathon with
no finishing line. We keep on improving in order to prevent ourselves from
retrogressing.”43 The fear of retrogression, of the nation’s slipping backwards,
is frequently articulated, with courtesy only one site of concern.

Litter and the Corrective of Humiliation

The need to be ordered, clean, and litter-free applies to communities as well
as individuals. Some anti-litter campaigns focus on Housing Development
Board estates, others on competitions for the status of cleanest block. The
killer-litter problem—residents throwing household waste from high-rise
housing blocks—is regularly featured in the press and in popular discus-
sions. From late 1986, legislation was passed allowing for the prosecution of
offenders, including the capacity to repossess the HDB flats of owners caught
throwing litter out their window.44
Public humiliation, one way of heading off retrogression, is regularly de-
ployed in relation to littering, as are Corrective Work Orders. People caught
littering can be made to collect rubbish as a punishment for their crime and
are frequently made to do this in public places. On occasion the media cover
these events, further entrenching the public humiliation. In 1993 the Straits
Times ran the front-page headline “A litterbug’s mane of shame,” accompa-
nied by a photograph of a woman, head lowered in shame, using her hair to
hide her identity. Her identity was, however, far from hidden. The newspaper
included her name, age, and occupation, as well as quotations from the court
proceedings. Loo Jane Ming’s offense, leaving a paper cup and a bag at the
48  .  chap ter 3

East Coast Park, led to considerable public coverage. She was contrite, saying
in court: “I wasn’t thinking when I committed the act.”45 Her husband, also
held responsible for the leaving of the paper cup and bag at the park, was
identified (“her husband, advertising executive Ang Lai Chuan, 26”) but not
photographed.
Most of the littering offenses involve the leaving of food-related items,
lunch packaging, empty cups, and so forth. The litter that offenders are re-
quired to collect also tends to be food packaging, and they are taken to places
such as public parks to serve out their Corrective Work Orders. In interviews
with members of the public picnicking in the park and watching the litterers,
public humiliation was an oft-repeated theme. Quek Siew-Wah, a forty-four-
year-old teacher, commended the media presence, saying: “The media must
cover the clean-up by the offenders. It is a lesson for them and the public.
The vest with the words ‘Corrective Work Order’ adds to the shame. Now
people will be serious about the corrective work order.” Des Iskandar Yusni,
a twenty-eight-year-old civil servant, shared this view and emphasized em-
barrassment, saying: “It’s a good policy. Litterbugs would feel embarrassed
cleaning up a public place. I don’t think they feel embarrassed much when
they get fined. They should be made to do community work or wash public
toilets.”46
The use of shame has changed little since these comments were published.
A 2010 article, “Using Shame to Tame Littering,” highlights the continuity in
strategy. The article begins by warning readers: “High-rise litterbugs beware.
If you are caught, your photograph could appear on your housing block’s
noticeboard or in the town council’s newsletter.”47 Community involvement
underpins public campaigns in Singapore, including litter campaigns. In 2010
Singapore launched its first community patrol group of Litter-Free Ambas-
sadors (LFAs). The LFAs conduct patrols at least once a month of “known
hot spots for litter,” wear special T-shirts, and talk to litterers in an attempt to
“create a new anti-littering social norm.”48 The public is thus both the source
of the problem and its solution.
The effectiveness of public humiliation, however, is not assumed. A 2008
feature-length article in the Straits Times questioned the usefulness and sever-
ity of punishment. The boldface subtitle read: “They have been fined. They
have been forced to pick up rubbish in public. But Singapore’s litterbugs are
unrepentant, with a record number caught last year. Time for more draco-
nian measures?” Before that question is answered, the scale of the problem
is detailed and the story of a cleaner in an HDB complex who regularly sees
people littering highlights the problem: “Her tale barely skims the surface
 public spaces, public bodies  ·  49

of Singapore’s dirty little secret: Litterbugs are lording over us.” Statistics are
also deployed: in 2007 the National Environment Agency recorded 21,259
littering offenses; this constituted a marked increase from the previous years
but also coincided with an increase in littering patrols. 49
The article describes the active role that town councils play in trying to
prevent and highlight the littering problems. Their multi-pronged approach
includes rewards (giving badges to school students who correctly dispose
of rubbish), punitive action (issuing fines), incentives (residents’ committee
competitions for rubbish collection), inclusion tactics (residents’ no-littering
pledges), and humiliation. Shock techniques are also used, such as taking
photographs of rubbish collected and sending them to residents, and “dis-
playing bags of litter collected at the void decks to shock and awe residents
over the amount of trash they leave behind.”50
The authors of the article express their disappointment in the lack of so-
cial responsibility and quote Lee Kuan Yew’s 1968 statement from the launch
of the Keep Singapore Clean campaign: “No other hallmark of success will
be more distinctive than that of achieving our position as the cleanest and
greenest city in Southeast Asia.” Singapore, the article says, has achieved this,
but there is a dark side: “Tourists gawk at its clean streets while international
rankings trumpet it as the best place to live for Asian expatriates and the top
Asian city to live, work and play in. But beneath the shiny surface lies the
scruffy truth—that being litter-free still does not come naturally to people.”51
Again, we see a disappointment in the need to correct behavior. Even though
Singapore has made it to first-world status, there is a lingering discomfort
with its national, class, and ethnic origins: being litter-free does not come
naturally. Instead, coercive policies and campaigns are required. Living in
the first world may itself be a learning tool, and Lee Kuan Yew, in saying that
he would not see “a gracious Singapore in his lifetime,” hoped that gracious-
ness would “come with cultivated living over a long period of time.”52 Social
regulation is thus a slow and ongoing project. The disappointment in the
lack of inherent good behavior is encapsulated in a remark by a member of
Parliament: “We are a cleaned city, rather than a clean city.”53 That cleaners
are employed to look after public spaces is interpreted as a failure of civil
society, or to be more specific, as the evidence of a failure of civility, and by
extension, a failure of civilization.
The costs of these public expenditures are also lamented. The National
Environment Agency spends more than $S30 million and employs 1,200
people in cleaning roads and pavements. Hiring cleaners to look after the
public spaces in HDB estates accounts for 16 to 20 percent of town council
50  .  chap ter 3

budgets (roughly $S4 million per council, with sixteen councils). But cost is
less important than the moral dimension. More than just a question of keep-
ing up appearances, littering poses a moral threat. As Chakrabarty observed,
“the space that collects garbage is the one that is not subject to a single set of
communal rules.”54 That there might be a space that is not subject to com-
munal rules is problematic for the Singaporean state. It is significant that
the litterers are increasingly being identified as young, uneducated men, a
particularly threatening class of people for the state because they embody
the failure of the system.
Amy Khor, Parliamentary Secretary for Environment and Water, worries
about “the growing trend—especially among youngsters—to think it is all
right to litter because someone will pick up the trash.” She also sums up a
broader societal concern about softness and weakness: “I hope it is not be-
cause the maid-assisted lifestyles at home of many have led them to think
that there is always someone to clean up after them.”55 Littering can thus
emerge as evidence of weakness of character, of a body undisciplined, soft
from having things done for it, weakened by inactivity.
The anxiety about the presence of maids’ creating weak citizens is also
reflected in popular culture. Jack Neo’s 2002 film I Not Stupid provides a
good example. The film focuses on the “pursuit of academic excellence in a
highly competitive society.”56 The story revolves around three Chinese boys
who are in 3ME, the bottom (lowest) stream at school. The main character,
Terry, an overweight, spoiled twelve-year-old who relies heavily on his maid,
narrates much of the film. When Terry and one of the other boys are kid-
napped, Terry is helpless. He cannot even butter his own bread. One of the
kidnappers comments to the other that the next time they arrange to kidnap
a “rich kid” they should take his maid as well.57 The scene is both comedy
and a comment on anxiety about the strength of character of the next gen-
eration. Terry is helpless because he has never had to do things for himself.
His parents and maid make his decisions, emasculating and weakening him.
I Not Stupid provides a critique of Singaporean society—laughing at itself
but also reflecting contemporary anxieties.
Anxieties quickly translate back to punishment. One Straits Times letter
writer suggested blacklisting repeat litterers, giving them lower rankings for
government jobs, university places, and vehicle registration. He also sug-
gested targeting civic activities, limiting offenders’ access to, for example,
National Day Parade tickets.58 Good civic behavior is rapidly translated into a
requirement for citizenship, much as the British colonial authorities required
 public spaces, public bodies  ·  51

their colonies to demonstrate their readiness for independence. Embracing

the role of the parent in relation to the child-citizen, the PAP is very much
like its colonial predecessors.
The state-parent issues punishments to the errant child-citizen. Another
newspaper article, “A Day in the Vest of Shame,” questioned the effective-
ness of the punishment by the state-parent (in the form of Corrective Work
Orders), only to finally endorse the method. The article blurb read: “The
number of people who did Corrective Work Orders for a second time tri-
pled from 2008 to last year. Does the punishment still work? Or is it time
for something tougher? Sunday Times reporter Goh Chin Lian finds out
first-hand.”59 It is telling that Goh Chin Lian’s experience as an undercover
litterer provided evidence of the program’s effectiveness. The journalist has
a moment of self-discovery, writing: “But I have a mini epiphany just bend-
ing down and picking up refuse again and again. Every bit of litter amounts
to hard work disposing of it.” Moreover, offenders (anonymous informers)
admit their guilt and reformed ways: “A man professes he has learnt his lesson
after being caught for throwing it out of his car. He now has an envelope to
store the remains.”60 The author is, however, a little disappointed that there
was not more public humiliation and that there was not a big enough audi-
ence, concluding that “perhaps because the offenders do not meet anyone
they know, the shame factor is not so strong today. But the exercise is edu-
cational and onerous enough.”61 The state-parent is thus identified as doing
“the right thing” but nevertheless needing to do even more for the wayward
child-citizen.

Chewing Gum and Moral Decay

The chewing of gum constitutes a rich source of international coverage, much
of it mocking, about regulation in Singapore. Regulation of the importation,
sale, and use of gum has been a controversial measure of state involvement
in the private sphere. Changes allowing nicotine gum and other “medicinal
gums” in 1994 and 2010, respectively, did little to change the perception that
the regulation of gum is a metaphor for Singapore as a nanny state.
Singaporeans see the chewing gum ban as meaningful. In a letter to the
editor about nation building and cultural identity, Adeline Koh, for example,
put it this way: “Policies on public housing, national service and even the
ban on chewing gum are all quintessentially Singaporean. True, these may
not be very ‘cultural,’ but they are very Singaporean.”62 The playwright Ong
52  .  chap ter 3

Keng Sen has a less positive take on the association, regretting that the West
cannot get beyond its fixation with the ban. For Ong these cultural stereo-
types “still say a lot—or not a lot about us.”63
It is not the chewing of gum but the disposal of it that most offends. Gum
is not so much a youth culture issue—there are no rebels chewing gum on
street corners—as it is an issue of littering and social order. The “incorrect
disposal” of gum, most particularly under tables in public places and any-
where on public transportation, was evoked when the regulation of gum was
introduced. Eating in public, as we will see, is very acceptable in Singapore
and is for many a daily occurrence. And although there has been a move away
from street food to indoor consumption of food, eating in public spaces is not
taboo. So, although this is not an anti-mastication rule, it can be understood
as an intersection of the regulation of bodies and spaces.
The social ills of chewing gum are not restricted to its conventional use.
In 2004 Lim Leong Poh used a wad of chewing gum attached to a metal rod
to “fish” money from a donation box outside the Sri Vadapathira Kaliam-
man Temple, an offense for which he was jailed.64 While some Singaporeans
think the ban should be lifted as a social experiment or as an “acid test of
Singaporeans’ attitudes to social responsibility,”65 others think Singaporeans
would fail the test. Jeffrey Soh Ying Cheun made this very clear in a letter to
the editor: “Singaporeans may have grown in stature as a people and social
etiquette may be improving but all we need is a hundred pranksters to bring
the problem of gum back.”66 In an argument akin to that mentioned above
(“We are a cleaned city, rather than a clean city”), citizens see the need for
cleanliness to be achieved without regulation. As one citizen wrote: “It’s hard
to boast when a city is clean because gum is banned. We can feel proud only
if the city is clean even when there is gum.”67 Another letter writer also op-
posed the ban, but for the reason that it does not educate people. Education,
she said, is the only long-term solution to the gum problem, as otherwise
people do not know how to behave in the absence of a prohibition.68
According to cleaning companies, Singaporeans do not know how to be-
have in the presence of a prohibition, either. Five companies interviewed by
the Sunday Times said they had a gum problem:
They still have to deal with gobs of chewing gum stuck on walkways, floors
and underneath tables and chairs at eateries, nightspots and malls. The worst
places are heartland shopping malls; Harbour Front, where hundreds of Singa-
poreans take ferries to Indonesian islands like Batam; and Woodlands, which
is just a hair’s breadth away from Johor Baru, where people can sneak in gum.
 public spaces, public bodies  ·  53

The more crowded the place, the more serious the problem is. Eateries, bus
terminals and nightspots are especially nightmarish for cleaners.69

Crowds thus mean disorder. Access to the unregulated space of Malaysia

and Indonesia provides temptation, and a lack of regulation and interven-
tion allows for rules to be broken. Transgression is a threat not just because it
leads to gum chewing but because it is symbolic of the moral decay that can
take place. That the problems are deemed worst in the “heartland shopping
malls” (simple suburban malls) is also telling. Heartlanders are the suppos-
edly “less sophisticated” yet “more genuine” Singaporeans. In his National
Day Rally speech of 1999, Goh cast heartlanders as the moral majority, the
custodians of conservative values, maintaining that they “play a major role
in maintaining our core values and our social stability. They are the core of
our society. Without them, there will be no safe and stable Singapore, no
Singapore system, no Singapore brand name.”70 The problem thus lies with
the heart of the nation; it is the nature of Singaporeans that poses a threat
to order and civility, yet these very same citizens are the key to the Singa-
pore system and brand. Regulating the behavior and bodies of heartland-
ers emerges as critical to the making, maintaining, and development of the
citizen. In a letter to the editor, Jason Wong said it is “time for laws against
inconsiderate coughing or sneezing in public,” suggesting that “the Govern-
ment ought to legislate against such irresponsible and selfish behavior, much
as it has done with respect to spitting, littering and chewing gum.”71 There
is thus an ever-expanding list of behaviors and bodily functions that could
be subject to regulation.

Toilet Training the Nation

Public humiliation also extends to the context of toilet behavior. Singaporean
newspapers are full of articles about toilets and bathroom behavior. To raise
the standard of cleanliness, the Restroom Association of Singapore (RAS)
launched the “Happy Toilet Programme” in 2010. Association president Tan
Puay Hoon is explicit in the way he connects development and toilet be-
havior, saying: “For us, toilet etiquette reflects Singaporeans’ culture. It tells
people how civilised we are. We are a First World country and we want a
gracious society to reflect that.”72 The RAS also hosts events and sponsors
awards such as the Let’s Observe Ourselves (LOO) award, given to owners
of establishments with what it considers five-star toilets. In December 2010
a coffee shop was successfully nominated for the award: “Nestled in the
54  .  chap ter 3

Tampines heartland, in a coffee shop called the 21 Street Eating House, this
toilet ticked all the right boxes—no litter or pungent odour, a cubicle for the
handicapped and even eco-friendly features such as sensor-activated flushing
and water-saving taps.”73 The Singaporean state has not left toilet standards
to private interests but has taken an active role in regulating public toilets,
including the installation of heat sensors that set off alarms if patrons have not
flushed toilets and a raft of urination sensors in public spaces such as eleva-
tors. The anti-urination devices work on the principle of public humiliation.
The sensors are set so that once urine hits the floor or walls of the elevator,
it automatically stops and the offender must wait to be released and fined.
The humiliation is multilayered—everyone in the building knows why the
elevator is not in operation, the offender has to face the person who comes
to release him or her, and the offense is publicized.
One of the ways in which the government justifies its involvement in mat-
ters of etiquette and good behavior is the importance of Singapore’s national
image to its economy, a factor emphasized in the area of tourism. Singapore
must be clean and appealing, as must its residents. Yet there is also aware-
ness that the state’s approach has caused some international ridicule. As one
newspaper article put it: “While a police state–like stance against littering
will not bode well for the image and reputation of this First World nation, it
may be necessary until courtesy comes naturally.”74

Hooking the Happy Hawker

Street food, synonymous with Singapore’s past, is the focus of dedicated and
forceful regulation, to the point that it has been almost completely rein-
vented. As the social geographer Lily Kong suggests in her book on hawker
centers, these are places that “have mirrored the changing life and landscape
in Singapore over time.”75 The story is one of a journey from chaos to order,
from itinerant sellers who walked the streets hawking goods to villages and
individual homes, to tight regulation and indoor spaces.
The system of itinerant hawking, always popular with residents, was al-
ways unpopular with colonial officials. Hawkers were seen to spread disease,
especially cholera and typhoid. From contaminated water came water-borne
diseases; from refuse came flies and rodents. These real public health con-
cerns were compounded by tropical conditions. The very nature of itinerancy
intensified the potential for spreading disease and made regulations about
cleanliness and attempts to clean public spaces somewhat futile. Some streets
spontaneously became night markets, itinerant hawkers would congregate
 public spaces, public bodies  ·  55

at ever-changing locations, and during these periods of occupation, tasks

such as street cleaning became more difficult and town cleansing laborers
consequently avoided these areas and clashed with the hawkers.76 For much
of Singapore’s early history the colonial authorities made hawking illegal and
conducted regular raids on the practice.
The 1950 Hawker Inquiry Commission, particularly concerned with or-
der, noted that there was a “disorderly sprawl of hawkers, blocking up entire
streets with a jumble of goods in defiance of all reason and order.”77 The peo-
ple, who were quite happy with the disorder, were perceived as unreasonable
and, consequently, in need of education and coercion. The themes of order
and education coalesced around schools, with the commission identifying
the tendency of itinerant hawkers to congregate near schools as both a threat
to social order and an example of how people needed to have their desires
readjusted. The “hawker problem” was, in the view of the commission, “in
large measure one of educating public demand, and the schools should have
an admirable opportunity for practical education here.”78 That is, children
should be taught about hygiene and civics as a way of shaping what it is they
want—they should not be allowed to want food that is unhygienic. The think-
ing is very similar to that seen in later healthy food campaigns—parents and
teachers telling children that raisins are nature’s candy as a way to get them
to choose healthy food instead of junk food.
Hygiene was important to the Hawker Inquiry Commission in its own right
but also because of its connection to disease. In the words of the commission,
“the presence of any hawkers makes it difficult to keep streets clean, but it is
chiefly the hawkers of food and drink that do the harm.”79 The hawkers at-
tracted flies that were carriers of disease, they dispersed dirty water, which
carried diseases such as typhoid, and through inadequately cleaned hands
and utensils they spread diseases with their bodies. Specifically, they were
understood to be carriers of gastroenteritis, enteric fever (typhoid), dysen-
tery, cholera, and parasitic infections such as hookworm and roundworm.80
Hawking, then, became a matter of public health, and the commission sought
advice from the Municipal Health Department.
Both the Municipal Health Department and the commission saw hawking
as a problem, but their solutions were not always the same. They shared, for
example, the anxiety about milk as a vector of disease, but the commission,
recognizing the great demand for ice cream in the tropics, did not follow
the recommendation of the Health Department that all ice cream vendors be
banned. In this, and in regard to other problems, the commission took an ap-
proach of regulation rather than prohibition. Regulation was still prescriptive,
56  .  chap ter 3

and the commission recommended that all hawkers be compulsorily inocu-

lated against typhoid and that as a condition of holding a license the hawker
be required to submit to a medical inspection if requested by municipal health
inspectors.81
The battle against disease was understood as just that: a war. The acting
municipal health officer, W. C. Hutchinson, wrote directly to the Hawker
Inquiry Commission and used the analogy of a campaigning army to high-
light his point about the threat of disease: “Every Army in all campaigns has
always suffered from a high sickness rate due to bowel diseases for the one
reason that it is impossible to maintain the hygienic standards of peace time.
Greater risks therefore must be incurred when dealing with an undisciplined
body of people.”82
There are, of course, two sets of undisciplined bodies—the hawkers and
the consumers. Combating disease required a multipronged approach, and
as the bodies of hawkers were cleaned and inspected, the behavior of con-
sumers was also subject to regulation. The commission suggested that the
introduction of straws would raise the standard of hygiene and recommended
that they be made available even if doing so required a subsidy. In removing
a potential point of contact with dirty bodies and equipment, the commis-
sion evoked technology and changes in consumer behavior as mechanisms
for bringing about better health outcomes.
The Hawker Inquiry Commission both destroyed and preserved hawking
in Singapore. It played a major role in the eradication of itinerant hawkers,
although it would be overstating the case to suggest that it was wholly respon-
sible. The commission also acknowledged the centrality of hawking to the
Singaporean way of life, and as Lily Kong suggested, the decision to regulate
rather than prohibit hawkers was a major shift in colonial administrative
thinking.83 By mainstreaming hawking and moving the practice into control-
lable spaces the commission actually preserved it, albeit in a modified form.
The approach to hawker regulation mirrors precisely that taken by the
government to social dissidents. In 1994, male-to-female cross-dressing was
officially banned from Singaporean television. An exception was made for
the character Liang Po Po, a feisty Chinese grandmother (played by a man),
who was so popular that she was reinvented rather than banned. The char-
acter was cleaned up with a new, healthy image that was not to be “saucy.”84
“Co-opted as yet another tool [in] the government’s social campaigns,” Liang
Po Po was “brought into the fold.”85 A similar strategy was taken with the
comedian Mr. Brown, who went from being an underground anonymous
podcaster to making a nationalist statement for National Day.86 Co-option
 public spaces, public bodies  ·  57

and regulation, rather than prohibition, have proved to be strategic control

mechanisms and evidence of the adaptive nature of the regime.
Not long after the PAP came to power, it made the regulation of hawking
a priority. In 1968, as students around the world protested against the Viet-
nam War and many other things, the Singaporean government launched a
nationwide registration process for hawkers, issuing temporary licenses and
relocating hawkers.87 Goh Chin Tong, former head of the Hawkers Depart-
ment, recalled the three-month registration period during which his em-
ployees traveled daily, noting names and locations of hawkers and issuing
temporary licenses. The licenses became the basis of reassignment—initially
hawkers were moved away from main streets and then into enclosed struc-
tures. For Goh Chin Tong, cleaning up the hawkers was a key task in the
pursuit of the broader governmental goal of making Singapore the cleanest
country in Asia: “Street hawking and hawkers were among the challenges to
be surmounted in pursuit of that goal,”88 he noted, and 18,000 hawkers were
relocated in that pursuit.
By the 1970s the state response to the issue had escalated. A Hawkers De-
partment Special Squad was formed, equipped with radio technology and
accompanied by guards during daily raids on illegal markets. The goods (in-
cluding vehicles) of unregistered hawkers were confiscated, and their food
was disposed of or given away. Raids, registration, and relocation were ac-
companied by physical remaking of public eating spaces. Hawker centers were
built—spaces that, although relatively basic, had key public health amenities
such as sewerage, drainage, water, electricity for lighting, and overhead cov-
erage. Some centers were in the city, but many were also placed in residential
areas, so while itinerant hawkers could no longer come to your apartment,
it was not inconvenient for you to go to them.
In recent years technology has become part of the management and regu-
lation regime. In 2010, for example, the National Environment Agency an-
nounced that it would be purchasing a new computer system to centrally
manage Singapore’s hawker centers. The software “covers hawker stalls lease
application and management; collection of rents; hawker centres facility
management, hygiene inspection and enforcement; [and] real-time budget
monitoring with financial and management reporting,” providing in-depth
management.89
The synergy between the regulation of food provision and the remaking of
public space reflects more broadly the relationship between regulation and
cleanliness. The hawkers, and their trade, were unseemly—dirty, visceral, a
grotesquery of bodily functions. And so they were cleaned up, their hands
58  .  chap ter 3

washed, their cooking equipment inspected and standardized. The spaces

in which they plied their trade were eradicated or repurposed, and hawker
centers, increasingly policed, cleaner, and more orderly at every turn, also
emerged as more “reasonable” and “ordered” spaces.

* * *
While frequently necessary and practical, this degree of regulation reflects
a desire to control not only public space but also the nation’s “body,” even
individual bodies, right down to the level of personal hygiene. Like public
space regulation, the management of Singaporean bodies through policies
about chewing gum, littering, toilet use, spitting, and hand washing turns the
body into a site of citizen making. These concerns dovetail with a broader
anxiety about development, progress, and civilization. Noncompliance with
physical and social regulation is understood as threatening the nation because
it betrays the long-term goals of prosperity and success for the nation. Even
at the end of the day, Singaporeans go home to private spaces that are also
regulated through the public housing policies of the state, and within that
space, kitchens—the spaces of domestic food preparation—are also subject
to regulation. Yet, as we will see in the following chapter, they are surpris-
ingly absent from public discourse.
 4
The Kitchen
Invariably Offstage

The growing worldwide interest in local produce, culinary history,

and regional cuisine has produced an increasingly sophisticated reading and
cooking public. As a focus of historical study, however, kitchens have received
little scholarly attention in Southeast Asian studies.1 Singaporeans are argu-
ably more conscious of the meanings of food now than at any point in their
past. Food matters to them, their lived experience is shaped by their cuisine,
and their personal feelings of “Singaporean-ness” are also linked to caring
deeply about food. This interest in eating, however, has not yet translated
to an interest in where food has been prepared. As we look for the elusive
kitchen through Singapore’s architecture, housing, history, and imagery, we
find that for Singaporeans, the concept of “kitchen” is not the focal point for
nostalgia and therefore it is less visible, even at times absent. In his seminal
work on Orientalism, Edward Said noted that “the Orient is all absence,
whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must
not forget that the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective
absence.”2 The implication, in the case of the Singaporean kitchen, is that we
must consider what is present (a conception of architecture as monumental
space and an emphasis on food as an activity of consumption) and what is
absent (domestic kitchens) as working in unison to reveal part of the mean-
ing of food in Singapore.
Writing about the establishment of a national cuisine in India, Arjun Ap-
padurai stated that there is surprisingly little written about cooking (and, by
implication, about kitchens) in important Indian texts. He wondered why it is
that such a highly literate and text-oriented civilization had not produced the
60  .  chap ter 4

kinds of high cuisines codified in French and Chinese texts. The centrality of
food to classical and contemporary Hindu texts deepened the puzzle for Ap-
padurai and led him to ask: “Why did Hindu India, so concerned with food as
a medium of communication on the one hand and with matters of hierarchy
on the other, not generate a significant textual corpus on cuisine?” He notes
that while there is “a vast body of rules, maxims, prescriptions, taboos, and
injunctions concerning food,” there is almost nothing that looks like a recipe.
Given that cooking is a highly developed art in India, how, he asked, “are we
to account for the absence of recipes and cookbooks from the otherwise om-
nivorous tendency of the Hindu elite to codify every sector of life?”3
His conclusion is illuminating: “It is possible to assert that while gastro-
nomic issues play a critical role in the Hindu texts, culinary issues do not. That
is, while there is an immense amount written about eating and about feeding,
precious little is said about cooking in Hindu legal, medical or philosophical
texts.”4 A parallel situation exists in Singapore—food is clearly important
socially and culturally, but there is an absence of writing about its prepara-
tion, or to use Appadurai’s words, there is much discussion of gastronomic
issues but not of culinary ones. In discussing Hindu texts, Appadurai makes
the observation that the process of transforming ingredients into dishes is
“invariably offstage.”5 The distinction between the gastronomic and the cu-
linary is a powerful tool for thinking about the Singaporean example, and
the notion of cooking as “offstage” is especially fitting.

Connecting Food and Architecture

Scholarly efforts to understand the relationship between production and
consumption of food can direct attention to the role that architecture, and
in particular the structure and placements of kitchens, plays in both.6 Singa-
poreans are reluctant to make the connection between food and architecture
at either the practical or the theoretical level, but memory and architecture
are strongly connected in Singapore, as evidenced by a growing number of
citizens, scholars, and practitioners calling for the preservation of its build-
ings, debating what constitutes “Singaporean architecture,” and considering
which buildings are worthy of conservation.
The power of architecture, public and private, to do national work is well
articulated in Singapore. In 2007 the Urban Redevelopment Authority, for
example, published a catalog to accompany the Singapore 1:1 Island exhibi-
tion. In his introduction, Wong Yunn Chii noted that the exhibition “attempts
to account for” the way exemplary architectural forms, spaces, and designs
shaped “Singapore’s emergence as a nation.”7 Architecture here is understood
 the kitchen  ·  61

as being formative to the nation-state. Kitchens, it seems, are not, in this

construction, spaces that account for the emergence of the nation—there is
not a single image of a kitchen in the 341-page volume. The one mention of
kitchens comes in the entry about the Mountain Rise apartment complex.
The text explains that the planning of each unit was kept simple by WOHA
Architects: “Major spaces such as living, dining and master bedroom line the
southern façade, while the kitchen, smaller bedrooms, washings and utility
are oriented towards the north.”8 The kitchen is not a major space. Wong
concludes the volume by returning to the power of architecture, stating that
it “defines the character of Singapore and its workings”; it is the pervasiveness
of architecture in daily life that Wong emphasizes, “its roles in our everyday
landscapes through structuralizing and spatializing the patterns of our lives
from the cradle to the grave.”9 Kitchens are being structured and spatialized
in these everyday landscapes as marginal places, and this in turn minimizes
the importance of the kitchen to everyday experiences.
It is not that there is no emphasis on domestic housing but, rather, that
kitchens tend not to feature in the representations of that housing. Aestheti-
cally Yours, Singapore, a pictorial celebration of Housing Development Board
(HDB) public housing in Singapore, makes this very clear. In its own words,
the volume shows “in a simple way and through the use of HDB estate theme,
the Singapore Story.”10 That Singapore story includes food in historic im-
ages—Samsui women roasting ducks, a pig feeding in Red Hill in the 1950s,
vegetable farming on the land that was to become a housing estate in the
1960s, produce arriving at night markets—but it includes no kitchen, historic
or contemporary. In this volume people eat and shop, they make phone calls
and play in parks, but they do not cook in kitchens.
Likewise, the inhabitants of Toa Payoh, as portrayed in an HDB com-
memorative publication, Toa Payoh: Our Kind of Neighbourhood, purchase
and consume food but do not cook it. The book is resplendent with images of
food—raw and cooked—of people eating in hawker centers and buying food
to cook. There are intimate images of daily life—people in prayer, at temple,
reading, marrying, exercising, sharing photographs with their grandchildren,
performing music, holding hands, having acupuncture. There are a range of
domestic spaces—living rooms, bedrooms, dining tables, windows adorned
with stuffed toys, doorways, entranceways, and public spaces—void decks,
community centers, shops, construction sites, panoramas of the whole estate.
There is, however, not a single kitchen, public or private, presented.
The tendency to marginalize domestic spaces as sites of memory differen-
tiates Singapore from broader trends in public history, which have moved to
celebrations of domestic life in national stories.11 Visitors to Thomas Jefferson’s
62  .  chap ter 4

Monticello in Virginia can see his kitchen—with fireplace, bake oven, eight-
hole stew stove, and replica kitchenware—or even ponder the mechanics of
his privy. Providing this modern access to the domestic sphere of the past
acknowledges its meaning in the present. The presidential chamber pot sig-
nals that Jefferson was a man, a human being with bodily functions and a
quotidian domestic life just as we have. He was both different and the same.
For architects in Singapore, monumental buildings are more important
than domestic architecture, the examples shared above notwithstanding.
In matters of public history and preservation, the state shares this prior-
ity. Architecture may embody national identities, but only the monumental
adequately represents this grandeur of nation. Also, land is at a premium,
so the preservation of a building must gesture to both national unity and
fiscal rewards. Architectural scholars recognize this link; as the Singaporean
public servant Kwek Mean Luck points out, heritage conservation not only
“grounds the memory of the nation, the story of Singapore, into something
concrete and visual,” it also “aids economic development.”12
In the churn of the redevelopment of built Singapore, it is largely homes
that have been redeveloped. Given Singapore’s physical limitations, the logic
of this is clear: there simply is not sufficient space in the island nation for a
sprawl of single-story houses; flats are a necessity. It may sound contradic-
tory, but the erasure of old domestic spaces socially reinforces the connec-
tions between monumental architecture and public memory. Drawing on
the work of the French historian Pierre Nora, Maurizio Peleggi argues that
the destruction of “places where social memory is embedded in daily prac-
tices” creates scope for public buildings “to serve as a catalyst for collective
remembrance.”13 In neighborhoods that are remade, as so many have been in
Singapore, the personal is shifted from the absent domestic to the still-present
public. Public buildings take on a new significance as symbolic and physi-
cal reminders of both personal and national memories, a process supported
and augmented by government policies. For the Singaporean government,
the connection between history, memory, and building is clear. The Urban
Redevelopment Authority, for example, used the phrase “our history cap-
tured in brick, plaster, wood and stone” to explain the relationship between
conservation and history.14 Here, the material of memory is building mate-
rial, not social meaning, lived experience, or cultural practice.
The exclusion of kitchens from these manufactured relationships is in stark
contrast to the importance placed on the study of kitchens outside Southeast
Asia.15 The Singaporean example troubles generalizations about kitchens as the
center of the home because they, historically, have been and often still are the
 the kitchen  ·  63

domain of servants. The kitchen functions in this context as a workspace of

Others—and a grotesquery of the hot, wet, and leaky. In architectural terms,
the kitchen was often physically removed from the house proper, creating
spatial, social, and cognitive distance. As Cecilia Leong-Salobir notes in her
important study of colonial food culture in India, Singapore, and Malaya,
despite the encouragement of advice manuals for memsahibs to inspect the
kitchen, because it was away from the main house they “found [it] to too
hot and tiresome” to do so.16 The notion of wet and dry kitchens—the wet
for cooking that is hot, smelly, and riskier with its use of hot oil—served to
continue the idea of the kitchen as separated space. And the presence in
contemporary Singapore of domestic maids who do kitchen work reinforces
the idea. In this sense, the colonial Indian cook-boy from the past and the
contemporary Filipina maid consistently occupy the kitchen. While notions
of Mother’s home cooking are not unfamiliar to Singaporeans, they have not
been integral to constructions of domestic femininity for citizens, meaning
that the social functions of the kitchen are marginalized.

Housing the Nation

The connection between the national meaning of space and kitchens is
clear in Singapore precisely because of the active role the state has played
in housing the nation. In 1959 the PAP established a statutory board called
the Housing Development Board that oversaw land purchases and estab-
lished public housing. Initially, state housing was a safety net, a short-term
solution to an immediate problem. Within decades the HDB grew in both
size and influence, and now about 87 percent of people live in HDB accom-
modation, with Singaporeans increasingly owning rather than renting their
HDB flats. Access to housing, particularly to home ownership, is viewed by
the Singaporean government as contributing to social and political stability
as it gives citizens a “stake” in the nation.17 Although the state still facilitates
much of the housing, the possibility of homeownership has been steadily
increasing, directly affecting the design of kitchens. Having a stake in one’s
own home gives one scope to redevelop the kitchen in a way renters cannot.
The unprecedentedly high levels of homeownership have allowed homes
to become sites for the “symbolic expression in material form of the role
and significance of family and domesticity generally,”18 which, naturally, is
reflected in the kitchen.
The state has articulated a connection between housing the nation and
the morality of the nation. Sexual orientation, marriage, and race determine
64  .  chap ter 4

eligibility for certain kinds of housing. Individuals are, for example, precluded
from renting or buying HDB flats without a “family nucleus,”19 encouraging
family as the primary form of social identification.20 The association between
home and morality is especially clear, and if by extension the kitchen is the
heart of the home, the kitchen could be predicted to be a site implicated in
very significant morality making in Singapore. Yet kitchens do not feature
to a great extent in such discussion.
With each decade, at a time when total square footage of each individual
flat has increased, the space devoted to the kitchen has been systematically
reduced in state-designed HDB flats. As a metaphor for the lack of central-
ity of kitchens, this seems profound. Eating and thinking and talking about
food connects Singaporeans on the personal and national levels. In crowded
hawker centers and at communal tables food has deep meanings, but domes-
tic kitchens remain outside of that circle.

Kitchens in Books
A number of books, popular and scholarly, have been written about Sin-
gaporean domestic architecture, both historical and contemporary. Again,
kitchens are largely absent or marginal. Identifying these marginalities, in the
very places where the kitchen might be expected to be prominent, highlights
the centrality of the absence. Norman Edwards’s The Singaporean House and
Residential Life, 1819–1939 (1990), conforms to this trend.21 It is not just the
marginal place of kitchens that is significant here, but also what is said about
them when they are mentioned. The eleven-page section on kitchens begins
with a comparison of the role of servants in European, Chinese, and Per-
anakan households, placing the kitchen foremost as workspace, servant space.
The book then considers the purchase of food items, ice delivery, the role
of the Cold Storage Company, and the rise of home refrigeration. Edwards
pays attention to differences in the kitchens of various ethnic groups, includ-
ing placement of cooking equipment and the existence of pantries, or serv-
ery spaces. But while these are very important issues, the kitchen remains
decentered in the examination of residential life. This decentering extends to
Edwards’s discussion of the spaces where “kitchen” work takes place. That is,
many tasks are done outside on the verandah of the outhouse (outbuilding)
or in the area between the outhouse and the main house, a space he defines
as being similar to the working area of the “English Victorian scullery.”22 It
is, of course, also similar to the external kitchen spaces of India.23
Continuing his comparison with the English kitchen, Edwards laments
that despite the “sophisticated developments in cooking equipment” that
 the kitchen  ·  65

had taken place by the early 1900s, the kitchen facilities in Singapore “were
extraordinarily primitive, even in the 1930s.”24 The kitchen, then, emerges as
a site of potential modernity, and knowledge about kitchens equated with
knowledge of civilization. The blurring of master and servant space and the
absence of European kitchen developments renders Singaporean kitchens
primitive and epistemologically distressing. For Edwards, it is the 1930s that
mark the greatest change in Singaporean kitchens. New technologies (refrig-
eration and ovens) and restrictions on imported female labor translated into
smaller kitchens with fewer distinctions between servant space and house-
hold space. Their invisibility reflects the historical changes in their design
and, critically, in the category of kitchen space. Technology and law acted to
resolve these categorical threats, rendering the kitchen safe but uninteresting.
Lee Kip Lin took a similar approach in The Singaporean House, 1819–1942.25
As with Edwards, Lee Kip Lin used the European, and especially the English,
kitchen, as a point of comparison, both in his analysis and through the use of
historical commentary. He quotes extensively from John Cameron’s 1865 Our
Tropical Possession in Malayan India, including the description of kitchens
as “thoroughly oriental in their character.”26 Cameron described the kitchen
as having no fireplace, but instead,
in the center of the room a table of solid brickwork is built with slabs of stone
or brick tiles laid on top; at one end of this a small circular chamber is built
to serve as an oven; a strong fire is placed inside and when the brickwork
is thoroughly heated, the fire is raked out, and whatever dish is required to
be baked placed inside and the aperture closed up, the heat given out from
the bricks being sufficient to cook it in a short time. The rest of the table is
divided into a series of little fireplaces, over which proceeded the ordinary
processes of cooking.27

Cameron’s description is by far the most detailed of any in the book, giving
a sense of both architecture and process. Brief mentions are made of second
kitchens and the influence of Malay architecture on domestic colonial build-
ings and, in one instance, the presence of a basement kitchen. For Cameron,
and by extension, for Lee Kip Lin, these second kitchens are marginal spaces,
not part of the house proper.
The second kitchen—a space dedicated to particularly hot, messy, or smelly
food preparation—is highly revealing of food preparation methods and do-
mestic divisions. Uncommon in contemporary Singapore, the second kitchen
is still seen in some Malaysian homes where there is a dry (indoor) and a wet
(outdoor) kitchen. Chinese and Malay families had the dual kitchen system.
The demise of the second kitchen in Singapore reflects changes in domestic
66  .  chap ter 4

housing and, later, the move away from houses to flats. The kitchen, for Lee
Kip Lin, is largely the realm of servants, an addendum to the house—both
literally, in the sense of usually being an outbuilding, and metaphorically, as
something outside the domestic core.
The literature on Singaporean architecture includes popular and recent
coffee-table books. Within this genre, Julian Davison’s work Black and White:
The Singapore House, 1898–1941, reiterates traditional ideas of what is included
in the category “architecture.”28 Unlike the preservationists, Davison focuses
not on monumental public buildings but on “exceptional buildings,” in this
instance, the “black and whites”—houses of a specific colonial design that
self-consciously drew on local Southeast Asian architectural traditions. They
were built using primarily local materials and “indigenous building technolo-
gies.”29 But in a volume replete with beautiful photographs, both historical
and contemporary, it is striking that there is not a single kitchen, not even in
the images of restored “black and whites.” In Davison’s popular construction
of “exceptional” housing, kitchens are not exceptional enough—although
including them would, in fact, have been exceptional. With Romancing the
Tropics: Bedmor and Shi, the focus moves from the colonial period to more
contemporary domestic structures, those of the architectural firm Bedmor
and Shi.30 Again, while largely domestic in focus, the romance of the tropics
clearly does not include kitchen spaces. The absence of kitchens in a volume
of this nature stands in stark contrast to collections of contemporary archi-
tectural works in the West in which kitchens predominate, even if they are
spaces in which status is displayed rather than food.31 These books are but a
small sampling. They do, however, exemplify a sustained trend of represent-
ing domestic architecture without kitchens.
Were food not so important to Singaporeans, this absence might be read
as evidence of a lack of interest in food. But since this is clearly not the case,
this suggestive absence points us at a different story, one that might allow us
to talk about the kitchen as servant space, as nondomestic space, precisely be-
cause the preparation of food is work, not recreation, and kitchens are rarely
communal social spaces. The Singaporean kitchen is, in fact, an inherently
classed space, as is the public history of the nation. In the grand buildings,
those with capital “C” Conservation, class is also memorialized. The national
history of Singapore, told by the state or through texts such as the architec-
ture books discussed above, is exclusionary. Kitchens are excluded not as a
threat, or as representative of a problem that has to be excised, but because
domestic workers’ spaces fail to constitute something important enough to
be considered capital “H” History.
 the kitchen  ·  67

Even in important scholarly volumes such as Beyond Description: Singapore

Space and Historicity, the culinary space takes a secondary role.32 Wei-Wei
Yeo, in her excellent chapter on the heartland of Singapore, acutely points
to the increasing representations of older style HDB apartments in popular
culture.33 She frames this as a rejection of the Singapore skyline, but still
the HDB kitchen does not make an appearance. In the same collection,
John Phillips, drawing on the work of Derrida and Foucault, thinks about
Singaporean architecture in terms of an archive.34 Extending the metaphor
frames the exclusion of the important domestic space of the kitchen from
that archive (which we may call “Public Space and National Memory”) as a
failure of accessioning. The material could be collected and stored, but the
cataloging rules do not allow that subject heading.
At the most obvious level, the kitchens of Singapore are missing for the
simple reason that they largely do not exist anymore. Years of economic devel-
opment and urban renewal have radically remade the space and architecture
of Singapore. In addition, kitchens, like bathrooms, are subject to more refur-
bishment than are other spaces. So even if a building remained standing, it is
unlikely that the kitchen would be preserved in its historical form.
Selina’s Dream Kitchens, one of the few texts to concentrate on Singa-
porean kitchens, features the designs of Selina Tay of Collective Designs,
with commentary by Monica Gwee.35 The vast majority of the kitchens are
dreams—they are in very exclusive single-family houses, which only a tiny
percentage of the population could ever afford. There are also some kitchens
from private condominiums, which despite the global financial crises are
still very expensive with few available under $S1 million. These are possible
dreams for some; they are perhaps aspirational kitchens. But I am particu-
larly interested in the HDB flats that Tay has renovated. With 87 percent of
the population living in HDB housing, these are powerful sites of imagining
what a Singaporean kitchen could be.
The section on renovated HDB kitchens begins with a description of their
historical role as “seldom seen and never shown off,” where the washing
machine was as common as the rice cooker.36 The book suggests that these
renovated kitchens “blur the lines between luxurious kitchen in private apart-
ments and utilitarian kitchens in HDB flats,” and consequently they have the
potential to create homes that revolve around what happens in the kitchen.37
The photographs and text that follow do not support that claim. The first
kitchen, titled “No Plain Jane,” is a small one that the client had “conser-
vatively” requested be brown and white. It uses space efficiently (“the top
hung compartment above the sink conceals a dish drainer to save countertop
68  .  chap ter 4

space”), effectively minimizing the kitchen.38 That these kitchens are about
things other than food preparation is evident in another renovation, part of
a larger project intended to align an apartment with feng shui principles. The
kitchen there is about the feng shui of the home, not about cooking.
The owner of an apartment in Ang Mio Kio seldom cooks and said all
she needed was her microwave. She was adamant that she did not want a
kitchen table because she did not entertain large groups. Her requests were
only followed in part—an alternative to the dining table was provided by
a table-height marble counter that “doubles as an eating area,” but she was
not allowed a kitchen with only a microwave: “a simple hob and oven were
added.”39 So, too, were a stainless-steel splash-back (to protect the walls from
cooking messes made on the hob that will not be cooked on) and an extrac-
tor fan (to remove the smells from food that is not being cooked). No food
is visible in the kitchen, nor storage areas for food, nor even a refrigerator.
On the marble counter, empty crockery emphasizes the lack of food.

Teaching Singaporeans How to “Do” Kitchens

Singaporeans learn about kitchens as part of their everyday life, but also,
more explicitly, through school. Kitchens make small but consistent appear-
ances in home economics textbooks, and while I look at these textbooks in
greater detail in Chapter 5, it is worth noting here the way kitchens are con-
ceived in education materials. In general, although many Singaporeans have
domestic help and may eat many meals outside of the home, the teaching of
home economics has tended to emphasize domestic arts and to presuppose
that women would spend time in the kitchen. For upper-class women, the
assumption is that in order to control the maid, the mistress must know how
the kitchen should operate, even if she is not running it. Lower-class women,
who do not have a maid, also need to be told how to run a kitchen in case
they do it wrong. In both instances, a poorly run kitchen is a metaphor for
how disorder has the potential to destabilize the order of society.
In home economics and domestic science textbooks the kitchen has a func-
tion beyond that of work. Whether it is a place for engaging with the colonial
past, a model of careful planning for future progress, or a site of ambition, in-
dustry, and work, the kitchen also has a moral function. It stands as a mecha-
nism by which the world can be ordered. Implicit in the ordering are ideas
about discipline, gender, hygiene, family, and nation. The imagined kitchen
of the domestic sciences textbook, though intangible, serves as a benchmark
 the kitchen  ·  69

for nation development. Relevant textbooks range from the colonial to the
contemporary, and while changes can be identified across time periods, there
are also consistencies. Advanced Cookery for Malaysian Schools (1964) was
published and used in Singapore.40 It is colonial in tone and content and is, in
fact, preparing students for the Cambridge examination—based in England.
The kitchen that is imagined by this book, and the one that students would be
tested on, was not a Malaysian but an English kitchen.
The kitchen plan in ‘O’ Level Cookery makes no concessions to the geographi-
cal or architectural specificities of Singapore; it is self-consciously a British
kitchen. First tracing the rise and fall of kitchens in British architecture, from
the “heart and soul of the household and a center of social life” in centuries
past to its fall in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when “the kitchen
became degraded and was situated in any dark corner of the house,” the text
then considers the kitchen of the 1970s. The authors conclude that because the
majority of women are now doing their own housework and cooking rather
than employing domestic servants, architects are paying more attention to
the kitchen, and when labor-saving devices are also taken account of, we are
gradually “returning to the idea of the kitchen as a center where the essential
work of the house takes place.”41 For Singapore these historical conclusions are
simply wrong. Consequently, not only would the advice about stoves and equip-
ment offered in the O (ordinary) level textbook be of little use to Singaporean
students, but the advice is actually not applicable to their circumstances. The
kitchen in the textbook does not exist in Singapore; it is imagined and imag-
ined remotely, a British kitchen remote in form and distance.
Published only a few years after Singapore gained independence, Christina
M. C. Fones’s Let’s Learn to Cook (1970) emphasizes newness, building, and
planning in making a clear link between food consumption, cooking, and
kitchen spaces. Specifically, she dwells on the planning of a kitchen, perhaps
even before a home is designed. For Fones there are three types: working
kitchens (with laundry facilities), a kitchen–living room configuration, and a
working kitchen “with room for dining.”42 Color schemes are recommended:
“cool colors (cream, pastel shades) are soothing and attractive and most suit-
able for a kitchen.” Fones also details the appropriate materials for walls, floors,
ceilings, and work surfaces, though with little mention of local materials.43
Equipment such as the stove is covered in detail and listed in descending
order of desirability. The electric stove has five advantages: it gives off no harm-
ful fumes, emits no soot, is not expensive, takes a small amount of space, and is
easy to clean. The gas stove is similarly praised for its modern features. The fuel
70  .  chap ter 4

stove lists no advantages, but operation, maintenance, and cleaning methods

are detailed. The kerosene stove description emphasizes the disadvantage of
the smell of burning oil. Charcoal burners are “old-fashioned,” cooking utensils
“become sooty,” and the “charcoal makes the house dirty.” Firewood burners
are clearly disapproved of: “It is not a clean way to cook and it takes some time
to start the fire, especially in damp weather.”44
Emphasizing planning and modernity, this kitchen, like the new nation,
is not yet built. It is an imaginary kitchen, one being envisaged and someday
to be brought to light. Having learned the ideology, methods, and recipes
of Let’s Learn to Cook, students must draw and describe “a well planned
kitchen.”45 The imaginary kitchen will be modern, not charcoal-fueled, and
while it exists only as a school assignment, drawn and described rather than
lived, it nevertheless emerges as a site of modernity, and the planning of it
is a performance of planned modernity.
More than a decade later in the New Home Economics: Book 1 (1983),
students are given explicit instructions for the design and arrangement of a
kitchen. The function of the kitchen, students are told, is to “provide a place
for preparing and cooking food, washing utensils and storing food,” and
the “arrangement of furniture in the kitchen should facilitate work.”46 The
emphasis on work reflects the ambitions and industry of the nation during
the 1980s.
The mandate to house the nation means that HDB kitchens take on a na-
tional significance, and the New Home Economics textbook features them.
Kitchen plans are included in the textbook with illustrations of model kitch-
ens in HDB three-room and four-room apartments. The former proposes
a “broken U-shaped” kitchen, and the latter an “L-shaped” kitchen. By the
1980s, HDB housing had become widespread but was not ubiquitous. At that
historical moment, the kitchen was simultaneously an imagined space in its
own right and part of the emerging, and therefore imagined, national space
of public housing.
Students are asked to compare their home kitchens with these model kitch-
ens in terms of the stove, food storage, and utensil storage and to outline their
suggested changes in equipment and their reasons for wanting these changes.
They are also instructed to sketch the layout of the improved kitchen.47 The
kitchen in this context is not only a workspace, an assignment, it is also a
model, an ideal to be achieved, one in which “good equipment, suitable to
the job” is deployed.48 In a nation where the discourse of progress is central,
improvement is always possible.
 the kitchen  ·  71

Food Remembered
In a society that is greatly occupied by matters of gastronomy, food takes
on a pre-eminent role in the public construction of nostalgia. Singaporeans
naturally express their personal nostalgia in terms of childhood dishes re-
membered, and the state naturally co-opts it in the form of heritage food
tours, food festivals, and health campaigns, often in partnership with private
companies that are also capitalizing on food nostalgia. Few of these public
events focus on historic spaces of food preparation. Even if the style or method
of cooking is historical, the events take place in modern surroundings such as
the Sunrice Singapore Culinary Academy and Spice Garden. These modern
public spaces are designed with an eye toward re-creating the social kitchens
of the past. The Food Republic food courts, for example, create competing
themed “historical” Singaporean foodscapes through architecture, costumes,
and services. In this spin on “quaintspace,” Singaporeans and visitors can eat

Figure 2. Food Republic, 2012. Photograph by Sandra Hudd. Used by permission.

72  .  chap ter 4

in clean, air-conditioned spaces that evoke the past without really resembling
it. The staff is dressed in historically themed outfits, the spaces decorated with
replicas of historical designs, and—by extension—the historical validity of
the dishes served is implied (see figure 2).
In other countries, interest in social history may translate into the restora-
tion of historic kitchens like that of the seventeenth-century kitchen in Ham
House in London.49 Similarly, visitors to Highwic House (1863) in suburban
Auckland, New Zealand, can see the restored kitchen of that historic home.
In addition, the material culture associated with kitchens has become a source
of highly collectible antiques in the West and is the purview of museum col-
lections. From Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum to the Illinois State Museum,
collections of domestic objects form important exhibitions and areas of col-
lection growth. The controversial National Museum of Australia displays a
replica of a 1950s kitchen in a section titled, tellingly, “Nation: Symbols of
Australia.”50 And in the United States, the kitchen of famous television cook
Julia Child is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum
of American History. In Singaporean memory, however, the tradition of
street food substitutes for home cookery. So there simply is not an equivalent
structured space to preserve or pay homage to. By its very nature, the na-
tional symbol of street food does not occupy a built, designed, or long-lived
space. Therefore, the state’s investments in the construction of historical food
and food nostalgia are in dishes consumed, public space, and events, not in
closed preparation spaces. As we will see in Chapter 8, it is street food that
has been the site of public memory making with regard to food.
Identity is in the food, not in its preparation. And consumption of the dish
is the marker. To evoke bygone times, or a sense of nostalgia, Singaporeans
construct linkages between memories of specific foods and memories of public
spaces of consumption. Many Singaporeans see their own ethnic identity in
terms of what they eat. The place of food nostalgia on the Internet is also firmly
established. In Singaporean blogs this is especially evident. As one blogger
noted, “I call myself Peranakan; and why not since I love my ‘hee piow’ soup
(fish soup) . . . as much as the next?”51 A simple equation is made—love of a
specific food symbolizes ethnic identity. Other bloggers reminisce about the
foods no longer available or now so commonly available that they have be-
come disconnected from the space of nostalgic association, such as the roasted
chestnuts in Katong Park, once specific to that place but now to be found “at
any of the hypermarts.”52 The Web site “I eat it, I shoot it, I post it” is one of
Singapore’s most popular, especially for Singaporeans living abroad.53 In the
 the kitchen  ·  73

words of one blogger: “Food is a cultural asset, isn’t it?”54 Food is a marker of
identity, not only for observers but also for the consumer. For the state, this
is a highly desirable and nonpolitical form of nostalgia.

Magical Spaces
In July 2007 two Singaporean architecture students distributed notebooks to
a range of Singaporeans posing the question: “What is your magical space?”
An exhibition of the responses—text, drawings, and photographs, real and
imagined spaces—was held and a monograph published. It is striking that
in the hundreds of responses not a single domestic kitchen is recorded as a
magical space. In fact, there is no reference to domestic food spaces at all.
But food is very much present in the responses. In a typically Singaporean
fashion, the site of food consumption, not its preparation, is celebrated. One
entry, for example, is a drawing of the Haato restaurant with the message that
this place has “my favorite ice-cream.”55 Another entry is a list of ten magical
spaces, including two bars.56 The motif of lists is taken further in one entry
that covers almost the whole page in a consecutive ring of text, listing places,
people, activities, and things that constitute magical spaces. Included in the
list are a number of food-related items: potato, KFC, pizza, bread, wedding
dinner, Ria restaurant, sushi, good food, and drinking.57 Food cohabits with
other important things, especially family and friends. For some, the mean-
ing of space is more figuratively interpreted: “Oh my magical space is what
ends up in my stomach.”58
What happens to the food once it leaves the stomach is a topic of more
regular representation in the volume. There is an entire subsection devoted
to images and discussion of toilets. The section is accompanied by a Henry
Miller quotation: “All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.
There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet—if one
wants to extract the full flavor of their content.”59
As one entry makes clear, in oversized lettering, “Toilets are amazing!”60
The privacy they afford is celebrated in most of the toilet-related entries. In
a crowded nation with relatively few spaces that are not shared or observed,
the toilet becomes a “magical space.” Many of the entries include drawings
of toilets, but some also include description. As one Singaporean puts it:
“I love sitting down in a toilet with high walls. Then I see a window above
me. Afternoon sunlight, breeze, rustle of the leaves. I shit. I chill out in lazy
afternoon delight.”61 The process of ridding oneself of digested food is thus
74  .  chap ter 4

comparable with its original consumption and the domestic space in which
that happens, perhaps even more so.
In the preface of The Magical Spaces Project, Kelvin Ang, executive architect
of the Conservation and Urban Design Division of the Urban Redevelop-
ment Authority, laments the focus on private rather than public spaces in the
entries. He says these “private and highly individualized spaces” would have
“relatively little value to others.”62 And for Ang the focus on individualized
spaces speaks very directly to national issues. He pinpoints the focus on pri-
vate space as revealing a greater fragmentation in Singaporean society, with
fewer common symbols. For him, national buildings are required for civic
pride and a sense of belonging to a Singaporean community. The lament very
closely reflects the idea that only public space has national meaning. In fact,
the absence of domestic kitchens in the conceptualization of magical space
is evidence of the agency of public space.
The one kitchen that is included is notable for its anomalous nature; it is
in total disrepair. The location of the kitchen is deliberately vague. The pho-
tograph is accompanied by the text: “Location: Central part of Singapore.”63
Whereas most of the entries in the collection are anonymous, this photograph
and fifteen others are identified as having been taken by Arron Teo. All six-
teen images are of buildings in disrepair. Teo concludes his section with this
statement, which also ends the book of the exhibition: “The ruins which you
have just seen are located within Singapore. The exact location will not be
disclosed to protect the ruins from [a] certain agency that promotes condos
and shopping malls building.”64
The kitchen ruin, while small, looks like a commercial rather than a do-
mestic space. The extractor fan dominates the space. There is rust, mold, and
decay, wiring is exposed, and a small branch of a plant can be seen growing
between the tiled wall and the bench (see figure 3). As a metaphor of the
absent or perhaps the abandoned kitchen, the image is striking.

* * *
If Singapore’s kitchens are primarily offstage, utilitarian spaces, then we
need to look elsewhere for symbols of Singapore’s food-related identity, and
that may be simply in the vibrant food culture itself, the Singaporean food-
scape. Broadly conceived, as Pauline Adema noted, foodscape refers to the
deep conceptual and physical relationship between food and landscape, on
any scale, from the personal to the societal.65 More specifically, “foodscapes
are symbolic of real and desired identities and of power, social and special
Figure 3. Abandoned Kitchen, Location: Central Part of Singapore. Photograph
by Arron Teo, copyright © 2007. Used by permission.
76  .  chap ter 4

relations articulated through food.”66 The consumption of food in Singapore

may be sufficiently hegemonic that it has excluded the kitchen from articula-
tion, both in official public history and in expressions of personal nostalgia,
but thinking about kitchens in Singapore has made us examine the social pro-
duction of space in ways that have not been undertaken before and opened
another way of interpreting the complexity of foodscapes, the real “kitchens”
of Singapore. Or to put it another way, if the kitchen is “invariably offstage”
then we need to look at both the stage and what is happening in the wings.
 5
Jam Tarts, Spotted Dicks, and Curry

Singaporean and Malayan advice manuals, school textbooks, and

magazines from the 1890s to the 1990s were filled with instructions that
would have been virtually impossible to fulfill in Singapore. Instructed in
the culinary norms of Empire, young Singaporeans were reminded of the
domestic rules of “home” and how to uphold a British way of life in the space
of Empire. A 1960s cookbook based on the Malayan school curriculum, for
example, is intended to “foster and develop those natural attributes of good
craftsmanship and artistry posed by all Malayans.”1 In the baking of jam tarts,
spotted dick puddings, sponge cakes, shortbread, dinner rolls, and scones,
it seems, Malayan artistry had a clearly British framing. As young women
studying home economics were taught how to make cakes in ovens they did
not have, they were being taught about more than food. Examining discursive
sites that were subject to many government efforts to sculpt femininity—
school textbooks and cookbooks, in particular—shows that the state took
a keen interest in domestic gender roles and the organization of domestic
space and, when it was expedient, called on connections to an imagined
past. Drawing on materials produced at the time of nation formation and
early nation building (the decades of the 1960s through 1980s) this chapter
reads home economics as a site of the transformation of national ideology.
Through educational materials, the colonial authorities and then the Singa-
porean government used the domestic sphere to establish specific gender
and racial constructions. Via these constructions they sought to imagine,
and thereby define, the nation in alignment with the agendas of the elites.
78  .  chap ter 5

The Birth and Rise of Home Economics

Home economics has a varied tradition, and while Singapore is most obvi-
ously influenced by the British tradition, home economics itself has an in-
ternational background and specifically an American influence.2 Although it
was started in Britain and, in fact, by 1878 was a compulsory subject for girls
at the elementary level under the subject name Domestic Economy, it was in
the United States that it was popularized and further developed. Typically,
however, during the age of Empire early writing about domestic economy
in Britain was both moral and functional,3 and as we will see later, this was
reflected in the educational materials of Singapore.
Home economics can be located in a broader tradition of writing about
food preparation.4 And, as Sarah A. Leavitt’s study of popular domestic advice
revealed, the home has long been an expression of an ideal, demonstrating
cultural ideals rather than cultural realities.5 The printing and dissemination
of cookery guides (cookery meaning broadly the art and practice of cooking)
enhanced the prescriptive character of recipes and more firmly fixed ingredi-
ents and methods. Domestic magazines did much the same, extending their
gambit to include domestic rituals, the management of a household (includ-
ing staff), and the right way to arrange matters domestic. Advice manuals,
menu planning guides, and other guides to household management can be
read as continuations of both cookery books and domestic magazines.
The publication of magazines aimed exclusively at women was well es-
tablished in Britain even before magazines with a home or domestic focus
were published. Largely concerned with leisure, religious salvation, or fash-
ion, such magazines became very popular. The Englishwoman’s Domestic
Magazine, first published in 1852, broke new ground. Focusing on matters
domestic and aimed at middle-class women, it was an affordable monthly
publication. Its popularity throughout the British Empire was such that the
1871 arrival in New Zealand of year-old issues made the news pages of the
Wellington Independent newspaper.6 The magazine became a template for the
many domestic periodicals that followed, and the British tradition of home
economics arose from this literary periodical tradition.
Home economics and domestic science in Singapore are products of a Brit-
ish educational initiative that was more closely aligned with advice manuals,
magazines, and religious order. A woman’s domestic duty was “inseparable
from her moral and religious duty,” and domestic economy, as it was initially
called, was essential study for girls.7 In the context of Empire, as we will see,
the moral economy of the domestic economy was even more intensely felt.
 jam tarts, spot ted dicks, and curry  ·  79

A line can be drawn from cookbooks to domestic magazines to home eco-

nomics and domestic science and textbooks. Although all have traits specific
to their respective mediums, they share an instructional edict at their core.
That is, their primary function is to tell the reader how to do something—be
that how to order the kitchen, entertain properly, instruct domestic servants,
or cook. They are about power, about authority, and about there being a
correct way of doing something. Ideas of empire and nation were early em-
bedded in these texts. And even before women were enfranchised, domestic
instruction came with ideas about citizenship.
Using Britain’s early North American empire as her example, Jennifer My-
lander, a scholar of transatlantic history, considers the function of manuals
and the creation of Englishness. She argues that the popularity of manuals
on subjects ranging from animal husbandry to agriculture and domesticity,
despite their lack of practical advice in the new colonies, showed they had a
function beyond instruction. For Mylander it is precisely the lack of practi-
cal advice that leads her to challenge the assumption that these are records
of common practice and to suggest that the ideological work of the books
was, in fact, to allow colonists to identify themselves as English rather than as
American.8 By extension, we can see the impractical advice in the domestic
manuals and home economics textbooks of Singapore as having the same
function—to educate about what “Britishness” should be, even if the circum-
stances did not allow it. The information about crops that were not planted
in the American colonies functioned in much the same way as a recipe for
a cream of asparagus soup in colonial Singapore, where no asparagus was
grown.
Extending this idea further, the instruction to bake cakes in ovens that
most households did not have, functioned to instruct students in the quali-
ties of citizenship—the appropriate household with the right oven becomes a
stepping stone for the appropriate nation with the appropriate citizen. Writing
about early European recipes, Robert Appelbaum suggests that the process
of defining a right way of cooking something divides the world into us and
them, those who belong and those who do not.9 That process of Othering is
as relevant in postcolonial Singapore as it was in colonial Singapore.
By 1970 some efforts were made to include “local” elements in Singaporean
curricular materials, but in ‘O’ Level Cookery (1971), the British origins are
revealed throughout the text. In a nation where there was very little seasonal
variation owing to geographic proximity to the equator, the edict of provid-
ing “foods suitable for the time of year” and using seasonal products seems
odd, and in one sense ahead of its time. The nutritional advice reflected both
80  .  chap ter 5

geographic and temporal imperatives, suggesting that each person “should

have” a serving of butter or margarine of “at least 1½ oz/43g” per day. The
comments about the challenges of “feeding old people” also reflected the
cultural origins of the text rather than the Singaporean reality. Students were
informed that “malnutrition in the old is often caused by shopping difficul-
ties in bad weather; making do with a cup of tea and a biscuit instead of a
meal.”10 The “bad weather” described is unlikely to be the tropical weather
of Singapore. The accessibility of cheap meals from hawker centers that were
often built into housing developments, while not as prevalent in 1971 as they
are now, nonetheless created a cultural landscape significantly different from
the British equivalent. In (and long before) the 1970s, itinerant hawkers would
bring food to the door or place it in a pulley basket, giving everyone, espe-
cially the elderly, access to a different kind of convenience food.

Reimagining the Housewife

The body of the student in home economics textbooks was that of the proto-
housewife, and both the student and the housewife were subject to regulation.
In a 1964 cookery book designed in conjunction with the Domestic Science
Syllabus of the day as a supplemental text to reduce laborious copying from
the blackboard, the student was as much a subject as was milk or pastry. The
book begins with fourteen sensible suggestions for preventing accidents,
which include more general advice such as, “Be considerate to others at all
times.” At the bottom of the page in bold text students are given a three-point
checklist titled “Before cooking see that you have.” The three items pertain
to cleanliness and orderliness—of body and approach. Hands must be clean
and nails short. Students must have an apron that is not only clean but also
“neat,” and they are reminded that “Tidy hair is safe hair.”11 Although clean-
liness in cookery is an obvious and important health and safety imperative,
the merging of social advice—being considerate, having tidy hair and neat
aprons—makes clear that cookery here is about much more than the prepa-
ration of food. Learning to cook is also about the preparation for domestic
life and citizenship, and much of Elementary Cookery for Malaysian Schools
is, in fact, devoted to cleaning tasks and the associated social responsibilities.
The 1971 ‘O’ Level Cookery textbook was more comprehensive but no less
concerned with locating cooking in a broader context of social roles for
women. The high expectation of women was made clear when students were
told, “It is not sufficient to be able to produce a few perfect dishes”; the house-
wife “must combine these to form a suitable meal for any occasion.”12 Select-
 jam tarts, spot ted dicks, and curry  ·  81

ing what to cook was transformed from a routine domestic task to a major
undertaking, with the making of menus described as “a great art, requir-
ing correct technical knowledge and good judgement.” Yet, simultaneously,
students were told that meal times should be enjoyable for all concerned,
“including the housewife.”13 The student therefore must not only master the
technical aspects, she must also learn to take pleasure in the performance
of domestic roles.
Having a smoothly run home was important to the home economic ide-
ology, but it was the displaying of the home that gave evidence of this, and,
consequently, entertaining plays a large role in textbooks and advice manu-
als. As one textbook suggested: “The homemaker should learn to play the
part of the hostess while young. Whatever the occasion, casual or formal,
she should learn to be calm and relaxed, to be pleasant and hospitable to her
guests.”14 Beyond being calm and relaxed there are more detailed instructions
for the hostess, who must “move around freely, gracefully and pleasantly all
the time” and refrain from unnecessary, harsh, or critical comments.15
The importance of domestic harmony and the role that food can play in
it was emphasized in many texts. In a 1957 guide for the “young housewife,”
the connection between food and happiness (or unhappiness) was made
explicit: “The close connection between an indigestible and unappetizing
breakfast and a stormy day at the office is well known.”16 The happiness and
even success of her husband at the office could be harmed by an unappetizing
breakfast. The housewife thus had a sphere of influence and a responsibility
for things well beyond her kitchen.
The Singaporean state has taken a sustained interest in the housewife. The
role that the idealized housewife should play has changed over time—she is
both a traditional and a modern figure. In the process of constructing the
state, organizing society, and developing a national narrative, governments
not uncommonly attend to matters of marriage, family, and procreation.
In Singapore, however, marriage and family formation take on a special
significance because the emphasis on the people as the only resource is so
pronounced.17 The viability of the future nation rests on appropriate and suc-
cessful marriages that produce the “right” kind of citizens. The overarching
concern for Singapore’s future became an early justification for state intrusion
into the private sphere and a redrawing of the boundaries between public
and private. Active intervention by the government in marriage, attempts
to control sexuality, and population policies are quintessential examples of
this process. The focus on domestic harmony and appropriate sex-specific
roles can also be understood in this context.
82  .  chap ter 5

During the period from 1959 to 1983, Singapore was primarily concerned
with reducing family size. Official slogans of the time characterized the pop-
ulation policy: “Girl or boy, two is enough,” “Stop at two,” “Small families
have more to eat,” and “Teenage marriage means rushing into problems, a
happy marriage is worth waiting for.”18 The government was determined to
grow Singapore’s economy, and, consequently, high female labor participa-
tion rates and low birth rates were seen as necessary. Yet at this same time,
home economics textbooks were emphasizing a domestic role for women.
Women were being asked to simultaneously support the economy in the
public sphere and the family in the domestic sphere. For the state, there was
not and is not a contradiction in this message.
Since independence, the Singaporean government has been consistently
preoccupied with the notion of family, albeit for different reasons at different
times. By the 1980s, the government had begun to reassess the approach to
family planning.19 In his 1983 National Day speech, Prime Minister Lee Kuan
Yew identified a trend in which university-educated women were delaying
both marriage and childbirth.20 The tensions concerning who reproduces
in Singapore came to a head during this period with the “great marriage
debate,” involving lengthy discussions in the media about the trend. The
debate facilitated an abrupt shift in the boundary between public and private
life in Singapore, with profound consequences for women. Placing popula-
tion policy firmly in the public realm allowed the PAP legitimately to cre-
ate further policy about relationships, marriage, and reproduction. Formal
population policy changed dramatically in 1986 as Lee ushered in the “have
three or more if you can afford it” policy.21 These changes redefined women’s
relationship with the state.22
With the rise in concern about insufficient population, promotion of larger
(Chinese) families led to a retreat from an overt commitment to women’s
rights, rights that in the interests of the nation were increasingly subordinated
to those of the family. In order to legitimate this shift, the PAP emphasized
the traditional roles of women as wives and mothers. The imagined Asian
families of the historical tradition were evoked to promote tradition in the
face of modernity. Although the PAP wanted women’s economic contribu-
tions, too, it simultaneously sought traditional roles for them. Women in Sin-
gapore, as elsewhere, became the guardians of tradition and the transmitters
of culture and were required to negotiate a dichotomy between modernity
and tradition.
The PAP invoked notions of a traditional “Asian” family to justify its em-
phasis on the family. As the Singaporean sociologist Nirmala Purushotam has
 jam tarts, spot ted dicks, and curry  ·  83

suggested, this claim to antiquity is an artificial construct, “a contemporary

invention whose dominance hides the facts of social creation.”23 The PAP
was using a construction of an invented historical notion of a pan-Asian
family to guide family formation for the future nation. That is, the state
was reaching for a connection to an imagined past, calling on a historical
fantasy to add legitimacy to a contemporary policy. Whereas this imagined
family was large and multigenerational, actual Singaporean families tend to
be nuclear.24 The PAP has directly encouraged larger and multigenerational
families via its population and housing policies, but in contemporary Singa-
pore the imagined historical Asian family has yet to emerge. The imagined
family does, however, make regular appearances in home economics and
domestic science textbooks.

Taking the Curry Out of Curriculum

Ideas of what the imagined family might cook fill many pages in home
economics textbooks, but not just in the form of recipes; planning the
meal is as time-consuming as cooking it. The theme of meal planning is
evident in the 1978 ‘O’ Level textbook Towards Understanding of Food and
Cooking, which has a special chapter on the topic. The focus is largely on
balanced meals and balanced diets. Section 10 of the chapter deals with
the issue of attractiveness and maintains that “a meal should look nice.”25 A
range of suggestions for improving the appearance of “drab” looking food
is offered, including the addition of color—maybe in the form of red chil-
ies or a colored sauce, even a gravy containing a browning agent. Decora-
tions, the text suggests, such as fruit or herb garnishes, can also be used
to improve the appearance of a dish. In fact, chapter 36, “Colour, Flavour
and Texture,” is largely devoted to issues concerning the appeal of food,
including, but not restricted to, its appearance. Students are encouraged
to learn about color and flavor by adding flavorings and colors that do not
match to jellies (red with banana flavor, green with strawberry) and test-
ing people’s responses.26 The semi-scientific approach moves this textbook
into the “domestic science” realm.
The section on the heating of “volatile flavors” undermines the scien-
tific credibility somewhat as students are told that volatile flavors should be
heated gently and for the shortest possible time. The advice concludes with
the perplexing statement, “When there is a delicious aroma in the kitchen
just remember that this means less flavor in the food!”27 The emphasis on
flavor loss continues in the discussion of herbs and spices, where students
84  .  chap ter 5

are told ground spices should be added in the last twenty minutes to long-
cooking items such as stews because “ground spices give out their flavor very
quickly.”28 While garlic is acknowledged as the sister to shallot, leek, and
chive, it is identified as being stronger and having a pungent flavor, and in
a text box that outlines how herbs should be used, it is noted that “garlic is
used sparingly in soups, stews, savory dishes and salads,”29 a description more
accurate in Britain than it is in Singapore or Southeast Asia more broadly.
In the section on local foods, primacy is given to English names; for ex-
ample, pandan leaves are described as “screw pine leaves.” Likewise, the di-
rections for the use of curry leaves (“the leaves have a strong flavor which
goes very well with almost every curry dish”)30 show a lack of understand-
ing of the concept of “curry.”31 The comment that coriander (cilantro) leaves
have a strong flavor “which does not appeal to some people” also suggests
unfamiliarity with local Singaporean food. In a supplemental text from the
1970s that explicitly aimed to focus on local recipes, the European tradition
was still framed as being superior, with the text noting that “Western recipes
are included for variety and because they often involve more skill and know-
how in both the preparation, cooking and serving.”32 Skill and know-how
here serve to marginalize knowledge that is not Western.
The textbook’s advice to wash dried and crystallized fruits the night be-
fore use and spread them on a papered tray to dry overnight suggests a lack
of familiarity with both the physical environment (Singapore has very high
humidity) and the fauna—a tray of wet and sticky sugary treats would be
highly desirable to tropical insects. Of the ten key “cooking hints” offered at
the start of the book, six pertain to European baking traditions, conveying
the ideological dominance not only of European food traditions, but of bak-
ing as the foundation to European and colonial food traditions—let them
eat cake!
The section on réchauffé (reheated leftover foods) suggests a further unfa-
miliarity with Singaporean food practices. Writing about Indian cookbooks,
Arjun Appadurai made the point that leftover food is highly problematic
in Indian food traditions, and the efforts in the 1970s to develop a cooking
style that uses them reflects broad social changes.33 For a variety of reasons,
leftovers are not well regarded in Singapore, so the book’s inclusion of them
ignores these cultural sensitivities. Chinese Singaporeans hold firm ideas
about “wind,” especially in relation to leftover rice, and for Indian Singa-
poreans the same Hindu ideas about leftovers and leavings that Appadurai
identified are at play. The advice to add “extra flavorings such as curry powder
 jam tarts, spot ted dicks, and curry  ·  85

or tomato sauce” to give leftovers new flavor makes some assumptions about
what kinds of food might be left over to begin with.34 A leftover sponge can
be made into a trifle, but a leftover laksa is quite a different proposition.
The local foodway plays a much more substantial role in the 1976 syllabus,
with Malay foods dominating the cookery curriculum. The oven, however,
continues to dominate non-Malay cookery. Students begin by learning how
to make scones, sweet biscuits (cookies), butter cake, sponge cakes, and baked
custard. As the term progresses, students attempt more complex items such as
fruitcake, cream puffs, cream horns, and puddings, as well as auxiliary tasks
such as making fancy icing. For students in the more advanced stream, theory
classes are added in which students learn about concepts, but without neces-
sarily having an opportunity to practice the skills or make the dishes. Here
additional baked goods such as gingerbread, brandy snaps, shortbread, and
Easter specialties are included, and students also learn about pastry—flaky
for meat pies, choux pastry for éclairs.35 At the Form 5 level (equivalent to
the tenth grade), when students could sit for the Cambridge School Certifi-
cate in Domestic Science, students were also required to learn the theory of
afternoon teas and tea parties, all of which rely heavily on goods baked in
the oven. Even in guides and textbooks written explicitly for the Singaporean
context, the advice given often displays either an ignorance of or a willful
disregard for real circumstances. The centrality of ovens is a perfect example
of this and reflects a tradition established early on in colonial manuals.
Comparatively little attention is paid to the provision of special diets along
religious lines. Occasional mention is made of halal meals, but less than you
might expect in a society that is more than 10 percent Muslim. The material
about vegetarianism makes some reference to the religious practices of Hindus
but does so in quite basic terms (“Rajan: I am Hindu and I do not eat meat.”)36
Vegetarianism is seen in relatively negative terms, particularly in relation to
meal planning, in which the absence of traditional European forms of protein
appear to make provision of a balanced meal a more challenging task. As the
authors of Towards Understanding of Food and Cooking put it: “Planning a
balanced diet for such people is rather like planning a journey for someone
who will not travel by air, road or rail!”37 Soy products, common in many of
the food traditions of Singapore, are lauded but not as extensively as might
be expected, reflecting, perhaps, a European sensibility about tofu.
Slimming advice is akin to the Atkins diet: “eat plenty of cheese and eggs”
and “as much as you like” of meat and fish, while reducing the consump-
tion of cereals “severely.”38 The slimming diet returns us to the theme of the
86  .  chap ter 5

student/proto-housewife as subject. It is her body that is the subject of the

slimming diet. Generally being fat is not an explicit theme in the textbooks,
but the neat body stands in for some of that discussion.
If, as John E. Finn, writing about the politics of food culture, suggests, reci-
pes are best understood as a type of political instrument, “a particular form
of political obligation” in which the cook and reader submit to “the terms
and commands of the recipe,”39 then this is even more the case in textbooks
that are already imbued with the authority to command. Finn is especially
interested in the tyranny of recipes that claim to produce the “perfect” x or
y, and while this is not a feature of the recipes in home economics textbooks,
ideologically speaking, there are a number of similarities. Most tellingly for
Finn, there is a connection between how we follow recipes and political cul-
ture. He concludes that “perfect recipes do more than make bad cooks—they
make bad citizens; they encourage habits of docility and deference, both of
which are inimical to democratic citizenship.”40 For the colonial administra-
tion and for the government of newly independent Singapore, the ideology
of recipe following, the making of docile and deferential citizens, was not
inimical to their political goals but, rather, essential.

The Moral Dimension of the Clean Kitchen

Textbooks and recipes are being read here as the sites of the transforma-
tion of national ideology. That students of home economics and domestic
science need moral as well as political training should come as no surprise.
For the newly independent postcolonial state, personal responsibility was a
moral and a political requirement. Proto-citizens were being taught to take
responsibility for their actions and to understand their role in making soci-
ety function smoothly. In discussions of “safety,” responsibility is repeatedly
stressed. One textbook, for example, states that “accidents in the kitchen
such as burns, scalds, cuts, falls and poisoning are common” and that “of-
ten these accidents are due to carelessness, apathy, poor lighting and faulty
equipment.”41 Here the key piece of faulty equipment is the housewife, and
it is through her “good housekeeping” that sources of kitchen danger can be
reduced. The “keypoint,” articulated in a shaded text box, makes this rela-
tionship explicit: “Although kitchens can be made reasonably safe by good
design, they have to be kept safe by good housekeeping.”42
In one text, the importance of the individual housekeeper is neatly en-
capsulated by the subheading “Food hygiene starts with you.”43 It includes
advice about bodily adornment along with that about the shortness of
 jam tarts, spot ted dicks, and curry  ·  87

nails. In a nine-point plan for kitchen hygiene, point six included the edict:
“Do not use nail polish as it may chip.”44 The 1961 Syllabus for Domestic
Science in Primary and Secondary Schools had “Hygiene in the Kitchen” as
its first principle, and it explicitly stated that throughout the course, “the
underlying theme is cleanliness of person, utensils, kitchen premises and
in preparation of food.”45 The syllabus was divided by educational level
and across years; the general two-year course was, for example, intended
to provide “a high standard of manipulative skill” rather than theoretical
knowledge.46
The syllabus was divided into four sections; teachers were, however, en-
couraged to cross-reference material in the different sections. In relation to
the theme of cleanliness of person and kitchen, the connection is explicitly
made for teachers, and they are told that “care of hair” links up with “cor-
rect foods to eat” and “washing of hair ribbons” with “brushes and combs,”
which in turn connects to “care of sinks.”47 Care of hair and care of sinks are
ideologically linked in this syllabus—the clean body being a prerequisite
for the clean kitchen. Neatness and cleanliness are embodied, literally and
metaphorically, in Singaporean domestic science education.
In the image presented with this lesson, a young girl adorned in neat
clothes displays her clean apron and herself. One hand holds the edge of the
apron, extending and emphasizing it; her other hand is in the air drawing
attention to herself as an object. Below this illustration of what we can pre-
sume is a “good student” is the text “Keep germs to yourself.”48 The smiling
home economics student is proud of her status as clean and neat, as well as
of her apron.
Two pages later the young girl/student is transformed into the housewife.
The text acknowledges that while many people enjoy cooking, not as many
enjoy washing up, but suggests that if domestic work is properly organized,
then washing up can be done easily and quickly and even “made quite pleas-
ant.”49 The illustration simply titled “Washing up” shows a young woman of
indistinguishable ethnicity, but with a slightly glazed look, about halfway
through the task of washing a large stack of dishes (see figure 4). Her apron
is fuller than that of the students—just as her role is fuller. She is, however,
still neatly and cleanly dressed.
The 1976 Domestic Science Syllabus remained the same as the 1961 version
for the two-year general stream, even drawing the identical line between
care of hair and care of sinks. At the other levels, though, a more modern
touch was evident. The syllabus begins with a statement by Lee Siow Mong,
then Director of Education at the Ministry of Education. Domestic science,
88  .  chap ter 5

Figure 4. Illustration of a girl washing dishes from a home economics textbook. Copy-
right © 1986 Longman Singapore Publishers (Pte) Ltd. Reproduced from New Home
Economics 1 (2d ed.) by permission of Pearson Education South Asia Pte Ltd.

teachers were told, “paves the way for happier homes.”50 A connection be-
tween modern practices in domestic science and classical Chinese practices
was made, and although it acknowledged that “the times have changed,”
the Ministry of Education endorsed a division of duties between men and
women. It should not be regarded, teachers were told, as a matter of the in-
ferior and the superior but as a way of dividing “a complete whole in home
life,” and life is, apparently, made more interesting that way.51 Once again the
 jam tarts, spot ted dicks, and curry  ·  89

state makes a connection to an imagined past and evokes it when politically

expedient. The modern is interpreted through the lens of the traditional and
is found to be concomitant rather than oppositional.
The emphasis on clean bodies continued in later home economics texts. Ad-
vice in a 1986 textbook verges on the robotic: to ensure an orderly preparation
of breakfast, fill the kettle the night before (preferably an automatic or whistle
kettle), turn it on when you get up, and then brush your teeth and shower, by
which time the kettle will be ready. The need for speed is considered in alterna-
tive breakfast plans. On days when you have more time for breakfast it might
include fried rice, porridge, or prata with curry; when you have little time,
toast or bread with eggs, or bacon and sausages, or baked beans; when there
is a real hurry, “a cup of milk-based drink and some cake or biscuits.”52 The
less time one has in the morning, the more European the breakfast appears to
be, reinforcing connections between culture and modernity.
According to a 1966 Malaysian supplemental text (not the syllabus but a
reference book developed with the Home Economics Syllabus in mind), there
are four basic aims that the “good cook/housewife” should have: “to serve
enjoyable meals; to keep her family well nourished; to practice thrift where
necessary; and to save time and energy wherever possible.”53 The edicts to be
thrifty are accompanied by advice that, while potentially helpful in Malaysia,
was not compatible with the geographic constraints of Singapore, even in the
1960s, such as burying waste or composting and keeping hens and growing
vegetables.54 Even when textbooks were attempting to engage with the spe-
cifics of a local environment, it was not that locale that was being engaged
with but, rather, an imagined Other.

Campaigns, Cookbooks, and Public Health

Cookbooks were often closely linked to government campaigns and em-
bodied much of the same public health advice as did textbooks. In 1969, for
example, an increase in the price of rice—over 40 percent in a twelve-month
period—prompted an “Eat more wheat” campaign. The Minister of Science
and Technology endorsed a multilingual cookbook aimed at reducing the
dependency on one grain. The government, keen to protect citizens from
the price increase, saw diversification, a strategy it still uses, as the solution.
With its unique agricultural situation, total dependence on imports, Singa-
pore was, and remains, particularly vulnerable to price increases because
there are no other crops to soften the impact. As with other campaigns, a key
90  .  chap ter 5

component was citizen participation, in this instance via housewives’ search-

ing for “cheap wheat meals.” The willingness and enthusiasm of Singaporean
housewives to participate in this process led the minister to describe the
search as “a new social consciousness, which will stand Singapore in good
stead in the years ahead.”55
Two decades later the focus had shifted from encouraging diversification
to encouraging moderation, reflecting global anxieties about obesity. Eat-
ing the Healthy Way, a publication from the Training and Health division of
the Education Department, endorsed the motto: “Variety, moderation and
balance.”56 The underlying premise of the book is that Singaporeans enjoy
food “very much . . . a bit too much.”57 Other government publications share
this view, but are also realistic. A guide such as Eating Out: Better Choice at
Hawker Centers acknowledges that more than 50 percent of the average Sin-
gaporean food budget is spent on eating out, and of that, 80 percent is spent
at hawker centers.58 That is, rather than advocating widespread change (from
rice to wheat) as in 1969, this guide aims to help consumers make informed
choices so they will select healthier options.
Eating Out uses case studies to illustrate the principles of healthy choices.
The character called Mr. Lim eats for a day and then his choices are evaluated.
He lacks variety in his diet—he selected noodles for all three meals, and he
chose items that were too high in saturated fat and salt. The guide suggests
how small changes could improve Mr. Lim’s nutrition: his dinner of fried
prawn noodles is traded for rice porridge accompanied by a vegetable side
dish of either gado-gado (an Indonesian salad with a spicy peanut dressing)
or rojak (a Malay chopped salad). He is encouraged to replace his dessert
of bubor cha cha (a yam and coconut dish) with fruit. This is incremental
change, gentle rather than coercive. It is toward the end of the volume that
Singaporeans are encouraged to alternate eating out with eating at home.59
Underlying these public health messages is a concern for hygiene, espe-
cially for the home cook. In an elaborate volume titled Food for Thought: A
Handbook on Food Safety and Hygiene (1989), the close relationship between
food producers and the state is made clear. Although the book is published by
the Ministry of the Environment, it is sponsored by Nestlé Singapore “in the
interest of consumer education or food safety and public health.”60 There is a
lot of practical advice about how to perform such key tasks as reading labels.
This advocacy of media literacy is impressive. Also, in a tropical environment,
the advice about the storage of perishable goods and the importance of using
reputable vendors for refrigerated and frozen goods is especially pertinent.
The illustrations include the correct sequence in which items should be pur-
 jam tarts, spot ted dicks, and curry  ·  91

chased. A stylized shopping cart, pushed by a simply dressed young woman,

is filled first with canned goods, then vegetables and fruits, with meats being
added last. The graphic is simple, as if for a semi-literate audience, and is
accompanied by the text: “Sequence of purchase: Make sure you buy meats
and highly perishable items like ice-cream last.”61 A box of ice cream sits on
the very top of the cart.

* * *
For one hundred years Singapore’s domestic manuals and textbooks mir-
rored a broad historical trajectory—from empire to decolonization and the
emergence of a new nation, one that remained deeply imbued with ideas
of empire. Home economics textbooks taught Singaporeans first how to be
proto-subjects and then how to be proto-citizens. Young Singaporean women
were taught to have a neat kitchen, prepare thrifty meals, or bake a sponge
cake, but what they were actually learning from these discursive sites were
the values of social order, including their domestic gender role, and fiscal
responsibility. Food preparation and cooking at home were marginalized in
discourses of femininity, reflecting the importance to the state of domestic-
ity (not cooking) as a site of citizenship training—with ideology preeminent
over outcome. Examination of the gap between discourse and reality—teach-
ing students how to bake cakes in ovens they did not have—continues in
the following chapter in the context of cookbooks, in which the disparity is
reflected in a move away from actual cooking and toward the cookbook as
aspirational and cultural guide.
 6
The Pizza of Love

Cookbooks claiming to represent a national cuisine provide a unique

opportunity to look at the way their authors use food and food preparation
to define national identity. A recent upsurge in cookbooks produced by com-
munity organizations (Singaporean and international), chefs, food writers,
government departments, schools, and food producers purports to offer
readers a guide to cooking authentic Singaporean food. But in a society where
the kitchen has a diminished role, as established in Chapter 4, the purchase
or giving of a cookbook takes on new meaning. When the book is not being
used for cooking, its function as an indicator of social status or of aspira-
tionalism, and as a signifier of traditional values becomes more prominent.
As we will see, in modern Singapore the symbolic value of the cookbook far
outshines its culinary regard. Through the pages of these books, food in the
abstract provides the citizens with an illusion of cultural connection that
ultimately serves the government by endorsing a notion of racial harmony
based on multiracialism. A cookbook is not just a guide to cookery; it does
important ideological work, tethering identity to the nation.

Setting the Boundaries of a National Cuisine

Drawing on the work of Arjun Appadurai on the making of a national cui-
sine in India, in this chapter I suggest that the Othering of ethnic groups in
Singapore is a critical function of Singaporean cookbooks and an explanation
for their popularity. Appadurai points to the “ethnic cameos” featured in the
introductions to India’s regional and ethnic cookbooks and draws a line from
 the pizza of love  ·  93

them back to earlier colonial ethnographic projects. He suggests that these

ethnic cameos form part of a growing collection of images and texts about
the ethnic Other that constitute what he calls an “‘ethnoethnicity,’ rooted in
the details of regional recipes, but creating a set of generalized gastroethnic
images.”1 For Singapore, with its tiny landmass, regional differences make no
sense. Appadurai’s arguments can, however, be extended to this context. The
process of codification and boundary making to which he points is all the
more meaningful in a small place where boundaries are intensely patrolled,
both by the state and by individuals, in efforts to maintain identity.
The gastroethnic images that Appadurai identifies as produced by insiders
and outsiders in India are likewise produced by multiple sources in Singapore,
and like their Indian equivalents they constitute a continuing refinement
of the culinary conception of the Other.2 The function of these images is
similar to the case of India and different. That is, in both instances there is a
clear nationalist function—creation of a national cuisine. Appadurai suggests
that in the Indian case the absorption of regional and ethnic specialties into
a national narrative served to eliminate the most exotic, peculiar, and dis-
tinctive aspects of the cuisine. In this instance, national can be equated with
standardized, so that whole regional idioms are represented by “characteris-
tic dishes.” In the Singaporean case, ethnicity is represented in gastroethnic
images, and identity presupposes identification with certain dishes, but the
making of this national cuisine emphasizes, rather than downplays, differ-
ence. National cuisine, then, offers a space where the differentiation between
what is multiracial and what is multicultural can be seen.

Stories in the Spaces

Since the rise of social history and academic interest in the informal writ-
ings of women, scholarly attention increasingly has been drawn to journals,
domestic manuals, and unpublished cookery guides. As the folklorist Janet
Theophano noted, “There is much to be learned from reading a cookbook
besides how to prepare food—discovering the stories told in the spaces be-
tween the recipes or within the recipes themselves.”3 For Theophano, the
spaces reveal women’s experiences, an avenue for accessing the voices of
women long dead and generally forgotten by mainstream historical accounts.
Given the relative newness of Singapore as a nation-state, the spaces reveal
an additional set of stories. There are colonial guides to housekeeping and
domestic arts that might give us some insight into the lives of colonial women
in Singapore when it was a Crown colony, and the spaces left in manuals of
94  .  chap ter 6

domestic science (examined in Chapter 5) clearly tell stories. Less attention

has been paid to the more contemporary cookbooks, but I suggest that the
spaces in these texts are as revealing, although the story they tell is of a na-
tional agenda, of clearly demarcated ethnic categories. Singaporean cook-
books reflect Singaporean society—the struggles of a new nation, of identity
formation of a multiracial society. Sometimes, this narrative is explicitly told
in prefaces and recipe descriptions, but we can also see it in less obvious ways
in a wide variety of Singaporean cookbooks: in recipe selection, in cooking
method, and in illustrations. Appadurai writes of the sense of advocacy that
animated many of the authors of Indian cookbooks, of the urgent need for
specific regional dishes and practices to be included in the national narra-
tive; for Singapore there is a similar sense of advocacy representing a desire
for national inclusion.
As the literary scholar Nicola Humble reminds us, “any cookbook offers
us an abundance of meanings and readings.”4 Audiences vary, and specific
readers read in varied manners for varied reasons. We might simultaneously
read a cookbook for inspiration, to get a new idea about what to cook for
dinner, and to be comforted by an imagining of the food of our childhood.
For Humble cookbooks tell us a lot: “They tell us what we fear and what we
desire, about our bodies and our appetites, our domestic politics, our eco-
nomic circumstances and our fantasies. They tell us who we are, and who we
want to be.”5 In a postcolonial context, cookbooks also tell us who we have
been. Appadurai suggests that cookbooks are often located in a literature of
exile, of nostalgia and loss—both of the colonial power, now diminished,
and of citizens in exile. A clear parallel between India and Singapore can
be drawn here. Cookbooks such as The Raffles Hotel Cookbook, celebrating
both the cuisine of the iconographic hotel and a genre of food, exemplify
the nostalgia for Empire. As Appadurai suggests, such books “inflate and
reify a historically specific tradition and make it serve metonymously, for
the whole.”6

Cookbooks à la Colonial
Drawing heavily on their Indian counterparts, Singaporean and Malayan
advice manuals, like school textbooks, are filled with instructions that would
have been virtually impossible to fulfill in Singapore. As recent work by liter-
ary scholars such as Anna Johnston and Ralph Crane has indicated, colonial
cookbooks tell us about far more than the goings-on in the colonial kitchen.
In the context of India, they note that the idea of the Victorian domestic angel
 the pizza of love  ·  95

presiding over the bourgeois home was critical not only to the imagining of
the British nation but, by extension, to the imagining of Britishness abroad
in the form of the British Empire.7
A 1953 volume by P. Allix, Menus for Malaya, a guide to “the art of menu
planning,” provides an insight into the project of British colonial identity
making. It is all the more revealing in that the identity formation is taking
place at the moment of its passing, at the end of the British Empire. In a
close reading of the text we can see how menu planning was an attempt to
use consumption to define identity. For Allix, menu planning, while guided
by some central principles such as variety, is an art, not a science, requiring
(like colonialism itself) “imagination and creative insight.”8 The inspiration
for the volume was the headaches caused to housewives, hotel chefs, board-
ing house manageresses, club caterers, and others having to think out daily
menus. Allix reveals culinary ideologies of the time, such as paying attention
to what was “popularly considered to be the correct amounts of vitamins
and proteins and minerals.” The book is explicitly intended for the “English
speaking food-lovers” in Malaya, and it is this audience that makes the vol-
ume of particular interest to this project. The aim of the book, in the words
of the author, was “to do no more than to suggest a selection of menus, more
in European style, but also in the tradition of Malaya.”9
Allix does very much more than to suggest a selection of menus—the book
provides an insight into a very specific postwar moment as the British Empire
was fading. The book, with almost 120 pages, is filled with advertisements,
many of which cannot be found elsewhere, and these, too, provide an insight
into life in Malaya (see Chapter 7). There is also an elaborate explanation at
the start of the book of the use of French terms in an English-language book:
the terms not only provide the name of a dish but also indicate the method
of preparation. Crème Comtesse, however, seems like a linguistic stretch for
Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup garnished with “green peas and chopped
cooked green lettuce leaves.”10
Many of the Menus for Malaya recipes require an oven, a persistent theme
we have seen in textbooks and other domestic manuals. From pastries baked
in the oven to meat roasted in the oven, the oven is central in the suggested
meal planning. Given the high temperatures in Malaya, using an oven, es-
pecially for dishes that are cooked for a number of hours, would have been
physically uncomfortable for the household. The proposed methods are also
very labor-intensive—the Cold Byculla Soufflé, for example, requires eggs
and sugar to be beaten for half an hour until the mixture has quadrupled in
size. It is interesting that the guide makes no mention of domestic servants,
96  .  chap ter 6

how to direct them, or tasks that might be appropriate for them. There are
occasional references to local measurements (“add half katti of rice”), but the
lifestyle, as evidenced both by elaborate luncheons and multi-course evening
meals and by the contents of the advertising, suggests substantial domestic
help. The maid is thus present, yet strikingly absent. As we have already es-
tablished, the recipes require prior knowledge and are not written in such a
way that they could simply be given to a domestic servant or translated and
given. The owners of Menus for Malaya were likely transitional figures—living
a colonial life, but also a British life. The presence of servants was perhaps
so obvious as not to require mention.
Allix’s collection claims to be a selection of menus “more in European style,
but also in the tradition of Malaya.” The tradition of Malaya is understood as
something that can add a little bit of exoticism to the table but which has to
be contained—a “Sunday Curry” or the occasional Chinese dish and some
appetizers and savories being acceptable nods to location, but not more.11 A
dish such as Fillet of Ikan Merah Portugaise (fish poached in the Portuguese
style) gives an appearance of exoticism, but an examination of the recipe (fish
poached in wine, which is reduced and used in a white sauce that is poured
over the fish along with tomatoes cooked in butter and finished in the oven)
locates the dish firmly in a European tradition and in a menu that begins
with smoked salmon on toast and ends with a chocolate soufflé via jacket
potatoes and braised cabbage.12
A number of the menus include fish dishes with combination Malay-French
names that are very European in style: Ikan Huro Bretonne (with capers and
onions), Ikan Tinggiri Bercy (tomato purée and butter), and Ikan Merah
Aurore (with a mornay sauce mixed with tomato purée). Even when space
is given for the “traditions of Malaya,” it is a European tradition, a tradition
of colonial life, not of Malay life. This is a colonial remaking and a colonial
repurposing in which food comes to stand for “way of life,” and the local is
remade into the colonial. After all, despite the claim to the contrary, the sun
was setting on the British Empire, and Allix is taking a stance against it.
The curries, when they do appear on the Sunday menu, come with only
the most vague directions. “Kofta curry and rice” is described as “curried
minced mutton balls” that are to be simmered in “curry sauce with coconut
milk.”13 The instructions for Herring Roes à la Madras (“The herring roes
are poached, then rolled in curry powder and chutney, wrapped in a slice of
bacon, fried and served on toast”) suggest that less direction may provide for
a better result.14 Given the British engagement with Indian food in Britain,
it should come as no surprise that the curry Allix refers to is vague. Britain
 the pizza of love  ·  97

had a complex yet somewhat ambivalent relationship with curry.15 Curry,

although not invented by the British, was adopted and adapted by them,
making it a powerful site of meaning making, even today.16
The recipes in Menus for Malaya for local dishes such as nasi goreng are
very loose interpretations of traditional dishes. In typical colonial style, they
include far more protein than did the original dishes, in this case, Chinese
sausage, prawns, pork belly, chicken meat, chicken liver, and egg. After the
meats and mushrooms are fried, boiled rice is added and fried for five min-
utes. Key instructions, such as using rice that has not just been cooked, are
also missing. In general, the instructions given are not very practical, and
while the author begins the book by saying that it is assumed readers have
“cooking skills and a willingness to learn,” a fair degree of skill is required to
interpret the recipes.17 It would, for example, take an experienced cook to turn
the instructions for jam beignets into jam beignets: “Prepare some ordinary
‘Pâté à Choux.’ Fry in hot deep oil by small quantity (one dessertspoonful at
a time). When well puffed and golden brown in colour drain them well and
fill them up with jam.”18 The instructions for Cream à la Czarina require the
maker to know what “white soup” is and how to make it before adding the
garnish of shredded ham, olives, and sultanas.19
The obscure directions raise the issue of audience and expectations. Did
Allix expect that the readers of Menus for Malaya would already know how
to make a choux pastry or that they would have a maid that did? Or, to put
it another way, does this reflect assumptions about basic cooking skills of
the time or a lack of knowledge of the Malayan colonial kitchen?
Occasional concessions to the Malayan context are made in the form of
suggested substitutions—a can of sweet cherries for a cherry pie, “as there
are no fresh cherries on the Malayan market.”20 Advice on the refrigeration,
for fifteen minutes, of red wine in the tropics is further evidence of this.21
The recipe for whipped cream is as close as the collection comes to reflecting
the circumstances of cooking in Malaya. Allix suggests that whipped cream
can be obtained by partly freezing a can of Dutch Baby Milk, pouring the
semi-frozen contents into a bowl, adding lemon juice, and whipping.22 The
mixture apparently will hold for almost half an hour. On the page opposite
this handy hint there is an advertisement for “The Dutch Baby: Full Cream
Unsweetened Evaporated Milk,” so perhaps the innovation came from the
manufacturer.
All of the menus include items that would have been challenging to pro-
cure in Malaya and are certainly not reflective of the tropical temperatures
(Hungarian Goulash and Vienna Schnitzel on the same day, one for lunch,
98  .  chap ter 6

one for dinner). Specialty meats such as pigeon are regularly featured. The
construction of the phrase “in the European manner” reflects not so much
different European styles of eating but the inclusion of European dishes in
a broadly British menu. Beef and Yorkshire pudding thus appear a week be-
fore ravioli. The instructions for the making of Ravioli à l’Italienne are not
particularly Italian. The directions to “prepare some noodle paste and roll
it flat and thin” before filling it, making ravioli, and to “boil them in salted
water for ten minutes” are mitigated by the sage advice that “Ravioli can also
be bought ready made.”23 Likewise the Loin of Pork à la Sevilla, pork roasted
and served with a tomato sauce into which fried and chopped “pimientos”
have been added, is not very Spanish. Identity formation once again comes
via culinary appropriation—of the European as well as the local.
The colonial fantasy is not restricted to the British or relegated to the past
but is very much a part of the expatriate experience in Singapore. Seasoned
in Singapore, a cookbook produced by the American Women’s Association of
Singapore in 1983, exemplifies the expatriate cookbook; it is simultaneously
about Singapore and obviously not of it. The cover of the blue-and-white
book is consciously orientalist. The title is given in both English and Chinese
characters. The cover features a representation of the Kitchen God, who is
named and described on the inside cover. The audience for this cookbook
is very evidently not Singaporean. While profits from the sale of the book
went to Singaporean charities, the stated purpose of the book was to “offer
a fine selection of recipes, imaginative menus and entertaining hints to help
the Singapore hostesses enjoy entertaining in the tropics.”24 Note the use of
the phrase “Singapore hostesses,” not “Singaporean hostesses.” Beyond the
recipes, the menu plans are particularly revealing, highlighting both the
demographic for the book (British American Christmas Dinner, Farewell
Buffet for 30, Bridge luncheon for 12) and the specificity of the Singaporean
context (Picnic at Ponggol, Hungry Ghost Festival Supper, National Day).
It is, in fact, the menu for National Day that is listed first, positing this
Singaporean event as most important. The menu begins with a Singapore
Sling, the pink, foamy-topped cocktail made famous by Raffles Hotel but
consumed by few Singaporeans. Shrimp dip, with a cream cheese and may-
onnaise base, and a cold yogurt and cucumber soup continue the meal and
locate it in a firmly Western framework. The main dish, pork in papaya sauce,
tips its hat to Southeast Asia with the inclusion of papaya, but the method of
cooking chops in the oven with butter maintains the Western orientation of
the meal. The National Day menu concludes with a Cuppage market dessert.
There is a Cuppage road in Singapore, but the dessert—cooked custard with
 the pizza of love  ·  99

fruit—is not especially Singaporean, and I have found no other references to

a Cuppage market dessert of any sort. So Seasoned in Singapore’s celebration
of Singapore’s National Day is marked by conspicuously un-Singaporean
food, emphasizing perhaps the difference between the cultures.
Just four years later, the American Women’s Association of Singapore re-
leased another cookbook, Entertaining in Singapore, which was even more
conspicuously directed at the expatriate community, and in addition to reci-
pes, this volume included handy hints for life in the tropics.25 The focus
on lifestyle, as opposed to food, is made particularly clear in the extensive
shopping guide at the back of the book. Of the twenty-two categories of
shopping, only one is for food; tableware, invitations, and shoes play an even
more critical role in this construction of entertaining. The section on paper
goods, invitations and stationery, which includes subheadings for bridge ac-
cessories, calligraphy, engraving, photocopying, book binding, and special
party and holiday accessories, is almost as long as the section on food, even
including the cake and cookie decorating listings. Guidance is also given
about social matters. There is a degree of awkwardness in the advice itself, as
in the chapter “Irish Wake and Other Theme Parties,” in which funeral mat-
ters are considered alongside “white elephant parties.”26 This awkwardness
aside, both volumes, despite the use of Singapore in their titles, are actually
not about Singaporean food, but about food in Singapore. They do not con-
form to Appadurai’s gastroethnic framing because, in this understanding,
Singapore is not an ethnic landscape but a backdrop for another culture, in
this example, American culture. Yet they are still examples of cookbooks
as a site of identity making, in this instance the identity of the expatriate
American community.

Constructing and Reinventing the “Local”

The category “local” is used in Singapore to signify belonging; it is a device
that can both include and exclude. Doris Lau Siew Lang’s slim volume Cook
with Love: A Collection of Easy-to-Cook Local Recipes highlights the way
the term local is used in cookbooks and in relation to food.27 The book is
self-published via the company Ray of Hope, run by Doris and her husband
as a self-help and mental-health advocacy concern. The self-help message
behind the cookbook underscores a range of Singaporean national social
policies that encourage individuals and communities to take responsibil-
ity for themselves. And while there are just thirty-eight recipes in the Cook
with Love collection, it is perhaps representative of Singapore with its five
100  .  chap ter 6

categories: noodle dishes, curries, soups, sambals, and miscellaneous dishes.

Naming and categorizing dishes is a key part of the process of codifying and
communicating the national cuisine.
The noodle dishes are Laksa, Lor Mee, Fried Hokkein Mee, Prawn Mee
Soup, Char Kway Teow, Mee Goreng, Yong Tau Foo Beehoon Soup, Hor Fun,
Wonton Mee, and Fishball Minced Pork Mee Soup. Many of these dishes
could equally well be listed in the “soup” category. Laksa, the first of the
dishes, holds a special place in the minds of Singaporeans and appears in
almost every collection of Singaporean recipes. What is striking about this
is that it is not a dish often cooked at home; the recipe, then, has another
function—recording for posterity, not for cooking. The dish that is unlikely
to be cooked must still be recorded because of the connection it provides to
an imagined tradition. Chan Kwee Sung, in his collection of memories of
Singapore, laments the passing of the “old laksa”: “The distinctive taste of the
original laksa was lost long ago when it was introduced into haute monde
eating outlets.” For him, the inclusion of extras such as cockles seems “a sac-
rilege to the genuine laksa lover.”28 Laksa now is not only a dish eaten out;
it is one that has been reinvented. And as we will see in Chapter 8, laksa is
also monumentalized in the National Museum of Singapore.
The other dishes that feature in Lang’s collection appear in nearly all other
Singaporean cookbooks, too. It is not just laksa that makes the claim of
street-food-as-home-food. Char kway Teow, a very Singaporean noodle dish,
is much more likely to be eaten out, generally at a hawker stall, than it is to
be cooked at home. Local food is understood as street food even though, or
perhaps precisely because, it is purchased outside, not cooked at home. In
fact, a study of recipe lists in Singaporean cookbooks bears a striking simi-
larity to the items in James Hooi’s Guide to Singapore Hawker Food, which
is intended to show the reader “how to order, what to order and other indis-
pensible information to get around the Hawker Food Stalls.”29 What we are
seeing is the emergence of a national cuisine composed of dishes cooked for
you, not by you, yet still recorded in cookbooks. Cookbooks are thus sites
of national meaning making, as opposed to guides to how to cook specific
dishes, although such information is included.
According to an ASEAN cookbook, “the appeal of Singapore’s cooking
comes from the melting pot of the subtlety and blandness of Chinese cook-
ing blended with the spiciness of Malay and Indian food.”30 While the term
“blandness” is problematic here, the notion of hybridity is key to the way
Singaporean food is conceptualized for local and foreign consumption. The
sociologists Chua Beng Huat and Ananda Rajah suggest that the first step
toward the inscription and codification of food as ethnic is the consumer
 the pizza of love  ·  101

menu that identifies the food item as “ethnic.”31 The cookbook is the second
step in this process, deepening the connection between an ethnic group
and a dish and allowing for food to function as a register for ethnicity. The
notion of hybridity in food presupposes a category of pure cuisine, which,
of course, does not exist. In a context of the conscious fusion of cuisines,
of food as hybridity, the issue of authenticity in Singaporean food becomes
complicated; it is the hybrid that is understood as authentic, although the
hybridity relies on the easy recognition of the categories from which the fu-
sion comes. Hybridity also works to underscore national policies according
to which hybridity is simultaneously feared, revered, and bounded.

Hybridity as Authenticity
Authenticity becomes one of the ways in which identity is defined, yet much
of the discussion of authenticity outside Singapore focuses on the authentic
outside of its original setting—does this Shanghai dumpling I am eating in
New York taste as it would in Shanghai? For the food writer Roger Owen,
debates about authenticity lead us to ask the wrong questions. He suggests
that we should not ask if a dish is a perfect copy but, rather, “Was the dish
cooked with a knowledge of its country and culture of origin?”32 In Owen’s
view, it is the appropriation of another culture, or borrowing, that is the
starting point, but the conundrum of authenticity remains at the heart of
the problem:
Borrowing takes place at all levels from snack bars and fast food chains to posh
hotels and famous restaurants, but in all these places, I suggest, we shall find,
however “naturalized” the food may have become, however dumbed-down,
denatured or cheapened, it brings with it a significant amount of cultural
baggage that is not strictly necessary to either the cooks or their customers;
and this baggage, some of it smuggled in, some of it brazenly flaunted, is all
in the name of authenticity.33

For Singapore, the borrowed is the authentic. Notions of fusion underlie this
claim, much as they do in cities that celebrate culinary diversity such as New
Orleans with the French, Cajun, and soul food influences in its cuisine. The
space of hybridity in this rhetoric emerges as the original, the authentic. It
is the process of borrowing that provides both novelty and the evidence of
authenticity.
Appadurai suggested that “the surest sign of the emergence of an authen-
tically Indian cuisine is the appearance of cookbooks that deal with special
audiences and special types of food . . . perhaps the central categorical thrust
102  .  chap ter 6

is the effort to define, codify and publicize regional cuisines.”34 In the context
of China, it has been suggested that a national cuisine relies on the presence
of regional cuisines so that a variety of recipes and regional techniques are
represented.35 The presence of food traditions that have a history far greater
than that of the Singaporean nation-state is key to authenticity in Singapore.
The authenticity is quite literally appropriated from another culture and time.
It is not regionalism or regional cuisines so much as other ethnic or national
cuisines that serve to allow Singaporean dishes to coalesce as a compartmen-
talized, but nonetheless national, cuisine. Hainanese chicken rice as cooked
in Singapore does not resemble chicken dishes in the Chinese province of
Hainan, but the suggestion that the dish has a long tradition located in China
gives it a legitimacy, allowing an awareness of the dish as simultaneously “old”
and “new.” Most important, it creates space for ethnic identities to cohabit
with a national identity—the hyphenated Chinese-Singaporean.
As the sociologist Jack Goody argued in the early 1980s, cookbooks illumi-
nate structures of production, distribution, class, and hierarchy.36 Appadurai
points to the construction of a national cuisine as an essentially postindus-
trial, postcolonial process, in which the regional and ethnic roots of the food,
and thereby the nation, are not hidden but instead celebrated.37 Appadurai
highlights the representation of Mughlai cuisine as “Indian cuisine” as an
important step in the construction of a national cuisine, suggesting that the
presence of regional food as national food strengthens the idea of national
cuisine even as it points to difference.38 Nyonyan food serves a similar func-
tion in the Singaporean context. The Nyonyan population is not numerically
dominant, but the cuisine is overrepresented in cookbooks, and Nyonyan
food often serves as an acceptable symbol of hybridity.
Nyonyan or Peranakan food, a cuisine that represents Chinese and Malay
intermarriage, with Chinese techniques coupled with Malay flavors, has a
special place in the definition of a Singaporean food. The food needs to be
neither popular nor popularly cooked in order to be Singaporean. The power
of Nyonyan (sometimes spelled Nonyan) food lies in its metaphorical value.
As the first line in the cookbook Nonya Favourites reminds readers, Nyo-
nyan food was “fusion before the phrase was even coined.”39 The notion that
this food reflects the cultural mix of the peoples of Singapore and reflects
the “cultural legacies of the Straits Chinese communities”40 of the region is
ideologically powerful. Yet at the same time, as Chua and Rajah note, for
non-Peranakans, the cuisine “resonates on the register of Chinese cuisine,
as a marker of Chinese ethnicity, in spite of the hybridization. The cuisine
remains a ‘Chinese’ cuisine because of the presence of pork.”41 So, for non-
 the pizza of love  ·  103

Peranakans, this cuisine exists as a marker of Chinese culture, a marker of

hybridity, and thus it codifies ethnic categories in a palatable manner.
Many Singaporean cookbooks consciously call on the past for legitimacy,
and so are unconsciously, to use Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, relying on “in-
vented traditions.”42 These invented ethnic pasts give legitimacy to culture
in support of “nation” and do so by selectively evoking cultural identity.
Food provides a site of tradition that poses little political threat but offers
deep cultural connection. The notion of recipes and traditions passed from
generation to generation is certainly not unique to Singapore—such motifs
are regularly deployed in the sales and marketing of cookbooks. In the Sin-
gaporean context, it is embodied in books with titles such as Grandmother’s
Recipes: Tales from Two Peranakan Kitchens.43 But what is the past that is being
evoked? For Singapore this is dangerous ground, for it is often the pre–nation-
state past that is being evoked. The danger lies not in the celebration of the
colonial but in the absence of the nation. Peranakan food, then, negotiates
the multiracial in a socially acceptable way; it becomes the guardian of the
past rather than an advocate for multiculturalism and provides an accept-
able national past that, because of the small size of the community, does not
destabilize existing racial hierarchies.
The acceptability of hybridity in food stands in contrast to the acceptability
of hybridity in sexual relations and marriage. To eat out is much more ac-
ceptable than to marry out. Culinary boundaries are more flexible, in part,
because “eating permits a variety of registers, tied to particular contexts,”
meaning something may be acceptable out that would not be at home.44
As Appadurai suggests in the context of India, the development of a na-
tional cuisine allows the middle class, in particular, to “maintain a rich and
context-sensitive repertoire of culinary postures, whereas in the matter of
marriage, there is the stark and usually irreversible choice between stay-
ing within the ambit of caste rules or decisively, permanently, and publicly
breaking them.”45 Eating out (of culture) in Singapore can be understood as
symbolizing modernity and cosmopolitanism and thus is separated from
what is acceptable in the domestic sphere. Cosmopolitanism is ultimately
permissible, but bounded.
For a multiracial society, levels of interracial marriage are very low.46
Boundaries may be blurred in eating out but not in making personal choices.
This logic can be extended to domestic cooking as well; a cookbook of another
ethnic group might be purchased or a collection that includes “fusion” dishes
bought, but this is a far cry from the cooking and eating of these dishes at
home. Appadurai argues that, “especially in culinary matters, the melting
104  .  chap ter 6

pot is a myth.”47 In the Singaporean context, the melting pot is central to the
national myth, but it is all about the location of the pot.
Singapore’s founding myth itself has hybridity at its heart. According to
legend, a Sumatran prince of antiquity once found shelter on an island dur-
ing a storm. There he encountered the Merlion, a lion with the body of a fish.
After defeating the inhabitants of Temasek, the island’s only settlement, he
renamed the island Singa Pura, or Lion City, in honor of the Merlion. Later
embellishments of the myth suggest that the Merlion is one of only five
mythical creatures to inhabit the earth. That it picked Singapore as its home
demonstrates the island’s “sacred mission.”48
The Merlion is both Singapore’s national symbol and the focus of its origin
myth. Its uniqueness and hybrid character are appropriate to the society it
represents. The small island state has a multiethnic population of almost five
million, including about a million foreign workers and noncitizens. It has
been a sovereign state for less than fifty years. The brevity of its history and
the complexity of its population are two problems that have confronted the
nation-making project in Singapore. Cookbooks provide one of many sites
in which that project can be read.
In 1964, just months before Singapore’s full independence, Ernest Gell-
ner argued that nationalism “invents nations where they do not exist.”49
In this influential formulation, he attributed an “agency” to nationalism,
a proposition criticized by some later theorists. Almost two decades later,
Benedict Anderson, while agreeing with Gellner about the creative powers
of nationalism, took umbrage at the suggestion that if nations are invented
(and therefore false and artificial), some other more “true” community
existed in contrast to the nation-state.50 Instead, Anderson proposed the
now-familiar idea that the nation is “an imagined political community,”
necessarily “limited and sovereign.”51 Anderson thus attributes national-
ism to the agency of the people, not, as Gellner did, to nationalism itself.
Anderson’s thesis relied on a specific understanding of history in which
certain events and trends became vehicles for the spread of national con-
sciousness. In particular, he privileged the printing press as an agent for
the transformation of identity, arguing that this new technology and sub-
sequent increased literacy allowed citizens to identify not just with their
local environment but also with a national community.52
The texts that Anderson is considering are not the cookbooks under con-
sideration in this chapter. And while cookbooks comprise just one agent for
the transformation of identity, they nevertheless are agents in this transforma-
tion. That is, in the repetition of a set of dishes that constitute “Singaporean
 the pizza of love  ·  105

cuisine,” a sense of Singaporean-ness is constructed—a shared view of the

nation that relies on a shared literature. The imagined national community
is, in the case of Singapore, repeatedly and variously imagined, and the state
is a regular and prolific author of imaginings.
One way nation-states or their governments have attempted to cement
national identity and a sense of belonging to the nation is by invoking the
past. More often than not this is an imagined past, or to return to Hobsbawm’s
phrase, an “invented tradition.” For Singapore, this process of construction
has been peculiarly difficult, given the absence of an appropriate past. Food,
though, provides safe ground in what is otherwise a rather contested his-
torical backdrop. Although we may read politics into food, it appears to be
“neutral.” It emerges as a nonthreatening medium in which the politics of
race, ethnicity, and identity can be showcased without formal political impli-
cations. It also forms an important national metaphor: if one can enjoy the
food of a rival community, then other types of connection might be formed.
The story of Singapore’s multiracial heritage is writ large in cookbooks.
Introductory sections, almost without fail, pay homage to the diverse culi-
nary traditions of Singapore’s multiracialism. For cookbook authors, then,
cuisine and history are inseparable. The narrative constructed about culinary
heritage stresses two features: diversity and uniqueness. In other words, Sin-
gapore has a series of rich ethnic and culinary traditions that come together
to make something that is uniquely Singaporean.
Few cookbook authors are historians, and the versions of the past that
are reproduced in cookbooks are, unsurprisingly, not very critical. Here,
the past is not made up of shades of gray but is clean and sharply contrasted
black and white. To an extent this approach is also reflected in recipe writ-
ing. While it is in vogue for a certain type of food writer to list substitutions
(or subversions) of traditions—this dish is usually made with olives, but I
prefer capers—there is a rigidity in the recipes of Singaporean cookbooks
that belies their contested nature. Even the title of one work, The Singaporean
Cookbook, implies a definite quality that is not experienced at table.53
The book is authorless, although the recipes were produced by six people;
this functions to emphasize the authority of the definite article in the title.
Judging from the introduction, the intended audience for this book is not
Singaporean. The descriptions of the country’s past are rudimentary, and the
detailed description of the way Singaporeans eat is something no Singapor-
ean would need to have explained! In this collection, no particular dish is
identified as being especially Singaporean, with the implication that the more
than two hundred recipes are all very Singaporean. That term does appear
106  .  chap ter 6

before a number of dishes, such as “Singaporean vegetable stock,” but not

before others—is the vegetable stock more Singaporean than the bean curd
soup made with that stock?54
The iconic Mrs. Lee’s Cookbook was first published in 1974, coinciding
with a period of rapid change in Singaporean society. While the cookbook
was ostensibly published so that “her grandchildren and future generations
would continue in the tradition of Nonya cuisine,”55 it can also be read as a
statement about culture. Belying the assumption that cookbooks are not po-
litical, Mrs. Lee’s Cookbook illustrates the inseparability of the political from
the ordinary. The mother of the “father of the nation” is far from ordinary,
especially in a society in which a discourse of eugenics was well established
with the success of progeny of the Lee family (Lee Kuan Yew’s son became
Prime Minister) serving as evidence of Lee’s assertion that Singapore was a
meritocratic society in which nature played more of a role than nurture.
While Lee Kuan Yew publicly promoted Chineseness via “learn Mandarin”
campaigns and the inclusion of Confucian studies in schools, cookbooks such
as his mother’s let citizens and visitors alike know what constituted an accept-
able deviation from that cultural frame. The ongoing need for this framing of
culture is evident in the continued popularity, reissuing and revising of the
cookbook. Almost thirty years after the first edition was released, Mrs. Lee’s
granddaughter, Shermay Lee, relaunched the cookbook “for a new genera-
tion.”56 A number of additional versions have also been released; there are
multiple volumes as well as versions in English and Chinese. The release of
these is often accompanied by significant publicity and promotion. Shermay
Lee’s version is recommended by the Singapore Tourist Board, which claims
that the original book is “a timeless collection of Peranakan recipes” that have,
despite their timelessness, been rewritten for a more “modern” context.57
At the launch in Kuala Lumpur, Shermay Lee noted that the book “is
geared towards those who have never touched a stone mortar and pestle in
their lives, the ‘modern’ Nyonyas and Babas, as well as metrosexual men.”58
The need to appeal to new markets is, of course, a pressing economic factor
in any publishing endeavor. Beyond this, the framing of modern Nyonyas
and Babas can be closely tied to the ongoing political and social function of
Mrs. Lee’s Cookbook. It embraces the modernity of technology; the modern
Nyonya—as embodied by Shermay Lee with her degree from Brown Uni-
versity and her investment banking background—uses a blender as well as
a mortar and pestle. This framing of modernity also poses the possibility of
a certain kind of modern man, the metrosexual, being interested in learn-
ing to cook Nyonyan food. The launch site, Kuala Lumpur, not Singapore,
 the pizza of love  ·  107

serves to muddy the waters. Mrs. Lee’s Cookbook is branded and identified as
quintessentially “Singaporean,” yet it was launched in neighboring Malaysia,
speaking perhaps to some of the origins of Nyonyan food and an expanded
market, rather than to the book’s modernity.
Authenticity is also key to the selling of cookbooks. In The Food of Singa-
pore: Authentic Recipes from the Manhattan of the East,59 the phrase “Man-
hattan of the East” is in odd juxtaposition with the necessary “authentic.”
This framing presupposes that Singapore is not sufficient in and of itself.
Yet authenticity is still required. The book opens with an introduction to
Singapore, which implies that the book’s audience is neither Singaporeans
nor tourists already in Singapore, but people for whom Singapore is an ex-
otic Other destination. The cookbook therefore also functions as a device
for marketing Singapore as a tourist destination, and the book’s emphasis
on ethnic groups and their traditions fits this approach. The introduction
attends to the fiscal aspect of Singapore (“Money can buy you everything: A
garden city where food is imported from around the world,”60); where and
how food is eaten—both hawker centers and coffee shops are covered; and
matters of etiquette (readers are told that tea is the traditional accompani-
ment to Chinese food in Singapore). But the opportunity for marketing is
not resisted: “There is nothing quite like beer to take the heat off your tongue
and to cool you down when you eat spicy food. One of the local beers, Tiger,
has won awards world-wide and has even been immortalized in Anthony
Burgess’s satirical novel, Time for a Tiger.”61 The consumption of beer with
Singaporean food has become not so much a sacrifice of authenticity as a
gesture to a foreign tradition.
Food, of course, forms a major part of the tourist experience, a way in
which tourists feel they can come to “know” a particular place or culture. If
learning to eat the food of another culture is the first step, then purchasing a
cookbook might be the next. As Chapter 8 shows, tourism plays a significant
role in shaping the identity of Singapore, for visitors and locals. The buying
power of tourists is legendary, if exaggerated. Tourists in Singapore engage
in all the usual forms of consumption; shopping is, after all, a national pas-
time. Purchasing a cookbook as a memento of a trip is a potentially effective
mechanism for remembering a place—every time a dish is cooked from that
cookbook it serves as a reminder.
Moving from the purchase of a cookbook to cooking from it is another
matter. Cooking foreign food is, according to food scholar Roger Owen, remi-
niscent of cross-dressing, leading him to coin the delightful phrase “cross-
cooking.”62 For Owen cross-cooking is titillating in precisely the same way
108  .  chap ter 6

that cross-dressing is—with cultural identity substituting for gendered iden-

tity. And “as with men in women’s clothing, it’s the obvious inauthenticity
that is alluring: so faithful in every detail, so assertively different in effect.”63
For tourists in Singapore, a cookbook is an opportunity not only to consume
the cuisine but also to try on the lingerie, so to speak.
If many cookbooks are purchased for reasons other than cooking from
them—status, beautiful imagery, aspirationalism—then a Singaporean ex-
ception might be confinement cookbooks. All three major ethnic groups
in Singapore follow specific dietary practices for pregnancy and the period
following birth. The month or so after birth, the confinement period, was
traditionally characterized by a specific diet and the assistance of a confine-
ment specialist who would cook the required foods and help the mother
with the new baby. During this period the mother would not leave the home,
hence confinement, and the continually evolving diet would both prohibit
some foods and prescribe others. Today, many Singaporean women follow
some of the practices of confinement, especially the diet, and middle-class
women still often employ a confinement specialist.
The significance of confinement cookbooks needs to be understood in
a broader context of state engagement with pro-natalism. In the process of
constructing the state, organizing society, and developing a national narrative,
governments often attend to matters of marriage, family, and procreation. In
Singapore, however, marriage and population policy take on a special signifi-
cance because the emphasis on the people as the only resource is a regular
policy message as well as a reality—after all, Singapore does have significant
geographical, and therefore economic, limitations. The viability of the future
nation rests on appropriate and successful marriages that produce the “right”
kind of citizens. The Singaporean state is interested in both an expansion
of the population and the management of that population. Pregnancy, so
long as it is planned and occurs in the context of marriage between fiscally
responsible parties, is highly encouraged by the state with a range of policies
and incentives. Although the period following birth might be private and
confined to the home, the lead-up to this point is not—pregnancy is quite a
public affair.
There are significant similarities between Chinese, Malay, and Indian
confinement practices, but there are also some important variations. The
Chinese confinement diet aims to enhance immunity and to help women
regain physical strength. Eating cold food is discouraged. Cold in this con-
text means both temperature and temperament based on Chinese medicinal
 the pizza of love  ·  109

practices of using food to maintain the balance between hot and cold in the
body. It is believed that cold foods can harm the spleen because they retard
the discharge of toxins. Foods that are considered cold include some meats
and seafood (especially snails, clams, and oysters), certain fruits (including
pomelo, starfruit, and watermelon), a range of vegetables (mushrooms, bitter
gourd, water spinach, and bamboo shoots) and other items such as seaweed
and soya sauce.
Malay mothers in confinement are discouraged from eating spicy food,
foods cooked with coconut milk, shellfish, and eggs. Their confinement diet
emphasizes soft food, especially soups, often served with rice, as well as noodle
dishes. Indian confinement diets also have restrictions and a focus on the role
of food as medicinal aid. In addition, certain foods are encouraged as aiding
bodily functions, for example, brown sugar to expel blood from the uterus or
toasted garlic to increase lactation. In all three traditions, women are encour-
aged to drink warm rather than cold water. In order for these dietary rules to be
followed, cookbooks with both recipes and guidelines are required, especially
for women who have not employed a confinement specialist.
David Tan and Amy Aoi’s book The Only Confinement Food Recipes You
Need is a typical example of a confinement cookbook. Like many, it navigates
a fine line between “traditional knowledge” and contemporary scientific rea-
soning. The book allows new mothers to be “in sync with the core principles
of this venerated system” and also provides “detailed nutritional analysis
and explains the possible medicinal effects upon the body.”64 So, legitimacy
is evoked by both tradition and science. In Tan and Aoi’s book the political
nature of confinement is also addressed, and the government is praised for
the extension of maternity leave for public-sector workers. The authors advo-
cate a confinement period of thirty to forty days and draw primarily on the
Chinese tradition. The book opens with the principles of yin and yang and
of food as medicine, providing a context for the recipes that follow. The use
of Chinese herbs is stressed, but so, too, is the use of confinement nannies.
A link to a Web site is provided (www.amynanny.com), perhaps a service af-
filiated with Amy Aoi, the coauthor of the book.65 There is both a social and
a fiscal dynamic to confinement cookbooks; as a value-added service, the
book is purchased but not imagined to be the only purchase. Consumption
is key to Singaporean identity, and specific purchases convey specific mean-
ings and can be the basis of identity formation—or to quote Prime Minister
Goh Chok Tong in his 1996 National Day speech: “For Singaporeans life is
not complete without shopping.”66
110  .  chap ter 6

Cookbooks Making History

Cookbooks also function as a site of history-making. In 1998, Violet Oon,
a Singaporean food writer, published A Singaporean Family Cookbook. She
situated her work in the context of Mrs. Lee’s Cookbook, saying that Mrs. Lee
had told her she wrote her book for her grandchildren. With this statement,
Oon simultaneously established her legitimacy—she actually knew Mrs. Lee
and spoke with her about matters relating to food writing—and framed her
book as having a programmatic nationalist function. Oon’s wish in writing
A Singaporean Family Cookbook was “to inspire Singaporeans to reach out
for pen and paper to each record the recipes of their mothers and grand-
mothers to preserve their own family history. They will find that each recipe
has a story behind it. And this story will give them an insight into their own
cultural soul.”67 A collection of Singaporean recipes is thus an attempt at na-
tional solidarity, a way of providing insight into a cultural soul. Individual
family stories and recipes have meaning as part of a national story, and Oon
is modeling what that story might look like.
The methodology suggested by Oon is akin to that of oral history, an
invaluable, if complex, way of preserving heritage. In 1979 the government
established a National Oral History Department, and since the 1993 passage
of the National Heritage Board Act, this department has been managed by
the National Archives of Singapore under the auspices of the Nation Heri-
tage Board.68 Both the archives and the Oral History Department encourage
public involvement and use, stressing their role as repositories of national
memory. Housing “the memory of the nation” helps enable “current and
future generations of Singaporeans to not only understand and appreciate
who they are and how they came to become a nation, but also enculturate
a national identity that they will be proud to proclaim and share.”69 The na-
tional memory is prescribed as a positive memory that Singaporeans will be
proud to share. Almost identical to Violet Oon’s wish to inspire Singaporeans
to “reach out for pen and paper” is the National Archives’ encouragement
of Singaporeans to “grab their tape-recorders” and capture the memories of
their elders “before it is too late.”70 Such recordings are then deposited with
the Oral History Department. Oral history, in this context, takes a free-for-
all, rather than a considered historical, approach. The National Archives of
Singapore slogan, “Visit us at the NAS to discover the Singapore in you and
me,” further implicates Singaporeans in the making of Singapore’s history, in
precisely the same way that a Singaporean cookbook implicates Singaporeans
in finding “their own cultural soul.”
 the pizza of love  ·  111

The connection between participation and nationalism stands proudly

in numerous projects and publications. The 2004 Cooking With Singapore
Families marked the International Year of the Family in a collection that
“brings together local celebrities and prominent personalities who firmly
believe in the importance of family.”71 The collection also includes material
from contestants in a National Library Board “My Family Recipes” writing
contest. The accounts that accompany the recipes are described as illumi-
nating “the richness and diversity that makes up Singapore today” in that
they “re-affirm the family as the source of nourishment for body and soul
for Singaporeans from all walks of life.”72 In a society in which the state has
made clear, via the White Paper on Shared Values, that “Family” is “the basic
unit of society,” the project’s reaffirmation of family becomes political.73
The first recipe in the collection, from a political figure, stresses the politi-
cal endorsement of the project. Yu-Foo Yee Shoon, Minister of State in the
Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sport, begins by noting
that “food plays a big role in strengthening my family ties.”74 The function
of food as national unifier is endorsed in the entry by Willie Chen, Chair of
the Committee of the Family and Chair of the National Volunteer and Phi-
lanthropy Centre, who retells a discussion about the origins of Kaya toast, a
coconut jam served on toast with cold butter. He is Hainanese and his wife
is Teochew. In the context of a friendly family debate about who invented
kaya toast, Chen asked one of his sons if he was Hainanese or Teochew. His
son replied that he was Chinese, not Singaporean, although even a short time
after independence the majority of the population identified as Singaporean.
Chen uses this as a way of talking about the universality of food in Singapore,
concluding, “Hainanese or not, it is a great, distinctly Singaporean snack.”75
Specific ethnic identity is retained while collective national identity is also
established, and a recipe for kaya toast becomes a parable for policies on
the management of ethnic identity and highlights how the commentary in
cookbooks works towards nation making.
If kaya toast can be read as representing state policies, then the “pizza of
love” can be read as evidence of the way Singaporeans use food as a meta-
phor. In Cooking with Singapore Families, Nur Iman Rostam says the pizza
his family makes, which he calls the “pizza of love,” represents “the very stuff
that keeps the family together.”76 Beyond this, the components of the pizza
represent the challenges that the family faces on a daily basis. Nur Iman
Rostam ascribes meanings to each of the ingredients in the pizza, includ-
ing the composite parts of the dough. His pizza philosophy is that the flour
represents care and the margarine, faith, while sugar represents sweetness
112  .  chap ter 6

and yeast gratefulness; salt becomes a symbol of love, and the warm water
that binds the dough is the time that the family shares together. The process
of making the pizza reinforces this ideology and is reflected in the “tomato
sauce of teamwork.” The selection of the toppings is an exercise in coopera-
tion, helping the family work together to “achieve new and meaningful things
in life.”77
The state plays the preeminent role in shaping and running Singaporean
society, but the role of community organizations is also critical. The state has,
in fact, made it clear that certain functions, such as some kinds of welfare, are
the exclusive remit of community organizations. An ideology of community
self-help is well established, despite a range of support mechanisms. Nur Iman
Rostam’s family is Malay, and the language he deploys to describe the “pizza
of love” mirrors that of Malay community self-help organizations and of the
broader state discourse about help coming from the family. If food is about
family, and community is also about family, then the “love pizza” emerges
as not only a strategy for success for Nur Iman Rostam’s family, but for the
broader community. The cheese that tops the pizza is the symbolic glue. Just
as for Yu-Foo Yee Shoon food binds the family, for Nur Iman Rostam, “the
cheese represents how we stick together . . . with love and care for each other
in the face of all the problems we have to confront daily. It represents the joy
and happiness that pulls us together, come rain or shine. The pizza reminds
us of the appreciation we should have for our family members, who are there
for us every day of our lives.”78 Cookbooks such as Cooking with Singapore
Families make explicit the role of family as the foundational unit of society.
If there is a quintessential Singaporean cookbook, it is Heritage Feasts:
A Collection of Singaporean Family Recipes. It was published in 2010 and
draws attention to the multiple ideological tasks that cookbooks do in Sin-
gapore. The volume, sponsored by Miele, embodies many of the features of
Singaporean cookbooks that have already been discussed. That the book is
sponsored by a private company is in itself typical. That the profits from the
sale of the book go to a charity, in this case the Kidz Horizon (which does
fundraising for the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital), is also typical. The
book begins with the history of the sponsoring organization, Miele, and in
particular, the story of the talented technician Carl Miele, who in 1899 estab-
lished a company making cream separators, the firm’s “humble beginning.”
The narrative of humble beginnings becomes one of economic success, in
this case an internationally recognized German brand, mirroring a pattern
that, as we will see in Chapter 7, is common in food advertising.
That Miele has remained a family business is reflective of existing advertis-
ing strategies; the book takes it further and makes a link between the Miele
 the pizza of love  ·  113

family and the family of the nation of Singapore. In an explicitly political

gesture, the similarities between Miele and the Singaporean government
are emphasized: “We build on our history and our founders’ commitment
to quality in the same way that modern Singapore has built on the strong
foundations laid by its forefathers.” Miele explicitly endorses the Singaporean
government’s view of heritage and history with the statement: “Appreciating
our history is the first step towards shaping our future; to progress, we must
honour our past.”79 Heritage is defined in a palatable manor that strengthens
the nation rather than dividing it.
The synergy between this cookbook and the state’s historical ideology
is exemplified in the timeline that follows the introduction. “Milestones in
Singapore’s Food History” necessarily constructs Singapore’s history as lin-
ear. The linear nature is further reinforced by the imagery of the following
pages, which begin with a black-and-white image titled “Street Hawker of
Old” and, crossing two pages of food-related images, concludes with a color
image titled “The Food Centre Today.” The type of history that the Singa-
porean government is comfortable with is linear, progressive; it relies on an
understanding of history as events, chartable on a timeline. “Milestones in
Singapore’s Food History” thus serves not only to codify moments of culinary
history, but also to codify the broader national project of history making.
Christopher Tan, a food writer and consultant, is a contributor to the vol-
ume and provides an introduction called “What Is Singapore Food?” which
I quoted at the start of this book. He provides a framework for interpreting
the recipes in Heritage Feasts. In defining what constitutes categories such as
“national food” and “heritage food,” Tan is mediating the meaning of these
categories for Singaporeans. In arguing for the preservation of “heritage”
food, Tan argues: “Food is also a language. A cuisine is a collection of state-
ments about people sharing a common culture or religion. A dish can be an
eloquent paragraph about history, heritage and communal memory, a meal, a
thesis. Food is no less capable a medium for expressing emotion and content
than music or poetry.”80 Tan suggests that, like many languages, cuisines are
also endangered. The imperative to save soon-to-be-lost culinary traditions
is a favorite mantra of both public and private entities in Singapore—Tan is
repeating a familiar view.
His is not the only voice. One of the things that make Heritage Feasts: A
Collection of Singaporean Family Recipes representative of its genre is the
inclusion of commentary by Singaporeans, in this case well-known Singa-
poreans. Their repeated endorsement of heritage underscores a common
understanding of it. Wee Wei Ling says: “Family values and tradition are
important to me. . . . That’s what our heritage is about.” Chan Heng Wing
114  .  chap ter 6

says: “Heritage is something you pick up; it’s the little nuances that you see
and learn as a child, it’s the things you absorb unknowingly.”81 We see here
a conflation of heritage with culture as a way of deflecting attention from
communalism, struggles for ethnic representation, and other potentially
complex issues concerning history, race, and identity.
Heritage cannot be admired from afar. It is not simply encapsulated in
recipes bound in books; it must be enacted. Tan provides a twenty-two-point
“call to arms,” a list of suggested ways in which Singaporeans can “honour
[their] heritage, which is also [their] country’s heritage.”82 The intertwining of
the personal with the nation is at the heart of the Singaporean government’s
approach to national history. The suggestions are wide-ranging and encour-
age attitudes toward food and food practices as well as toward social habits.
Readers are told to “Bless your favourite hawker with verbal and monetary
encouragement” to cook things using laborious recipes and so to preserve
heritage. Using these wide-ranging approaches to changing behaviors reflects
the Singaporean government’s approach.
Tan also makes space for new traditions, which again positions this col-
lection of recipes as especially meaningful. Tradition is fixed and unchal-
lengeable in the culinary imagining of Singapore—a dish is defined as being
exactly as it was made in one particular place at one particular moment in
time. But in a society that has undergone such tremendous change, tradition
cannot be maintained in an unchanging fashion. New traditions provide a
seamless solution. They do not replace the original, the real, and the authen-
tic dish; rather, they are something new. The domestic sphere is identified
as the place where these new dishes can flourish. That is, when one goes out
to dine there is an expectation that the Beef Rendang will be made with set
ingredients and with a set method. The expectation of family traditions is
different. Given how little is cooked at home, the potential threat of these
deviations is minimal.
When the filmmaker Eric Khoo gives a recipe for “Childhood Tomato
Soup,” which includes a can of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup, it is
acceptable in a way that it would not be if that dish were served in a restau-
rant. The recipes for hot cross buns and carrot cake with canned pineapple
function alongside recipes for more obviously regional dishes such as Ikan
Panggang Daun Pisang (grilled fish in banana leaf). Both serve to codify the
categories of “authentic,” “national,” and “food.” Heritage Feasts: A Collection
of Singaporean Family Recipes functions, to borrow Foucault’s phrase, to es-
tablish “the order of things.”83
 the pizza of love  ·  115

* * *
The cookbooks of Singapore reinforce categories of ethnic identity, which
strengthens the national narrative of multiracialism, reinforces existing pub-
lic understandings of history, and represents heritage as culture. Talking of
second-hand cookbooks, Nicola Humble noted that they become “palimp-
sests, the original text overlaid with personal meanings and experiences.”84
The food writing of Singapore is in its own way a palimpsest, a series of texts
written and re-written for such new purposes as personal memory, defining
nation, and reflecting the concerns of the times and the society being writ-
ten about. Similarly, Appadurai suggests that we view cookbooks as “reveal-
ing artifacts of culture in the making,”85 a conceptualization the cookbooks
of Singapore most certainly conform to. As revealed in the sponsorship of
cookbooks, there is a synergy between the advertising of product and nation,
and the “advertising” of cuisine and nation, the topic of Chapter 7.
 7
Picked in Their Fresh Young Prime

Food advertising in Singapore has always been intimately bound with

“foreignness,” a direct consequence of the fact that Singapore is not able to
produce its own food or water, and its status as a port city. The obvious for-
eignness of the foods purchased and culinary techniques used are reflected
in advertising from the colonial period to the contemporary. As the cultural
historian T. J. Jackson Lears pointed out, advertisements have a powerful iconic
significance. Iconic, but not static symbols, they are the coupling of “words
and pictures in commercial fables.” Advertisements tell stories that “are both
fabulous and didactic, that have evoked fantasies and pointed morals, that have
reconfigured ancient dreams of abundance to fit the modern world of goods.”1
For Lears, these fables of abundance have become the most dynamic “represen-
tations of cultural values in the world.”2 Contrasting Singapore’s food-related
advertising of the 1950s to that of a half-century later reveals two significant
shifts or stories. First, the primary target of food-related advertising shifted
from the colonist to the local. Second, the ideological direction shifted from a
focus on behavior (how to be a good colonist by buying the right goods) to a
focus on cosmopolitanism (how to be a good Singaporean by consuming the
appropriate goods). What advertisements from both periods have in common
is that they can be read as demands that consumers engage with products that
serve to situate their consumption and, to an extent, themselves, globally.

Massaging the Medium

Advertisements are, of course, products of their cultural and historical set-
tings. In the Singaporean context, this means advertisements were, first,
 picked in their fresh young prime  ·  117

part of a global environment created by British imperialism, then part of

a global environment sustained by the port, and, more recently, part of a
global environment actively courted and supported by multinationals. Yet
the international advertising community was divided between standardiza-
tion and adaptation to local markets.3 “Just as the main purpose of adver-
tising is to sell goods in Singapore as well as Sydney and Santiago,” argued
the advertising manager and standardization advocate David L. Brown, “so
all the primary purposes of advertising are identical in all countries.”4 The
purposes, increased consumption, may be identical, but the effectiveness of
specific advertising certainly varies from market to market.5
As the American public was being encouraged by the journalist and social
critic Vance Packard to wise up to the way advertisers were manipulating
them in his bestselling 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders,6 Singaporean con-
sumers were being encouraged to consume in order to develop the nation.
In fact, the rhetoric in colonies and Britain alike was not so different from
the 1920s advertising with the slogans “Buy Empire Goods from Home and
Overseas” and “Buy Empire Every Day.”7 And in contemporary Singapore,
consumption, as Chua Beng Huat has established, is not only a national
pastime, it is an activity that, because of its benefits to the local economy, is
understood as benefiting the nation.8 Equally, shopping is an activity that
is recognized as being Singaporean (we are Singaporeans, in our spare time
we shop) and as strengthening the nation (we are Singaporeans helping our
national economy). When this is coupled with Singaporeans’ love of food,
then food-related advertising emerges as an important cultural site.
Overall, the advertising of food in Singapore reflects the broad social and
political changes of the times. During the colonial period, food advertising
about Britain and the Empire enforced ideas of hierarchy, civilization, global
imperialism, and modernism. As the historian Jeffrey Auerbach notes, ad-
vertisements for specific products also draw attention to the “production,
consumption, and commercialization of commodities,” which were essen-
tial components of British imperialism.9 In the post-independence period,
food-related advertising reflected the emergent, imagined past, in which the
national story of Singapore was one in which a generalized Asian past stood
in for tradition. Returning to P. Allix’s 1953 Menus for Malaya (referred to in
Chapter 6) reveals that canonical text to be firmly ensconced in the exten-
sive tradition of the guides and handbooks of British imperialism, and its
imagined audience to be the aspirational and upwardly mobile new arrivals.
Following the trajectory of aspiration and economic boom, this chapter turns
below to contemporary food-related advertisements in the elite magazine
Singapore Tatler.
118  .  chap ter 7

In the late colonial and early independence era, advertising was insepa-
rable from advice manuals and magazines. Advertising not only provided
funding for the publication but was a critical part of the information being
imparted. Even in Allix’s book, ostensibly a menu-planning guide, food-
related advertising goes beyond ingredients to include restaurants, kitchen
equipment, cigars, and, especially, alcohol. The book’s advice about domes-
tic management is therefore also advice about which brands are best and,
consequently, which brands will improve or maintain one’s social place. At
the textual level, Menus for Malaya includes both full advertisements and
in-text endorsements (“We especially recommend Tiger Beer with Curry,
Sauerkraut or Hamburger”), which in total, share roughly equal space with
the titular menus.10
Menus for Malaya pays a good deal of attention to specific brands of food-
related products. In the introduction, Allix justifies this by explaining that
certain brands have been mentioned in the recipes because they are “most
suitable” but also notes that brand substitution is acceptable if readers “do not
have these particular brands at their disposal” (3). The social function of adver-
tising was (and still is) broader than the process of getting people to purchase
a specific product; it signifies what were appropriate products for consump-
tion in the colonies. For the brand builder Alina Wheeler, the touchstones for
building a brand are navigation, reassurance, and engagement.11 This turn of
phrase might not have been used in the colonial context, but the concepts are
apt. In the potentially confusing world of Empire, advertising provided much-
needed navigation, brands provided reassurance of social place and order, and
the products created a fiscal and social engagement with the Empire. Besides
social categories among the colonials, products themselves were also catego-
rized. There were everyday items and those that were aspirational—and both
kinds patrolled the border between locals and Europeans.
From an advertising perspective, many of the examples from the 1950s
seem to lack focus, in part because many have dual advertisers. Such im-
ages stand in contrast to those in noncolonial settings in the 1950s, reflect-
ing, perhaps, the fact that the advertising in Singapore was largely aimed at
a relatively small group of consumers: the colonial elite. The advertisement
in Menus for Malaya for Williams and Humbert’s Dry Sack Sherry is, for
example, also an advertisement for the importing agent, Calbeck’s of Singa-
pore (opposite page 1). The advertisement for F. Chauvent Chablis, likewise,
simultaneously promotes John Little and Co. (24). The linking of a brand with
the all-important importer sends a signal about the kinds of items, brands,
and status of particular importers. The Ayam Brand green peas advertise-
ment, elaborately illustrated with luscious-looking peas, is shared with A.
Figure 5. Advertisement for Ayam Brand Peas and A. Clouet Importers, 1953. Courtesy
of AYAM SARL.
120  .  chap ter 7

Clouet importers. In aligning itself with a superior pea product, A. Clouet is

implying that just as the peas are “picked in their fresh young prime” and are
thus “unsurpassed for fine flavor” (see figure 5) so, too, can these qualities of
exclusivity and fineness be found in A. Clouet’s service and other imported
products (28).
Advertisements for individual products did exist, but those for import-
ers, stores, and suppliers dominated early food-related advertising—where
you purchased your flour was as important as which brand of flour you
purchased. The 1953 Bun Bee and Co. Ltd. advertisement is typical. A boat
with five fairly hapless-looking sailors is afloat on a treacherous sea, com-
plete with shark. All five sailors are engrossed in looking, one up the mast,
another with a telescope, one off into the distance, and two at the water
itself. The flag flying from the mast reads: “Food suppliers.” In a large text
bubble at the top right-hand side of the advertisement is the punch line:
“We search the world for good things to eat” (8). Obviously, this style of
advertising reflects the economic conditions that produced it and paid for
it. Products might be global, but distribution systems were local. A savvy
colonist wanted to know which specific importers were suitable, reliable,
and proper, or even which might provide nice, fresh status.

The Advertising Appeal of Alcohol

In the best colonialist tradition, Menus for Malaya is awash with alcohol
advertising. Brands are always either European or imperial, making the con-
sumer the sojourning colonial and illustrating the best way to stay in touch
with Anglo-European culture. Examining this advertising reveals the cultural
subtexts of gender, hierarchies of nations, and whiteness.
Alcohol was marketed to Europeans in Singapore with conscious refer-
ence to Europe and in very European terms. In a champagne advertisement,
a bepearled and coiffed woman leans forward to blow out the candles on
a cake; at the base of the advertisement is a bottle of champagne in an ice
bucket and the text: “Lanson Champagne makes it an occasion” (19). Robin
Brandy also uses the figure of a European woman in its marketing. A young
woman in a dress and apron is cooking a chicken in a wok over a flame. She
is looking down lovingly at a bottle from which she is about to pour some
liquid into a spoon, presumably destined for the chicken. Above her a bottle
of Jules Robin Cognac is depicted on the back of a black horse in mid-gallop,
and below her it says: “For fine food . . . or a fine drink. Robin Brandy. One
 picked in their fresh young prime  ·  121

sip convinces” (59). The woman who is cooking certainly looks convinced
by the brandy.
The global nature of alcoholic beverages is stressed in many of the adver-
tisements. A 1933 advertisement for Gordon’s Gin speaks directly to the global
association with the slogan “East or West. Gordon’s is Best.”12 The gin is, by
implication, the best one can have if one is in the East or the West, but its
West-ness is not disputed. Identification of place of origin (“Imported from
Scotland,” “Bottled in Jamaica”) is probably mandatory but also emphasizes
the global. Listing the beverage by country of origin, as in the advertisement
for Mointe Comte C. Ltd., Importers of High Class Wines, which list all of
the products by country, functions in the same way. The wines and spirits
from France are listed first and, therefore, clearly ranked as the finest quality.
Beer and creamy whiskey from the United Kingdom come next, followed by
chianti from Italy, port from Portugal, sherry from Spain, and in the least
prestigious spot, rums from Jamaica (124).
Captain Morgan Jamaican Rum, by contrast, does not capitalize on place
of origin but is advertised in Allix’s book by the “Captain” himself—a pi-
ratical figure based on the seventeenth-century Welsh privateer Sir Henry
Morgan. Despite the brand’s 1944 origins, the product is advertised as having
a long history, an obvious example of an invented tradition.13 The portrait of
the captain is in an elaborate gilt frame. A seventeenth-century ship gliding
through the Caribbean waters is shown at the bottom of the advertisement.
Although this is a dark rum, the ad bears a legend in fine print: “Light in
flavor. Light in Colour. Light in Bouquet” (88). Lightness has dual symbolic
value here, not just referring to viscosity but also serving as a reminder of
European-ness; the rum may be made in the Caribbean, but it is associated
with the British figure of Sir Henry Morgan and a land conquered by a Eu-
ropean empire.
Themes of gender emerge clearly in an advertisement for Ballantine’s
Blended Whiskey and London Dry Gin. It features bottles of the two spirits
spouting cartoon-esque heads—the whiskey a male head, the gin a female
head. Gender links choice of beverage and the heads are illustrated: Mr.
Whiskey is bald and wrinkled, and Ms. Gin is excessively made-up, with
oversized lips, a large patch of rouge, exaggerated lashes, and curly hair. In
conversation, Mr. Whiskey claims: “I am equally good with water or soda;”
Ms. Gin counters: “I’m a pretty good mixer myself.” Once their bickering
has subsided they unite to tell the reader: “In fact we’re a universally popular
pair” (123). In the Singapore context, the truth of their claim relies on the
122  .  chap ter 7

colonial subtext that physical attractiveness is less important than whiteness,

gender, and alcohol.
Alcohol advertising in colonial Singapore was (and remains) an appeal to
lifestyle, symbolic of status, aspiration, and social place. An advertisement for
the French liqueur Cointreau, unlike other alcohol advertisements of the time
that depicted only Europeans consuming the beverage, showed a cartoon-like
character with a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other. The cartoon figure
has an oversized head and a very round face reminiscent of a character in a
Hong Kong–style cartoon. More significant, and in contrast to almost every
other advertisement targeted at the European population of the colonies, it
includes text in both English and Chinese. The messages in the two texts, how-
ever, are quite different. In English, the text describes Cointreau as the “soul
of the orange,” which positions the beverage as cultured and romantic. But a
translation of the text’s Chinese characters (補身健體) reveals Cointreau to
be a “physical fitness supplement” (55). It is unlikely that many Chinese read-
ers purchased Allix’s Menus for Malaya, so they were an unlikely target for the
advertisement. Rather, the inclusion of the Chinese text might be read as an
attempt to make Cointreau simultaneously European and local. It is signed as
both available and suitable.

Instant Coffee, Frozen Dinners, and Celebrating Modernity

Food-related advertising also taught colonists to value convenience and ef-
ficiency, thus separating them from the imagined lazy native and connecting
them to the imagined modernity and industriousness of the broader postwar
West.14 Kitchen gadgets promised speed, efficiency, and cleanliness, and pack-
aged or processed foods that would make a nutritious part of this delicious
breakfast ready in a flash or a wink.
In America, it was the increase in married women’s employment that
heralded the massive expansion of domestic advertising: there was a 400
percent increase in advertising from 1945 to 1960. The historian Stephanie
Coontz notes that American advertisers were negotiating convenience, the
need to make prosperity socially acceptable, and the emergence of the youth
market, and they did this by linking materialism to family life.15 Time-saving
qualities, coupled with a discourse of modernity, were common advertising
themes. The meanings shift, however, in a colonial context where the intended
audience most frequently had domestic servants. A GEC full-page advertise-
ment for an electric stove, for example, suggests that the DC-114 model is
“just the thing for your ‘Modern Kitchen.’” Among its advertised virtues is
 picked in their fresh young prime  ·  123

the ease of cleaning its porcelain-enamel surface. On one hand, being easy
to clean is not a particular concern if you are purchasing an appliance for a
domestic servant to use, and the advertisement makes servants invisible by
implying the colonialist will be the cleaner. On the other hand, the emphasis
on cleanliness gestures at here-unspoken assumptions of nonwhite dirt. The
servants, it hints, need all the help they can get. Other appliances are also
featured—refrigerators, kettles, floor polishers—the majority of which would
not be used by a colonial mistress. The store selling the oven has branches
in Singapore, Malacca, Kuala Lumpur, and Penang and offers “British qual-
ity products” (100) and cultural assumptions for the housewife who is both
British and colonial.
Advertising for the Morphy-Richards Automatic Toaster promotes it as
a cheap and efficient servant, with a dual emphasis on convenience and the
personal touch (11). The toaster, then, is like the bespoke tailored suit—the
product made to the specific requirements of the consumer, not to the re-
quirements of mass production. At a time in which consumer goods em-
phasized mass consumption and standardization, the individualization high-
lighted in this advertisement is significant. It is the European figure who is
making the toast to his liking; it is not the servant preparing the toast as her
master likes it. The automatic toaster replaces the servant, popping with
speed and efficiency. For Europeans with, arguably, a large amount of time
on their hands, speed emerges as a symbol of the importance of their activi-
ties rather than a lifestyle necessity and stands in stark contrast to the ideas
about the lazy native that abounded in the colonial setting.16
Nescafé also focused on convenience, speed, and easy cleanup in its adver-
tisements. One has three illustrations—a man enjoying a cup of Nescafé, a
frustrated European woman throwing out coffee grounds, and an illustration
of a can of Nescafé. The pajama-wearing man is sitting on a sofa, smiling as
he makes himself a cup of Nescafé. We know it is morning—behind him the
clock says 6:45, outside his window a rooster is crowing, and the sun is shin-
ing. In large print above the man’s head are the words: “How Convenient!” The
message of convenience is reinforced in the text next to him: “You don’t have
to wait for the percolator,” and “In an instant you have really fine coffee.” The
woman upending the coffee pot is wearing her dressing-gown, so presumably
it is morning for her, too. But the coffee pot she holds has a large X through
it, and the text next to her reads: “There is nothing to throw away. Nescafé
dissolves completely and there are no messy grounds to dispose of. Have this
convenient product on hand at all times.” For readers, the advertising mes-
sage is about purchase, reduction of labor, speed, and adaptability—even a
124  .  chap ter 7

man can do it: “In an instant you have really fine coffee, made as strong or
weak as you like it.” At the bottom of the page; in a section highlighted by
wavy lines, readers are reminded that Nescafé provides “Coffee in a flash.”
Readers are also educated about the product with a small-print note about
the pronunciation of Nescafé (“Nes-cafay”) so that they know not only what
the product they are about to purchase looks like from the illustration, but
also how to ask for it (7).
Lassie Brand rolled oats are advertised by a woman adorned with pearls
and jewels and a Dutch wimple hat. She is engaged in an exaggerated wink
and the tagline of the advertisement is: “Enjoy nutritious Lassie Brand Rolled
Oats. Ready in a wink!” (56). Other Lassie Brand products (milk powder, corn
flour) also offer convenience of both time and storage. Convenient storage
is certainly understandable as a plus for a product in the tropics, but con-
venience is more complex. Ryvita, an English crispbread marketed as “your
daily bread,” with serving suggestions—“for breakfast with marmalade” but
also “indispensable with cheese”—was not marketed as a convenience food,
although its shelf life actually makes it very convenient (31). Convenience,
then, is something to be strategically deployed.
Magnolia brand ice cream, sold at Singapore’s Cold Storage Supermarket,
is one of the few frozen products advertised in 1950s Singapore. Frozen food,
although convenient, required a home freezer or rapid consumption. Its ad-
vertising is contradictory—Magnolia is “your favourite ice cream,” yet it is
also something new because readers are encouraged, “Try it today!” Here, the
ice cream functions as an illustration of modernity—the consumer is already
familiar with the latest products, and their familiarity evidences their moder-
nity. Modernity also signals multiplicity, evident in the way the ice cream is
marketed. The single advertisement promotes not only Magnolia Ice Cream
and the store from which it can be purchased, Cold Storage Supermarket,
but also Bird’s-Eye quick-frozen fruits (104). The ice cream quickly moves
from a dessert in its own right to an ingredient in Peach Melba or other fruit
desserts; it is a part of the elaborate ice cream sundae featured in the adver-
tisement. Magnolia Ice Cream is simultaneously a symbol of modernity and
a lifestyle statement.
Fats, in various forms, were regularly advertised. Elephant Brand marga-
rine is “delicious and wholesome” and “a nutritious food with a fine flavor.”
The cooking oil bearing the Elephant brand is proudly described as “super re-
fined” and “the basis of all good meals” (35) Volta Olive Oil suggests, “Smarten
up your salads and make a success of your mayonnaise” (51). Other fats are
also advertised. Crisco claims, “It’s crisp! It’s light! It’s fried in Crisco!” as a
 picked in their fresh young prime  ·  125

European woman serves her family (husband and two children) a steaming
dish they look at longingly. Below them are images of plates of food, a cake,
a pie, and a dead (but unplucked) chicken, plus text advocating the use of
Crisco “for cakes and pies and tasty fries” (39).
Lightness is a quality also deployed by Brown and Polson, makers of baking
powder—“For feather light cakes and pastry use”—accompanied by a larger-
than-life tin of Raisley Baking Powder. This feather-lightness is not left to
the imagination but explained in “scientific terms” under the heading, “The
point about Raisley”: “Raisley is a new baking powder scientifically prepared
to withhold its raising power until it feels the full heat of the oven. Then, and
not till then, does Raisley Baking Powder expand throughout the mixture,
raising it thoroughly, evenly, strongly” (40). It is feather-light but also strong.
The placement in these advertisements of an image of the product in lieu of
text turns the product into the message. The tin of baking powder or the can
of Crisco is the message of the advertisement and is beyond words.
Aji-No-Moto brand monosodium glutamate (MSG) was one of a few prod-
ucts advertised to a European market in Singapore that makes reference to
non-European traditions. Aji-No-Moto MSG is promoted as being “interna-
tionally famous” and “used by all Chinese Chefs and no Chinese dish is com-
plete without its use (52). While MSG was ubiquitous in China and Chinese
cooking, it is stretching the truth somewhat to say that Aji-No-Moto was
used by all Chinese chefs. The presence, in the same menu-planning guide,
of an advertisement for Zest, a rival brand of MSG, further undermines the
message (20).
Lingham’s Chilly Sauce is larger than life in its advertisements. In one, a
bottle of the sauce towers above the people in the advertisement. A woman
is telling her dinner guests: “I like my Lingham’s.” A young man, perhaps her
son, is carrying the sauce, which is almost twice his height, and the effort of
carrying it is causing him to sweat. His sweat is, in fact, a trifecta of sweat—it
evokes the heat of the chili sauce, the heat of the tropics, and the heat caused
by his labor. The hostess gestures towards the sauce and the guests look at
it, not at the elaborate meal on the table—a roast turkey, an enormous bowl
of mashed potatoes, and other side dishes, all dwarfed by the sauce. The ad-
vertisement describes it as a “mild piquant relish and appetizer,” and readers
are told that once they have “tasted the delightful flavor of Lingham’s,” they,
too, will like it (107). The place of the sauce in the meal is ambiguous. Is it an
ingredient or a condiment? Has it flavored the turkey, or should it be added
at the table? It is not presented as something that would be served ahead of
the meal (an appetizer).
126  .  chap ter 7

For many postcolonial societies, buying locally produced goods was a

way to express a fledgling national identity and support the economy. Given
the impossibility of doing so in Singapore, an alternative form of economic
nationalism—the consumption of foreign goods—was harnessed to broader
ideas about consumption, to the point that consumption formed the basis of
a kind of nationalism. Singapore was defined by its status as a port and an
emporium with an impressive breadth of consumables. That categorization
provided the foundation for an engagement with globalization as a form of
nationalism for the postcolonial nation-state of Singapore.

Referencing the Local, Sort Of . . .

Unlike many advertised food products, Lingham’s Chilly Sauce was (and still
is) produced in Malaya, and for the colonial market. Although a chili sauce
might seem like an ingredient in local cuisine, this was a colonial product,
used by Europeans in the colonies in a fashion very much like that of Anglo-
Indian relishes. In contemporary advertising for the (now) Malaysian prod-
uct, the spelling has been changed to Chilli, but its colonial origins remain a
candid part of its marketing: “first manufactured in 1908 during the British
Colonial era to pamper to the delights of the English masters.”17 Lingham’s
is still pampering the delights of the English, with ten different varieties of
chilli sauces currently on sale in Britain. It is widely available at British su-
permarkets such as Tesco’s, but the website for Lingham’s also makes it clear
that the quality of the product is high, and it is available at exclusive venues
such as Harrods. Lingham’s has become a global product, widely available
in former British colonies such as Australia, Kenya, and the United States, as
well as in Thailand and the Ukraine. Lingham’s Chili Sauce thus represents
a continuity with the colonial as the global.
Similarly, Hafnia, Danish cooked ham, also claimed in 1953 to be “known
through the world.” It is a boneless, ready to serve, canned meat product. The
ability to purchase a pork product that did not require butchering would have
been an advantage to those in Muslim areas of Malaya, although this was not
such a problem in Singapore. To ensure that there is no ambiguity about the
pork content of ham, the Hafnia pig is shown dancing on the cover of the can
of ham (79). Other preserved northern European goods were also advertised,
such as Dutch Baby canned evaporated milk. This advertisement includes
two images. The first, from the can’s label, shows a woman holding a baby
with a Dutch pastoral scene behind her. The second image, a line drawing
of a cup of tea with a jug of milk suspended in the air pouring milk into the
 picked in their fresh young prime  ·  127

tea, is accompanied by the words: “Tea time calls for Dutch Baby Full Cream
Unsweetened Evaporated Milk” (75). The baby of the Dutch Baby logo is na-
ked, slightly awkward, and held in a pose similar to that of a Madonna and
Child, more a symbol of purity than the target of the advertisement. More
recently, Dutch Baby was renamed Dutch Lady, evidence of the marginality
of the baby imagery.18
Health, as now, was a key marketing point in food advertising. Marmite,
the yeast-based, vitamin B–enriched spread, makes particular (if vague)
health claims, such as the oddly capitalized: “Marmite is everyone’s fit-
ness food.” The vitamins “keep everyone fitter,” which leads to good health.
The text of the advertisement lays out exactly how this works: “By adding
Marmite to our meals every day, we strengthen our bodies to resist chills
and diseases; we get more goodness from everything we eat; and children are
assured a vital ‘extra’ to help them grow up sturdy and fit.” Marmite, which
the Anglo world is more familiar with as a topping for toast or sandwiches,
was at this point being marketed as an ingredient to be added to other foods
to give “a richer and more appetizing flavour to all [y]our favourite dishes—
rice, meat, soups, savouries.” The thriftiness of Marmite is also featured in
the advertisements (“Cooks like Marmite also because a jar lasts such a long
time”), which pitches it at a less well-off section of the colonial market (68).
Marmite’s rival, Bovril, does not mention thrift but does echo the emphasis
on health (“Bovril: The concentrated goodness of beef ”). One Bovril adver-
tisement shows a European woman offering a plate of food to three men.
They lean forward expectantly, enthusiastically, with snacks already in their
hands. In large type, readers, presumably female, are instructed to “tempt
them with Bovril snacks.” The clear reference is to European men (“them”),
and the evidence that Bovril is indeed worth using is that the men like it
enough to mention it: “When men talk recipes over cocktails you know
you’ve made a hit” (92). Like much of this advertising, it is aimed at women
who are purchasers, but the focus is on pleasing men.
In contrast, Ovaltine—the familiar malt-based, chocolate-flavored drink—
aimed its Singapore advertising at women as the consumers of the product.
Ovaltine, often served hot elsewhere and primarily promoted internation-
ally as a children’s drink, was advertised in Singapore in 1953 as a cold drink,
showing a surprising adaptability to the market. The advertisement begins
with the text “Cool Delights for warm sunny days.” The refreshing quality is
stressed but so, too, are the health properties; Ovaltine is suitable for those
looking for “energy-restoring nourishment” in their “hot-weather drink”
(96). It is worth noting that Singapore is always hot, so this is a perpetual
128  .  chap ter 7

market. The tagline sums up the competing qualities of the product: “Ovaltine
Cold. Delicious—Refreshing—Invigorating.” The target of the 1953 Singapor-
ean advertisement was European women. A woman in swimming attire is
shown at the beach, sipping her cold Ovaltine from a milkshake glass. She
is young and slightly glamorous, as one assumes Ovaltine wanted to be seen
in this market. A 2011 advertisement, by contrast, shows a child drinking
cold Ovaltine, and the text, while still focused on women, appeals to them
as mothers, not as glamorous beach-goers. Readers are asked, “Do you know
what your kids should eat for their healthy, growing bodies?” and “Have your
kids had a glass of milk with Ovaltine today?” The emphasis on children
and health goes further with a list of “essential vitamins and minerals” and
the daily percentages that Ovaltine provides. Visitors to their Web site are
invited to evaluate Ovaltine’s “chocolaty goodness” in comparison to other
healthy foods and see how “Ovaltine stacks up against foods which are good
sources of vitamins and minerals.”19 The transformation of the marketing of
Ovaltine in Singapore can be read as a metaphor for the transition of women
in marketing there more broadly—from glamour to motherhood.

Contemporary Takes: Fat and Happy, or Vaguely “Asian”

Food advertising is both very simple and very complex in contemporary Sin-
gapore. Operating in a highly competitive and advertising-saturated market,
multinationals compete alongside individual hawker stalls. High and low
food cultures exist in tandem, and the markets are perhaps less differenti-
ated than in other sectors—the “fine diner” will also have a favorite hawker
stall. Market segmentation still exists, however, and the advertising of fast
food, especially that from transnational companies, is clearly focused on the
youth market. In 2010 the American chain Burger King began an irreverent
advertising campaign to launch a new menu. It started the campaign with
the “Great Apology,” offering free soft-serve ice cream as an apology for not
launching the new menu sooner.20 The strategy of entertaining and rewarding
consumers was being coupled with a wide variety of promotional activities,
free deals, and social networking–based “guerilla consumer activation pro-
grams,” in which consumers are unexpectedly drawn into an advertising or
promotional event.21 The purpose of these strategies, aside from increased
sales, is to develop closeness with the consumer.
Humor, long used to good effect in advertising, is now featured globally
owing to rapid and affordable communication technologies. In Singapore, the
winner of Campaign Brief ’s silver medal for an Individual Television Adver-
 picked in their fresh young prime  ·  129

tisement in 2005—for a Marriott Hotel buffet—shows a plump man walking

down the street. Suddenly he is the victim of an attempted kidnapping. The
kidnappers try to push him into a car. There is a close-up of his large bot-
tom with a roll of fat above the waistline. The kidnappers work hard to push
his body into the car, but it will not fit. They give up and the car drives off.
The plump man is left sitting on the curb. The words “Fat people are hard to
kidnap” appear on the screen. The screen fades to black and there is more
text: “All you can eat buffet $31.95.” Fatness and excessive food consumption,
usually framed as problematic and socially undesirable, here become a sub-
versive marketing strategy. The notion of excessive consumption is, in fact,
a common advertising theme both for individual products and Singapore
more broadly. Singaporean advertisements that use excessive consumption,
such as the Marriott Hotel Buffet commercial, place their product in a rec-
ognizably Singaporean context—with, in this case, the buffet and the nation
receiving simultaneous promotion.
Fatness and humor are common bedmates in Singaporean cultural prod-
ucts, too. The Marriott Buffet advertisement is referencing the 2002 Jack Neo
film I Not Stupid, discussed in Chapter 3.22 The main character, Terry, an
overweight, spoiled twelve-year-old, narrates much of the film. When Terry
and schoolmate Boon Hock are kidnapped, Terry is helpless. He cannot even
butter his own bread. One of the kidnappers comments to the other that the
next time they arrange to kidnap a “rich kid” they should take his maid as
well.23 The trials of kidnapping the fat then became a cultural reference point
in the Marriott advertisement.
Another common advertising strategy in post-independence Singapore is
to evoke a Chinese past as a way of giving a brand greater authenticity and
history, so that an invented British tradition is replaced by a consciously
Asian past, as the Singaporean state did with the Asian Values debate when
it emphasized an amorphic pan-Asian past. The absence of a substantial pre-
colonial past created a problematic vacuum in Singaporean identity that Lee
Kuan Yew sought to fill with an insistence on the nation’s generalized Asian
past and present. He did so specifically through his notable championing
of Asian Values discourse.24 This discourse sought, among other things, to
locate Singapore within an “obviously” Asian framework.
Lee Kuan Yew’s initiatives in this regard deserve attention in the context of
Ien Ang and Jon Stratton’s argument that “the discourse of East/West divide
is essential for an understanding of Singapore as a colonial construct” and,
even more significant, because “it is structurally constitutive of Singapore as a
modern national cultural entity.”25 The ambiguity about Singapore’s definition
130  .  chap ter 7

as an Eastern state, they suggest, derives from its obvious Western inception.
Yet the Singaporean government, and Lee in particular, do unequivocally
project Singapore as “Asian.” Ang and Stratton recognized this, describing
Singapore as a contradiction: “On the one hand, its very existence as a modern
administrative unit is a thoroughly Western occasion, originating in British
colonialism; on the other hand, the Republic of Singapore now tries to rep-
resent itself as resolutely non-Western by emphasizing its Asianness.”26 It is
in this context that the “Asian past” of contemporary products functions.
The Wen Ken Group, manufacturer of the health drink Three Legs Cool-
ing Water, evokes a consciously Asian past in its advertising. In a 1997 issue
of the industry magazine Asian Supermarket, the Wen Ken Group took out
six full pages of advertising, most of which explored the historic nature of its
brand. The first advertisement, a two-page spread, started with the headline
“Standing the test of time” and quickly moved to the brand story.27 The ori-
gin story of the brand (four Chinese families going into business together in
1937) is described, as well as the flagship product, Three Legs Cooling Water.
The medicinal properties of the beverage are detailed (cooling the body, bal-
ancing yin and yang), as is the brand logo, a rhinoceros, chosen because the
horn of the rhinoceros is identified as having a cooling effect on the body.
The explanation is used to both allay fears of the inclusion of an endangered
species in the beverage and to locate the brand in the marketplace; the use of
the rhinoceros is described as being “in much the same way that a famous
saloon sports car company chose a Jaguar as its brand.” Three Legs Cooling
Water is framed as ethical and safe while simultaneously being exclusive.
The exclusivity is further emphasized by mention of the “secret recipe.” The
advertisement ends by reiterating the history of the product, reaffirming that
its popularity in Asia is “proof ” that the drink has “stood the test of time.”
And, finally: “Generations of consumers have felt its benefits . . . and they
still continue to enjoy it day after day.”28
An advertorial then details the history of the company decade by decade,
telling the story in such a way that it mirrors the story of the nation. Like
the nation, the makers of Three Legs Cooling Water “had humble begin-
nings.” The story of their growth, from delivery by foot to delivery in vans
and eventually to a customer base of more than 200 million people in Asia,
is told in order to mirror the development of Singapore as a nation-state. In
the next section, decade-by-decade details of the growth and development
of the company, its advertising strategies, manufacturing expansions, and
other minutiae are detailed, again mirroring the development of Singapore.
The advertorial is bookended by actual advertisements. After reading the
 picked in their fresh young prime  ·  131

article, with its focus on the history of the company, readers then see the
contemporary and modern face of the company: “Wen Ken into the New
Millennium.” The future focus is characterized by “ambitious” plans. Wen
Ken may be “experienced and trusted” but it is also careful to negotiate the
balance between past and future, and it ends the advertisement with a line
that speaks to this negotiation: “The main emphasis will continue to be pass-
ing value back to Wen Ken customers, without whose loyalty over the past
60 years, the group could not have succeeded.”29 The marketing of an over-
the-counter medicinal beverage is thus an example of the way food-related
advertising reinforces the national story by deploying a version of the past
that paints both the product and the nation in acceptable terms.
Tradition is also evoked in the marketing of Peranakan foods. Peranakan
almost becomes shorthand for heritage in Singapore. As we saw in Chapter 6
in relation to Peranakan cookbooks, the mixing of Malay and Chinese culture
is signed as both the past and as acceptable heritage, rather than as a symbol
of contemporary hybridity. Baba King makes a range of ready-to-heat frozen
meals advertised under the product name and slogan “Peranakan Cuisine:
Authentic. Traditional. Delicious”—the three qualities that Baba King most
wants associated with the brand. Authentic and traditional, in this context,
have different associations. Authentic speaks to a contemporary culinary
aesthetic in which the product must taste like food that could be purchased
from a restaurant or eaten at a Peranakan home. Traditional refers to a more
historical authenticity, a cultural identification. So, although the advertise-
ments clearly display the cardboard boxes of frozen food, ornate Peranakan
serving wear is also featured in the images.30
Katong Catering, a Peranakan catering service, embraces tradition as Three
Legs Cooling Water did, by tracing its origins and successes: “From a humble
tingkat delivery service, Katong Catering has grown over the years to become
an established and well-known caterer in Singapore.”31 Humble beginnings
are perhaps most desirable for a food company; they evoke home kitchens
and the familiar. Humble beginnings also signify culture with all its embed-
ded associations. Moreover, food is used as a way of advertising nonfood
products, even a product as remote from food as telephone betting. Readers
of The Peranakan, a magazine for Singapore’s Peranakan community, were
encouraged to “perfect those recipes instead of queuing” by using a phone-
betting system and not wasting time standing in line to place bets in per-
son.32 In the children’s book The Kitchen God young readers are introduced
to Peranakan culture through the preparation and consumption of food.33
Food is equated with cultural meaning, and if Peranakan is shorthand for
132  .  chap ter 7

heritage, the meaning is doubled. The food is both the expression of culture
and the sign of culture.
Australian butter, a popular food product in Singapore, also functions as
an expression of culture—European culture (notwithstanding that Australia
is south of Singapore). Produced in Australia and sold in Singapore for more
than a century, SCS Pure Creamery Butter claims to be “Singapore’s No. 1
Butter” and offers a guarantee that it is halal. It is unclear whether the claim
to be the number one butter refers to sales (it is a very popular product) or to
quality. What is interesting are the food items associated with SCS butter in its
advertising. In a 2005 magazine, for example, the bottom third of a full-page
advertisement is filled with croissants, waffles topped with a knob of butter,
American-style cookies, butter biscuits, bread, garlic bread, fruit pastries, a
lemon tart, an elaborate fruit gateau, and, finally, two pieces of toast with
a serving of butter on one.34 Butter, then, is framed as exclusively Western
in its orientation to food. There is no clarified butter (ghee) or even toast
with kaya (coconut jam served with cold, hard butter). There is a deliberate
rejection of local butter-use practices and emphasis on the European-ness
of butter.
The brand’s other advertising reinforces butter as a Western-style product
via the “SCS Family Baking Workshop.” The workshop has multiple functions,
including that of a marketing opportunity for a range of products—SCS but-
ter, Sunshine flour, Almond Roca confectionery, Glad baking products, and
Berndes cookware, which all have logos and product placement in a promo-
tional advertisement for the workshop that reads: “All it takes to bring the
family together this school holidays is just a wedge of creamy SCS butter, a
handful of fine Sunshine flour, a piece of crunchy Almond Roca and a dash
of enthusiasm.” The baking workshop also functions on the social and edu-
cational levels. It is a socially acceptable family activity, not a children-only
workshop, and it markets itself as providing a step-by-step guide to “how the
family can spend quality time together by doing some baking.” But in a highly
competitive society such as Singapore, family time is not a sufficient benefit.
By learning to make fruity carrot cake, Almond Roca chocolate mousse, and
pear and almond crumble, children will also be in training. Parents are told:
“Teach your kids to sieve, stir, whisk and have fun—all this while training
their psychomotor skills.”35 Baking is elevated to an activity that enhances
the relationship between cognitive functions and physical movement. But-
ter emerges as a product that is closely associated with a Western tradition
of baking, has an important social function of family cohesion, and also
provides a learning tool for children.
 picked in their fresh young prime  ·  133

Performance of emotional or social functions is also revealed in other

food products. Orient Food Rice Chips deploys familiar rhetoric about guilt
and food, establishing an easy binary between taste and health: “Orient Rice
Chips taste so good that you may think they are bad for you.” The “truth”
is revealed: “They have at least 50% less fat than regular fried potato chips.”
And moral release for gluttony is provided: “Now, you can finally crunch to
your heart’s content without that guilty feeling.” In a flowing cursive font,
the reader is reminded of the healthiness of the rice chips with the slogan
“Cholesterol free. Trans Fat Free and Guilt Free.”36
In Singapore Tatler, a magazine consciously positioning itself as exclusive,
advertisements for local restaurants are placed among those for global brands
known for exclusivity, such as Tiffany’s. The magazine itself uses food and
exclusivity in its subscription materials—“Chocolates and mouth-watering
treats when you subscribe to Tatler Singapore. Limited Offer.” (It is not so lim-
ited, though, because it is also available in the following month’s issue.) The
restaurant advertisements emphasize exclusivity (“Fine Tradition. Superior
Dining. Soul Satisfaction”)37 and uniqueness (“Northern Chinese Favorites
with Character”).38 The Australian wine company Wolf Blass advertises its
high-end Grey Label wine, not its more widely available Yellow Label line.
Exclusivity is also conveyed in the editorial content, such as an article evalu-
ating Swiss finishing schools.39 The culinary culmination of these articles
and advertisements is in the notice for the magazine’s restaurant guide. The
advertisement begins with a question in bold black type: “What do Tatler-
ish people make for dinner?” A woman’s elegant hand, holding gold-tipped
chopsticks, appears below the question. The chopsticks are pointing not at
a gorgeous bowl of food but at a telephone. The text then answers the ques-
tion: “Reservations, of course.” A reader of Singapore Tatler, therefore, is a
consumer of fine food, not someone involved in its making. “Tatlerish people”
are looking at the annual restaurant guide to “Singapore’s best restaurants,”
but only if they are “looking for Singapore’s finest dining.”40 Fine dining is
here a symbol of class, social status, and self-identification. Tatlerish people,
those who reader Singapore Tatler, are branded and form a secondary adver-
tisement for the places they attend.
If fine dining is not appropriate, other dining options that are suitably ex-
clusive and classed are also advertised in Singapore Tatler, such as the Regent
Hotel’s take-away food service. This advertisement begins with the question:
“Another ordinary take-away service? Hardly.” Regent “delicacies” and “cui-
sine from the gourmet chefs at The Regent Singapore” can be purchased. The
“hardly” is reflected in the table setting. There is a decorated plate, sitting on
134  .  chap ter 7

a matching placemat, a full place setting of cutlery, napery, and a wine glass.
The plate is very large in comparison to the takeaway container—perhaps a
nod to haute cuisine. The food is almost absent, hidden in a white cardboard
box with a discreet metal handle and the Hilton “SomethingToGo” logo on
the front. 41 It is not, then, the specific food that is being marketed; it is the
idea of takeaway food from the Hilton Hotel. The box resembles American
Chinese take-out food boxes, but the cutlery, which does not consist of chop-
sticks, orients it elsewhere. The plate and mat are green, the box is white, and
the backdrop for the text is white, too, so the take-away box almost disappears
into the background. The food is doubly ambiguous—visible but invisible.
Food is also strangely absent and present in a Singapore Tatler article about
diamonds. In “The Big Bling,” Vanessa Langford “looks at the latest way to
wear diamonds. From growing your own bling to immortalizing your loved
one or pet, there have never been so many options.” The article includes a
number of illustrations, from stars wearing the latest diamond fashions to
specific pieces of jewelry, but none so intriguing as that of a plate of diamonds.
A white-skinned woman, with polished nails and a large diamond ring, holds
a knife and fork in her hands and appears to be cutting into the jewelry on
the plate. The text that accompanies the illustration reads: “Our obsession
with diamonds shows no signs of abating.” Eating is equated with excessive
consumption, the knife and fork turning the plate of jewelry into a perverted
consumable. Her knife is poised on a brooch held still by her fork and, by
extension of the action, about to be destroyed by the act of consumption.42
A few pages later the magazine has a two-page spread called “Weight a
minute!” with the theme, “You know your diet isn’t working when,” which
consists of eight cartoon-style illustrations of white obesity.43 The dominant
image on the first page is that of a large woman, so large she takes up half the
page, in a purple dress. She is holding a pair of underpants in her hand and
looks aghast at their label: “Jumbo pants.” The underpants, like her dress, are
purple (a lighter shade) and are adorned with green ruffles—so it is possible
that it is the aesthetics that horrify her. It is also possible that what horrifies
her is that despite the label “Jumbo pants,” these are average-sized underpants
that, given her anatomically puzzling design (her body is basically a circle,
with a small indentation for her breasts), she could not possibly fit into. Food
consumption emerges as highly problematic in this context, and the plate of
jewels takes on an even more sinister gleam.
Diets in the context of the Singapore Tatler are not about a period of re-
stricting consumption but, rather, about a way of life, a lived everyday rela-
 picked in their fresh young prime  ·  135

tionship with food. You know your diet isn’t working when “you salivate when
opening a tin of cat food.” While some might view a diet’s success in terms
of deprivation—the dieter is so hungry that the cat food looks good—in this
context that means the diet is not working. From an advertising perspective
this is important; Singapore Tatler is largely about consumption, luxury, and
excess—and this includes dining pleasures.
Miele’s advertisement for its steamer continues the theme of luxurious food
consumption via a two-page spread. On the left-hand side an Asian woman
dressed in a long, red, backless evening gown is standing with her back to
the reader looking over her left shoulder in a slightly suggestive fashion. She
is resting her hands on pale, Danish-looking chairs as she presides over an
elaborately set dinner table. Part of the spacious home is also evident on that
page; a series of sofas are seen at the back of the image, and these, along with
windows showing greenery, continue onto the facing page. The menu for the
dinner party is listed in part in black type at the top of the left-hand page:
“Hairy Crabs from Lake Yang Cheng, brought in by air. White asparagus from
North Limburg, picked by a seasoned hand.” These global luxury items are
then cooked by an unnamed Miele appliance: “Natural flavours exquisitely
retained by Miele.” In small type at the bottom of the left-hand page readers
are told: “To experience why Miele’s steamers are considered state of the art
in cooking appliances please visit our showroom.”44 This is the first mention
of the steamer.
The exclusivity and high quality of the steamer are reinforced by the
final line of text on the page: “Once there you’ll know why anything else
is a compromise.” There are no compromises in this home. On the right-
hand page, half of the space is taken up with further illustration of the
living room—so spacious that it cannot be contained by one page. In a
nation where space is at a premium, this is an instant signifier of wealth
and status. The indoor-outdoor pool further illustrates this. The edge of the
home fades softly to a block panel of red. Three-quarters of the red block
is empty. In a halo of white light at the bottom quarter of the page, a Miele
steamer presides. The steamer is alone, not in a kitchen; it is an appliance
of such significance that it requires no context. Below the steamer is the
word steamer in capital letters—labeled perhaps because the object is not
actually distinct; it could be a microwave or a convection oven. What is
being sold is the status of the item, and that message is reinforced for a final
time with the Miele logo and the phrase “Anything else is a compromise”
at the end of the advertisement.
136  .  chap ter 7

* * *
As the nation-state of Singapore moved from its status as a colonial posses-
sion to an independent, modern city-state, the food-related advertising also
changed to reflect the broad social and political changes of the times. Adver-
tising of European products moved from being a guide to the way colonists,
as consumers, should behave to postcolonial evidence of cosmopolitanism.
The content and style of food advertisements, the exclusivity of certain in-
gredients and food-related experiences, represent and reinforce ideologies
about gender, race, and class. Ultimately, the conflation of Singaporean-ness
with food leads to a doubling of the meaning of some advertisements that
rely on food to signify culture. In Singaporean cosmopolitanism and adver-
tising, whatever the origins of the ingredients, embracing the culture of food
is good for Singapore, especially because it is a site of engagement with the
global economy. Selling Singapore as a tourist food destination is also good
for Singapore, and the next chapter looks at the variety of ways the govern-
ment does so.
 8
Food Sluts and the Marketing
of Singaporean Cuisine

Framing the nation as a tourist destination, especially a food tour-

ist destination, is now standard practice in the countries of Southeast Asia,
and particularly Singapore. But the rubric of the exotic, and therefore the
erotic, Orient, while clearly evident in Singapore, is being displaced by a
neo-Orientalism of literal consumption. Unlike its neighbors, Singapore,
through its English-language public sphere, is the “knowable Asia.” As a
Westernized, globalized city, it appears knowable through the consumption
of local fare. Tourists are actively encouraged to partake of local food as part
of the experience of Singapore—to literally taste the nation. Food-related
tourist destinations repackage culture for consumption by visitors and locals.
Even the National Museum of Singapore works to make food a pathway to
knowing and consuming culture in Singapore. The flow-on effect is a grow-
ing interest in Singaporean cuisine in the West, an interest evident in the
pages of food magazines and television travel programs in which Singapor-
ean cuisine signifies an acceptable and unthreatening Asia, an unsurprising
perception given the considerable political and social effort expended by the
Singaporean state, positioning food as apolitical and neutral.
Food may be perceived to be politically neutral, but it is critical to the
marketing of this island-state. Food is symbolically and rhetorically signifi-
cant in the marketing of Singapore because it offers a contained paradigm of
sensual excess. In a nation where sex is highly regulated—from prostitution
to marriage—and the nation has a decidedly strait-laced reputation, food is
an acceptable form of excess where other excesses are not. Food, then, can be
understood as something of a substitution for sex. Citizens as well as visitors
are making this substitution, guided by tourism materials.
138  .  chap ter 8

No More “Stopover City”

The most widely advertised product in Singapore is Singapore itself, and it
does it well. As the sociologist Susan Pitchford suggested in the context of
Wales, tourism can serve as a medium for telling a nationalist story, but it
is one that requires skillful handling in order to be effective.1 In the case of
Singapore, tourism does tell an effective nationalist story, and it is as much
about local consumption of state policies as it is about bringing in tourists
or shaping their experiences once they are in Singapore. In this island city,
famed for its role as a stopover city, tourism plays a significant economic
role, but beyond its practical importance, tourism is ideologically important
because it provides a mechanism by which a relatively new nation can display
itself, both to outsiders and to itself.
Commentators and academics frequently identify Singapore as an anx-
ious society.2 Singapore is an anxious nation precisely because Singaporeans
are regularly reminded of the fragility of their nation-state. Far from being
an accidental consequence of PAP policy, creating and maintaining anxiety
about the future of Singapore and, by extension, of Singaporeans, has been
a political strategy. Among other things, this approach positions the PAP as
the solution to a raft of problems and creates a seamless connection between
political party, government, and state. It also creates the need to emphasize
the validity of the nation-state.
The Singaporean state’s complex relationship with its national past, the
brevity of its history, and the complexity of its population are problems that
have confronted the state’s nation-making project. As highlighted early in
this book, most colonized nations have a distinct pre-colonial history, but
Singapore was a colonial society at its very inception, with a small population
and no national identity. It was the colonial administration after World War
II that remade Singapore as a state, first, in the Federation of Malaysia, and
then in 1965—well within living memory—full independence was achieved.
Singapore had become a nation-state in its own right, and the nation build-
ing began.
From the beginning, Singapore’s validity and authenticity as a nation-state
were insisted on by the ruling PAP, which undertook the task of bringing
the nation to maturity. As the Southeast Asian specialist David Brown has
noted, “to say that Singapore was not a nation-state at the time of decoloniza-
tion is to indicate that the PAP government, which led it, lacked nationalist
legitimacy.”3 The PAP sought legitimacy by emphasizing the fragility of the
new nation-state, the need for all Singaporeans to pull together, and for the
PAP itself to constitute a strong state.
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  139

Its unusual national origins, coupled with the absence of a substantial

pre-colonial past, created a problematic vacuum in Singaporean identity. Or
to put it another way, Singapore needs to be marketed to itself because of
the rhetorical function of talking about the fragility of the new nation and
down-playing possible sites of non-national identity formation. Tourism ef-
fectively fills this gap by providing images that illustrate Singaporean identity
to Singaporeans. The images of multiracial Singapore in tourism materials
reflect the policy imperatives of racial harmony but distinctive culture. Racial
harmony, a social landscape free of any ethnic tensions or potential tensions,
is a long-standing platform of PAP government. The colorful tourism ad-
vertisements teach Singaporeans about the state’s expectations and provide
a visual representation of what concepts such as “harmony” might look like.
Some advertisements focus on children, because racial harmony might
well be easier to imagine in the next generation than in one’s own. In one
of these advertisements, four children share a bowl of ice-kachang, a Singa-
porean dessert of brightly colored and flavored shaved ice.4 The advertise-
ment is laden with symbolic value: the four children are sharing the same
dish, so we might assume that the dessert represents the nation, an entity in
which they all share; the multiracial nature of that nation/dessert is dually
represented by the bright and distinctive colors of the syrup coloring the ice
(red, green, the white of the ice, and yellow adornments) and by the children
themselves, who represent the major racial groups of the nation and whose
clothing mirrors, in a slightly more sedate fashion, the colors of the dessert.
There are two boys and two girls. The Malay girl and the Indian boy are on
the far left and far right of the grouping, respectively, in the center, the two
Chinese children dominate the image, the girl with a huge smile and the boy
with his mouth open wide, gasping at the coldness of the ice.
Even if the Chinese children dominate the picture, the children are shar-
ing equitably and enjoying themselves; harmony is thus less about sacrifice
than about pleasant experiences. The text at the bottom further positions
this advertisement as being for both local and international consumption. It
reads: “I learnt that ice really could melt people’s hearts.” The children have an
additional role: to melt the heart of the observer. Seeing a multiracial group
of children partaking of a refreshing dessert/nation is intended to make the
citizen feel warmly toward the notion of racial harmony, yet it simultane-
ously feeds Orientalist notions about the exotic Other for the international
consumer.
Every citizen and permanent resident in Singapore is allocated one of four
rigidly imposed racial categories: Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Other. Race has
been enshrined as the basis of social classification, and while class, caste, and
140  .  chap ter 8

religion function as modes of identification, the sociologist John Clammer

has pointed out that “the only society-wide, universal and officially sponsored
means of personal, social and cultural identification is race.”5 As a result,
an inflexible system of stratification has emerged. Clammer notes that “by
stimulating ethnic awareness, people are made more and more self-conscious
of their race,” which makes the divisions more rigid and the transgressing
of them less likely.6 Tourist advertisements rely heavily on easily identifiable
racial symbols. Culture becomes reduced to race, and race becomes reduced
to symbols. The symbols of race (ethnic dress, food, and colors) work for
both local and tourist consumption. As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall notes,
there is always a tension between “the desideratum of a multicultural state”
and the reality,7 but the Singaporean state works hard to minimize the gap.
Some advertisements clearly target a tourist audience rather than a local
audience, such as an advertisement showing a European man enthusiasti-
cally tucking into local food on a table groaning with food.8 The central
figure is clearly a tourist, evident in part from what he is eating, but also in
the apparent enchantment of his experience as conveyed by photographic
effects blurring the shapes of the other diners and staff. There are only two
in-focus figures: the tourist and the cook, who is bringing the tourist more
food. While a blurred image might traditionally be read as a signal of speed,
the blurring here seems fantastical. The tourist reaches with his hand and
chopsticks toward the food and the viewer. There are already fourteen dishes
on the table, with another about to be delivered by the smiling cook. The
dishes are a mix of snacks, main dishes, and desserts. For a local audience the
array of dishes might signal incompetent ordering—a plate of chili crab sits
next to a bowl of ice-kachang—but for a tourist audience it is a portrayal of
plenty and exoticism. The location architecturally reinforces this with arches
and golden adornments. The food and environment mark this as a hawker
center (Lau Pa Sat Festival Pavilion), one of the places that, as we will see,
play a pivotal role in the internal and external advertising of Singapore.
Excess is acceptable in this Othered space. At a time when carbon-foot-
print-conscious globalism accompanies advocacy of low-fat, low-cholesterol,
low-salt, low-sugar austerity, the change of location offered by travel can also
offer an escape from the moral economy of food politics. The worries of calo-
ries and carbon footprints can be temporarily, and temporally, suspended.
The text that accompanies the tourist advertisement described above—“It’s
easy to see why diet books seldom make it to the Singapore bestsellers list”—
reinforces the distancing from the daily grind and positions Singapore as a
space in which excess is acceptable. The factual inaccuracy of the statement
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  141

aside, the message is powerful—this is a place where diet books, which we

might read as a symbol of doing without, are not popular. We are returned
to food as substitute for sex, the acceptable sensual excess.
An advertisement showing a group of tourists eating at the well-known
tourist hub Clarke Quay repeats the theme of excess.9 The text here asks:
“Why must a day have only three meals?” Excess is not just about food,
though. Images of (usually) female consumers clutching multiple shopping
bags also dominate advertisements targeting non-Singaporeans. The “Great
Singapore Sale,” the annual event that generates particular images of exces-
sive consumption, also speaks to the important contribution that tourism
makes to the Singaporean economy.
The centrality of tourism to political and economic matters is reflected
in the role of the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), which takes seriously its
mandate of ensuring that “tourism remains a key economic pillar through
long-term strategic planning in partnership with the public and private sector
stakeholders.”10 It offers differentiated services, including medical tourism
and educational tourism, each of which has a distinctive internet presence,
all under the umbrella of STB. Medical and educational tourism are major
sources of revenue for Singapore. As the medical tourism Web site notes,
Singapore is “a leading destination, not only for business and leisure, but also
for world-class, affordable and safe healthcare.”11
The complex aims and strategies of Singapore Education, the education
tourism branch of the STB, give insight into the nuanced approach that board
takes to the relationship between tourism and nationalism. Singapore Educa-
tion describes itself as the “marketing and promotion arm” for international
education services, and STB “assumes the responsibility of attracting inter-
national students to Singapore.” Singapore Education strategizes the building
of brand recognition, marketing, and information channels. But perhaps its
most revealing aim is to ensure that “international students have an enrich-
ing learning (and living) experience in Singapore so that they in turn can be
valued ambassadors for Singapore.”12 This matches the ideology underpin-
ning the services, such as that of the Web site “Overseas Singaporean,” which
keeps Singaporean expatriates in touch with home and reinforces the idea
that tourism is for the consumption of multiple audiences.13
The branding of Singapore is not static. Three recent campaigns—“Singapore:
Instant Asia,” “Uniquely Singapore,” and “Your Singapore”—reflect the evolu-
tion in the messages for local and international consumption. The brand over-
view describes “Your Singapore” as focused on “visitor-centricity.”14 The brand
may be visitor-centric, but there is also an emphasis on local consumption of the
142  .  chap ter 8

brand. The STB is explicit about this, noting that “the brand awareness among
Singaporeans and residents is also important. This includes a comprehensive
domestic tourism program, strategic outdoor advertising and communications
platforms such as signs and display panels in immigration checkpoints, airports
and districts with high tourist traffic.”15 Brand awareness among Singaporeans
reinforces ideas about the nation-state and nationalism in a variety of contexts,
with food representing a critical medium through which these messages are
illustrated.
The focus on consumption leads sometimes to a conflation of the catego-
ries “shopping” and “dining” in the marketing of Singapore. For the STB
the goal is “to establish Singapore as one of the most compelling shopping
and dining destinations in Asia, where every visitor’s shopping and dining
experience will be an enjoyable and unique one that exceeds expectations.”16
Food plays a major role in advertising Singapore to visitors, as well as to the
local population. Food, purchased like other commodities, is positioned as
central to the tourist experience. According to the STB: “Food has a sacred
status in Singapore. Your trip here is not completed till you’ve tried the vari-
ous cuisines and signature dishes.”17 Specific dishes defined as signature dishes
are then listed, and culture is thus codified in culinary terms.
While specific dishes may come to represent cultures or ethnicities, they
need to be knowable, and this is one of the functions of the STB Web page
“Your Singapore.” A feature of the food-focused page of the site, “Food in
translation” serves to take the familiar and expand the visitor’s understand-
ing of the category. Visitors are invited to “experience signature Singaporean
dishes,” which are “presented through various dishes from different countries
that you recognise and love.”18 An item, such as donuts, is identified and de-
scribed (a deep-fried dough snack that has garnered popular reception all
over the world), and then the viewer can click on an icon marked “translate
this dish.” The image of a donut is replaced by an image of Jian Dui, Haina-
nese glutinous rice balls filled with red bean paste and covered with sesame
seeds. Inquisitive readers can click on another link to more information,
which takes them to a page about the places where Jian Dui are sold and a
description of Dim Sum restaurants. Additional fillings in Jian Dui are also
described on this page.19 Kuih Bom, a Malay glutinous rice ball with a co-
conut filling, is also discussed, but it is the Chinese “donut equivalent” that
takes precedence and provides the only visual representation.
One of the ironies of this feature is that donuts are actually incredibly
popular in Singapore and were the subject of a “food craze” fueled by a rivalry
between two shops, Donut Factory and Dippin’ Donut. At the peak of their
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  143

popularity in 2007–2009, people stood in line for hours to purchase fancy-

flavored donuts akin to those displayed in the STB interactive Web feature.
Donut stores still have a significant presence in Singaporean malls, with many
featuring donut fusion—durian flavor, green tea icing. International donut
chain stores such as the Japanese company Missy Donut and the American
chain Dunkin’ Donuts have also opened, defusing the craze.
In the “Food in translation” Web feature, Long Island Tea is translated
into a Singapore Sling, both sickly sweet alcoholic cocktails. Beef stew is
translated into the Malay dish Beef Rendang (a coconut-based beef stew).
Apple pie, described as the “epitome of American food,” is traced from its
medieval European roots to its status as a New World phenomenon; it is
then translated into ornate mooncakes, the staple dish of the Mid-Autumn
Festival. The visual representation of the mooncakes is quite different in the
translation and read-more sections. The first image makes the mooncake
look like an American-style cookie, wide and flat. The second image shows
a more traditionally shaped mooncake, thicker and denser. Visitors are di-
rected to specific bakeries and restaurants where they can try mooncakes.
They are also invited to suggest their favorite place to eat mooncakes, giving
visitors ownership of their experience of consuming mooncakes. The “Sug-
gestion” function requires a name and email address, so it is not completely
anonymous, and it suggests that there are some local users of the Web site.
A link called “Places to visit” directs visitors to the Mid-Autumn Festival
celebrations and more generally to Chinatown. If visitors click on this link,
they are taken to a “Chinois Chic” page where heritage and modernity are
posited as coexisting.20 An infomercial directs visitors to activities and spe-
cific commercial outlets, including hotels. In Chinatown, visitors are told,
they will “enjoy a mix of heritage, shopping, as well as a good variety of food
options, which are sure to leave a traveller happy and satisfied at the end of
the day.”21 The Web site is a marketing exercise, so it is to be expected that it
sells the destination, but the centrality of food to the process is revealing.
In the translation of squid ink pasta to Lor Mee, an additional feature is
included—“What others say.” Visitors may make their own comments or
agree with the comments of other visitors. The statement “I love Singapore”
has been agreed with a number of times in relation to the image of the bowl of
Lor Mee.22 A number of Thai dishes (Pad Thai, Tom Yum soup) and Japanese
dishes (Oden, Okonomiyaki) are also available for translation. Individual
dishes within the Signature Dish section can be “liked” (but not disliked)
and shared in various social media, giving Singaporeans and tourists the
means to participate in viral marketing. The STB’s education policy aim (to
144  .  chap ter 8

have international students and expatriates acting as informal ambassadors

for Singapore) can also be understood as a form of viral marketing, with
individuals spontaneously promoting Singapore as a destination. By using
food as the dominant part of the overall marketing, this strategy appears to
be politically neutral, while allowing for acceptable nonsexual excess.

The Nation in the Sky

National airlines, not uncommonly associated with nationalism, bring visi-
tors, especially tourists, to the nation and carry residents both ways. Even
when airlines such as Australia’s Qantas are privatized and cease being state-
owned national carriers, the association continues at an emotional level.
Singapore International Airlines is a key participant in the marketing of
Singapore as a destination and an idea. The flag-carrier airline functions
as a direct form of marketing for the nation-state, with the imagery of the
“Singapore Girl,” the hostesses of the airline, a cornerstone of both the air-
line’s advertising and the marketing of the nation. Although the airline can
trace its origins to 1947, it only began trading as Singapore Airlines in 1972,
after the company underwent restructuring. Singapore-based Batey Ads
was responsible for the Singapore Girl advertising iconography and retained
the account from 1972 to 2007, a very long time in that highly competitive
industry.23 The account moved to a U.S. firm, but there was little change in
the centrality of the Singapore Girl to the branding of SIA. She has come to
stand for not just service and Singapore, but also for an image of the category
“Asian women,” an image criticized as representing Singaporean women as
subservient.
A 1974 Singapore Airlines double-page advertisement, for example, showed
a Singapore Girl wearing the famous SIA sarong kebaya and crouching down
to the level of two small children seated in large airline seats. On the left, the
blond-haired child leans in toward a birthday cake with five candles, which is
directly in front of the second child, who is Chinese. The children and hostess
are blowing out the candles. The large-type heading says, “Travellers must
be content,” and the smaller body text on the opposite page tells the story of
the birthday event: “Gentle hostess. Giving a party in the sky, with birthday
cake and fizzy drinks all around. And something a little stronger for those
a little older. Across half the world and more, this girl of Singapore Airlines
will care for you as only she knows how.”24
The gentle hostess offers care that is both maternal and exotically erotic.
Her body is highly regulated, in terms of both structure (height, weight) and
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  145

adornment (regulation hair styles, eyeliner colors), and she is an individual

who can “care for you as only she knows how” with an interchangeable body
that can provide service—be it “fizzy drinks all around” or “something a little
stronger.” The underlying Singapore Girl strategy has not changed in decades,
and she is still shown sedately serving customers. What has changed is the
way Singaporeans are talked about in other travel mediums.
A 1974 travel article headed “The city called ‘Instant Asia,’” in Orienta-
tions, the same up-market Hong Kong magazine that carried the birthday
cake SIA advertisement, tells readers: “In big cities like London, Rome or
New York, the moment a Singaporean spots one of his kind, he will go over
to his compatriot’s table and start a conversation. Very likely, they’ll shortly
end up in each others homes or, if they are both on vacation, see the town
together. This disarmingly open nature can be traced to the Singaporeans’
‘Malay ancestry.’”25
Food in this example becomes a point of identification and sharing. Cul-
ture is also essentialized. Only about 15 percent of the Singaporean popula-
tion has Malay ancestry, so it is unlikely that the Singaporeans’ “disarmingly
open nature” could be traced to one such racial group—quite aside from the
ideological issues with this statement. Readers were also informed that
Another heritage of the Singaporean’s multiracial environment can be seen
in his fondness for spicy food. . . . You’ll find restaurants famous for their hot
curries frequented by Indians as well as Malays and Chinese. This sense of
culinary adventure is fostered between friends of all races, who mingle freely
in each other’s homes to try various cuisines. The Singaporean has very little
taste for bland, colourless food and no particular fascination for steaks, roast
beef and Yorkshire pudding.26

The structuring of the sentence about the fostering of culinary adventure

makes it sound as if Singaporeans only go to the homes of friends of other
races for the purpose of trying different cuisines. The Singapore of this text
is harmoniously multiracial, if dismissive of Yorkshire pudding, and exotic
in its fascination with spicy food.

Museums Making History

Heritage and history making are critical to nation building and, increasingly,
to tourism. Museums, central sites for both these processes, frequently be-
come the “custodians of public memory,”27 tempering how the nation imag-
ines and remembers itself and how that national memory is presented to
146  .  chap ter 8

visitors. In the case of Singapore, museums were slow to emerge as tourist

sites, but they have always functioned as ways of representing community,
increasingly so for local and external consumption. In 1990, then Prime
Minister Goh Chok Tong gave a speech in the Singapore parliament called
“Our Museum Must Capture the Memories of Our Nation.” He concluded
that his ultimate goal was for visitors to be so inspired by what was then the
Singapore History Museum as to leave saying, “Ah! Now I know Singapore.
I have felt her spirit and lived the story of her life.”28 The museum in this
construction is a tool of education along very explicit national lines—it is
the custodian of “the” national story (that is, there are no other competing
stories), and it is a story that is knowable. It does not have to be experienced,
as by citizens, but can be encountered by visitors to the museum. The legal
historian Kevin Tan critiqued the museum as “rudderless” and having an
ill-defined role before it became a tool in nation building.29 Goh’s statement
heralded a period of explicit nationalism for the museums of Singapore.
Since Goh’s 1990 statement the museum has undergone radical changes in
terms of physical space and exhibition content. The museum is both one of the
oldest and one of the newest in Singapore. The National Museum of Singapore
(NMS) opened in December 2006, but it traces its institutional origins and
some of its holdings to the 1887 Raffles Library and Museum. Under various
names, including the Singapore History Museum, it displayed Singaporean
history to both local and international audiences. For Tan, the transforma-
tion from Singapore History Museum to National Museum of Singapore was
problematic. The transition signaled a change in physical space, emphasis, and
function. Tan notes that the NMS is “conceived more as a lifestyle space and an
interpretive centre than as a repository of historical artefacts, knowledge and
scholarship.”30 These changes led him to suggest that “the NMS is no longer a
true keeper of Singapore history but a mere story-teller.”31 The changes to the
museum have certainly increased its appeal as a tourist destination, but they
have also brought into question its function for the local community. As Tan
sees it, the museum is failing to fulfill a number of its functions. He asks, “Is
the museum a maker of Singapore History? Hardly.”32
Even within the nationalist agenda, there are tensions. The PAP has tried
to balance the demands of two distinct groups: older Singaporeans who were
nostalgic for the slower pace of 1970s Singapore and young Singaporeans who
knew little of their past and were excluded from the dominant construction
of the national past. The PAP responded to this situation by attempting to
control national history itself. The tensions between a repository function and
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  147

a nationalist and tourist function run deep. It is, of course, difficult to know
how audiences receive exhibitions. As the author and media commentator
Susan Douglas has noted, “We will always know more about the motives and
assumptions of the producers of media images—including their assumptions
about the audience—than we will about the audience itself.”33 The audience
responses to the changes at the museum may be difficult to gauge, but it is
clear that the museum is emphasizing interaction and objects.
Stuart Hall suggested “it is by our use of things, and what we say, think
and feel about them—how we represent them—that we give them mean-
ing.”34 In echoing the attitudes of the Singaporean state, the NMS ratifies the
construction of cultural knowledge in Singapore. Material culture, displayed
and absent, provides us with an understanding of this cultural knowledge.
With its relentless engagement with material culture, the NMS seeks to give
very specific meaning to Singaporean objects. Nowhere is this more apparent
than in the four Living Galleries—Food, Fashion, Photography, and Film.
The Food Gallery focuses on Singapore’s street food from the 1950s to the
1970s, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in a visual display coupled
with sound installations. Visitors are told that they “will discover how street
food reflects the ethnic diversity, cross-cultural exchanges and cultural in-
novations of Singapore.”35 One of the ways in which the objects in this col-
lection are given meaning, in Hall’s sense of the giving of meaning, is by
faux-historicizing. That is, although objects are not falsely identified as being
older than they are, many objects are displayed in such a way as to imply age
(see figure 6). An attentive visitor can find accurate information, including
dates of objects, but some effort has been made to making objects look old.
In a very conscious attempt to deploy the past, traditions, as Eric Hobsbawm
suggested, are invented by implying invariance.36
The illusion of age is directly addressed in the National Museum of Singa-
pore Guide, which states that “despite the relative youth of the artifacts . . .
they might well be from the turn of the last century, so different was life in
the 1970s compared to conditions merely three decades later.”37 In this con-
struction, the recent past is not so much different as radically different. The
dishes are, however, deeply familiar to any consumer of Singaporean cuisine.
While the food preparation implements may have changed, it is hyperbolic
to suggest they have changed to the degree that they might as well be from
the turn of the century.
The colonial, to some extent, stands in for the past. The back room of the
exhibition, with colonial-era botanical prints and drawings, reinforces this
148  .  chap ter 8

Figure 6. Detail of a tea tin in the Living Galleries Exhibition, National Museum of Singa-
pore. Photograph by Eric Anderson. From the Collection of National Museum of Singa-
pore, National Heritage Board, Gift of Tian Heng, Tea Merchant. Used by permission.

notion physically and ideologically; it is at the back of the exhibition, as the

colonial past is behind the nation but still underpinning it. Reproductions of
botanical prints and drawings by William Farquhar, the first British Resident
and Commandant of Singapore (1819–23), are displayed in a modified form,
or in the words of the museum, “are embellished onto an array of colourful
jars”38 (see figure 7). The display is bright, colorful, and visually quite distinc-
tive from Farquhar’s characteristic pastel and watercolor drawings. The past
is, however, very explicitly evoked simply by the inclusion of his iconographic
drawings, even in a modified form. The exhibit manages to be simultaneously
self-consciously modern—some of the botanical images of plants connect to
jars that simulate the smell of plants—and deliberately historically conscious.
The importance of this part of the exhibition can also be read in its repro-
duction in other sites. The children’s story Sasha Visits the Museums provides
a good example of this.39 The popular Sasha series by Shamini Flint, also in-
creasingly known for her adult crime fiction,40 “began as a mother’s crusade
to provide books with a local context for her child growing up in Singapore”
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  149

Figure 7. Detail of the display of jars in the Living Galleries Exhibition, National Museum
of Singapore. Photograph by Eric Anderson. Photographed courtesy of the National
Museum of Singapore. Used by permission.

and is now “a fully fledged travel series.”41 Sasha is certainly a busy child. She
regularly travels within Asia and around Singapore and has the remarkable,
but not remarked upon, ability to change race. She appears to be Malay in
Sasha Visits the Botanical Gardens, Chinese in Sasha Visits the Bird Park, and
Eurasian in Sasha Visits Bali and Sasha Visits Tokyo. She is a potent symbol
of racial harmony in the (in)visibility of her race.
When Sasha visits the museums of Singapore, our racial chameleon is a
pale-skinned girl with light brown hair. She visits four museums, but the
NMS is given prominence and is featured on the cover of the book, as well
as at the heart of the narrative. The illustration of the NMS building is re-
peated in the story, and the accompanying text explains several of its archi-
tectural features. In this sense, the building is itself a destination. While at
the NMS, she visits two of the permanent exhibitions in the Living Gallery
section—Food and Photography. It is the jars embellished with Farquhar’s
drawings that provide the visual representation of the food exhibition. The
jars do offer an appealing interactive aspect of the exhibition—visitors can
150  .  chap ter 8

sniff scents, as Sasha is depicted doing. Alpana Ahuja’s illustration of Sasha,

although a still image, captures the interactive quality that is reinforced by
the text as Sasha tells her mother she has found out which jar contains the
pepper. The colorful jars move beyond the scientific to the artistic, making
the display both a desirable illustration for a children’s book and a source of
marketability for the museum.
In the National Museum of Singapore Guide, the jars are used to introduce
the Food Gallery, although they are physically at the end of the exhibition,
and images of individual jars and groups of jars are featured heavily in this
section of the book. There are sixteen sections in the Food Gallery, of which
the jars are only one, but they are the visually dominant theme. Color fre-
quently symbolizes ethnic culture in Singapore, a factor evident in Singapore
Tourism advertising.42 The Food Gallery section is described in the Guide as
a “playful and hands-on experience for visitors striving to learn more about
the island’s cuisine,”43 casting this section of the exhibit as targeting visitors
who do not know about the island’s cuisine, most likely tourists. In contrast
to the rest of the food exhibition, however, the jar section is not about meals
or individual dishes but is about ingredients, something tourists are in fact
less likely to encounter.

Hawkers, History, and Homesickness

Hawker food dominates the representation of food, as opposed to ingredients,
in the NMS Food Gallery, as it does the food culture of Singapore. The Guide
states: “The Food Gallery focuses as much on the nature of local cuisine as on
its mode of preparation and most common distribution venue: the street.”44
The street is not actually present in the exhibition, but the notion of street
foods is very evident, and iconography of street peddlers dominates. A kueh
tutu (small steamed cake) seller’s tricycle, complete with umbrella, dominates
the first section of the exhibition.
Of the sixteen sections in the Food Gallery exhibition, ten are dedicated
to hawker dishes, four show types of kitchen equipment, one is a section
of “kitchen curiosities,” and, finally, there is the wall of spice jars. The ten
hawker dishes displayed represent the culinary heritage of ethnic groups in
Singapore and can be read as a statement of racial harmony. The unifying
nature of food, its assumed apolitical nature, is reflected here. As we will see
shortly in non-museum-related discussion of hawker food, the discourse of
food crossing social barriers is regularly deployed. As the Guide notes, and
we have heard before: “Whatever their ethnic origin, income, or political slant
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  151

might be, most, if not all, Singaporeans would agree on the importance of
food.”45 The central message of food as neutral speaks directly to why food
is deployed as a nation-building tool.
The composition of the ten dish-themed displays is varied, but each has
accompanying text describing the “history” of the dish, together with a line
drawing of it. Laksa (spiced coconut and noodle soup) is the first display,
and its line drawing is of a poor Chinese man—harried-looking and bent
over a caldron about to serve a bowl of laksa. He is wearing shorts, a jacket,
and a hat, his poverty implied by his bare feet (see figure 8). A linguistic his-
tory of the word laksa is included, with an attempt to trace the origins of the
dish. The theme of origins, very important in the construction of Singapore’s
national history, is visible in the attempts to ascribe an origin to each of the
dishes. It is precisely because of the newness of the Singaporean nation-state
that ethnic origins have emerged as important. That is, culture and cultural
traditions stand in for some national traditions. That such traditions, espe-
cially when they coalesce around food, are comfortably apolitical, adds to
their political appeal.
The need to name hybridity functions in a similar way. Thus, laksa is
described as a “hybrid of Malay and Southern Chinese food traditions,”

Figure 8. Detail of the Laksa Man Illustration in the Living Galleries Exhibition, National
Museum of Singapore. Photograph by Eric Anderson. Photographed courtesy of the
National Museum of Singapore. Used by permission.
152  .  chap ter 8

associated with a Peranakan culture but largely served by the Chinese. Next
to the text is a black-and-white photograph of a real laksa-serving hawker.
He, too, is bent over his equipment—his feet are obscured, but his dress
is similar, if a little more casual; he wears a hat, shorts, and a shirt-sleeved
top. The photograph looks quite old, but it was taken in the 1960s. As the
Guide notes: “Because of the difficulty of finding older equipment and
witnesses, the material exhibits and taped audio accounts documenting
the dishes and hawkers’ past way of life tend to date to Singapore’s post-
Independence decades of the 1960s and 1970s.”46
The film accompanying the laksa display is even more recent and shows
contemporary laksa-making practices. It makes no attempt to imply that it
is anything other than contemporary film. I would, however, suggest that in
the context of the rest of the display, some strong ideas about the timeless-
ness of Singaporean laksa and its simultaneously long tradition are in fact
being conveyed.
Next to the laksa display is the char kway teow (fried noodle dish) display.
In the line drawing, another harried Chinese man prepares food, and again
a linguistic and historical origin story is given. The dish is clearly “classed”
in the description, its high lard content described as making it popular with
laborers. The transformation in recent times to a lard-free healthier version in
the form of “green char kway teow” provides a palatable history for the dish.
Regional variations, such as the inclusion of crab in Penang, give a deeper
tradition and sign it as having a place in a regional history. By extension,
Singapore, too, has a place in this regional history—alluding to traditions that
pre-date the nation-state, food legitimates culture and thereby the traditions
of that nation-state.
The display concerned with roti prata (fried, unleavened bread), like the
laksa display, is accompanied by a multimedia component. Large-screen
video showing the making of roti prata dominates the rest of the visual dis-
play. In the standard line drawing, the ethnicity of the hawker is not as clear
as in some of the other drawings, although the accompanying text locates
the roti prata hawker tradition as originating in South India. The hawker is
as harried as the others in the exhibit. He is wearing more clothing—top,
long trousers, and an apron—but still has bare feet as a symbol of his poverty.
The sarabat man (who runs a drinks stall), also framed as Indian in the ac-
companying text, appears to have shoes. He sits on a stool and has his head
covered as he adjusts his tea-making paraphernalia. Next to the illustration
and text for sarabat is a promotion for soft drinks that illustrates the blur-
ring of time in the exhibition. The text locates tea and other beverages in an
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  153

early colonial time. Next to this is a promotion for soft drinks that relied on
coupons promoted by the 1982 film E.T. On the other side of that is an ad-
vertisement for condensed milk. It is as if all these historical moments exist
in one undifferentiated temporal space: the nation-state.
In addition to information about specific dishes, the exhibition locates
a social history of hawkers and hawker food. The blurring of time and au-
thority is evident in the narrative of the exhibition. Readers are told that
the colonial authorities recognized the utility of hawkers but resented their
“unregulated use of public space.” Actions by colonial authorities in the late
nineteenth century to regulate, register, and license hawkers are described and
followed by a statement about more contemporary policies: “By the 1960s,
the government had banned itinerant hawkers. . . . By the 1980s, all vendors
of makeshift food stalls had to shift their operations to hawker centers. The
street hawker no longer existed.”47 The transition from “colonial authorities”
to “government” is seamless in this social history. Ideologically, as this book
suggests, it was somewhat seamless; the remarkableness of this might be lost
in the museum context, but the telling of the history of hawkers is actually
deeply revealing.
The centrality of hawker food and hawker centers is also evident in a va-
riety of other forums, including publications such as Lily Kong’s Singapore
Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food. The blurb for Kong’s book makes this
centrality clear. “True Singaporeans,” it begins, “know that hawker centers
are where the local flavor is found, literally and figuratively.” It concludes
with a description of hawker centers as “communities in themselves” with
unique character and underscores the inseparability of the categories “hawker
food,” “hawker center,” and “Singapore” by saying: “They are Singapore.”48
The power of this message should not be underestimated.
The range of ethnic food available in hawker centers easily maps the mul-
tiracial aspect of Singaporean society. While many societies have a myth of
classlessness, in Singapore the myth is one of meritocracy and equality.49
Simon Tay, chair of the National Environment Agency, which oversees the
regulation of hawker centers, made this connection clearly in his foreword
to Kong’s book, saying that hawker centers are places where “rich and poor
equally queue up for their favorite dishes.”50 It is not that there are no class
differences, but rather that these differences are not at play in the sacred
space of the hawker center, which emerges as a neutral national space. Yaacob
Ibrahim, the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, echoed this
message: “Visited by people of all ages and income levels—students, profes-
sionals, housewives and retirees—the absence of social strata makes hawker
154  .  chap ter 8

centers a vibrant meeting and eating place where everyone feels at home.”51
The absence of social strata seems not to extend to the people cooking the
food, cleaning the tables, and serving “the people.”
Brand Singapore relies heavily on food, and hawker-style food in particu-
lar. A series of social functions is ascribed to hawker centers. For tourists
they are a “distinctive attraction,” providing an accessible, safe, clean, and
cheap avenue for the consumption of local culture. The 2006 Singapore Food
Festival included a feature for tourists on hawker centers and promotional
offers. Signage in Japanese and other languages used by tourists were erected
at popular hawker centers, and local tour agencies included visits to them
as part of their tours. Also, the STB encouraged Singapore-branded estab-
lishments to provide hawker-style food at international functions, making
it “useful as a tool of diplomacy.”52
For expatriate Singaporeans, hawker centers are a “locus of memories.” For
those living in Singapore they are “embedded in the popular imagination”
and are places that pulsate with “a life and rhythm unique to the island.”53
The concept that is used to unite the social functions for Singaporeans is
“makan,” which Kong defines as “to eat,” but then explains in some detail
that the word also means much more than this;
it is about the flavor and presentation of the food, the quality of the service
and the spontaneity and casual style of dining. It is about convenience and
easy accessibility, and most importantly, the affordability of the food. It is
about being able to walk to a nearby hawker center in flip-flops, T-shirt and
shorts or about being able to pop out of the office for a quick bite at midday
to re-energize. It is about eating with good friends and family and about
sharing stories over a meal—even with a bit of sweat and a lot of noise. It
is about being able to have three main courses and two desserts at the same
meal, extending the waistline, yet not hurting the wallet. It is about a sense
of longing for the familiar and affordable food while overseas.54

Hawker centers are about all these things, but it is the framing of longing
while away that is perhaps the most telling. The meaning of hawker centers
relies on people going away and missing this aspect of their culture. Many
Singaporeans do travel, and the emphasis in travel materials targeting both
visitors and expatriates is testimony to the importance travel has in the mind
of the Singaporean state. The Web site “Overseas Singaporean,” mentioned
above, provides Singaporeans away from home with a structured way of keep-
ing in touch with Singapore and also mediates homesickness.55 The framing in
Kong’s book of hawker centers further mediates the relation between home-
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  155

sickness and national meaning. Hawker center food is regularly featured in

the blogs and personal accounts of Singaporeans overseas.56 The American
journalist Calvin Trillin’s description of Singaporeans as “culinarily . . . among
the most homesick people I have ever met” is often quoted.57
Kong’s book includes a variety of interviews and quotes from Singaporeans.
Fifteen-year-old Rachel uses the term makan in a conflation with hawker
centers, claiming, “If all food places where casual makan can be found were
eradicated, I’d just stay at home!” Her thirteen-year-old brother was equally
strong in his sentiment: “Well, I think that if there were no hawker centers
in Singapore, it would be like the end of the world!” The third child in the
family also revealed the centrality of hawker centers to their lives: “If there
were no hawker centers, I would feel there is nothing to look forward to. . . .
I would miss them very much.”58 For children, then, hawker centers are both
familiar and exciting—they offer possibilities and are identity-forming. The
national pastime of eating is rightly celebrated in Kong’s book, and as she
notes, food is about much more than necessity in Singapore: “It is culture, a
passion, leisure activity—indeed, an addiction.”59

Food on the Page and Screen

It is food as a passion and leisure activity that North American and Austral-
asian food magazines regularly feature in articles on Singapore. Pieces about
Singapore are very significant marketing tools; Saveur magazine’s 2007 “My
Singapore: A Native Son Celebrates the Delicious Foods of This Country” by
Christopher Tan was reported in the Straits Times and on several Web sites.
That it was written by a Singaporean was the cause of a lot of media atten-
tion, including an interview with James Oseland, editor-in-chief of Saveur,
who was quoted as saying: “Chris writes like a dream, telling the story of
Singaporean food as only a native could. And reader reactions have been
overwhelmingly positive. I think they’re thrilled with his smart, insider per-
spective and his clever and warm wordsmanship.”60 Saveur prides itself on
providing authenticity, so the notion of writing “as only a native could” is
in line with the magazine’s approach and consistent with the state’s message
regarding tourism. Authenticity is also deployed in articles such as Gourmet
magazine’s 2009 “Eight Great Places to Taste the ‘Real’ Singapore.”61 Authen-
ticity functions in magazines in much the same way it does in cookbooks—
while very amorphous, it is used to signify legitimacy.
The STB also sponsors food-related promotions in magazines, such as
one with a prize of a twelve-day culinary tour of Southeast Asia.62 The
156  .  chap ter 8

magazines themselves frequently blur the lines between information and

entertainment, as when Gourmet magazine reproduced a 1953 recipe for a
Singapore Sling. The drink has been altered for modern taste by the “some-
what controversial” inclusion of lime, but readers were told, “trust us, the
drink needs it.”63 The Raffles Hotel is not mentioned in the article, but its
presence is implied.
The romance of the colonial era is, of course, a staple in contemporary
magazines: “Gourmet’s Asia correspondent seeks out the romance of a by-
gone era in Singapore, Cambodia, and Burma.”64 But the colonial aesthetic is
not always sufficient, as one article laments: “There’s no shortage of colonial
influence in Southeast Asia, but there is a lack of faithfully maintained ar-
chitecture—with a few exceptions.”65 There are extensive restaurant reviews,
and several magazines supplement this content with Web-based travel guides
and restaurant listings. Australian Gourmet Traveller lists mainly top-end
restaurants in its International Restaurant Guide to Singapore.66 Food and
Wine lists nineteen restaurants, nineteen hotels, and eight “things to do” in
Singapore.67 The things to do are going to clubs and shopping. In general,
the guides focus on consumer activities.
A dichotomy between high culture, as represented by international culture,
and low culture, as represented by local culture, is evident in much of the
travel writing about Singapore. It is also nicely illustrated in an episode of the
Australian cooking show Poh’s Kitchen: On the Road; in this episode Poh Ling
Yeow, a Malaysian-born Australian and runner-up in the Australian televi-
sion cooking competition Master Chef, visited Singapore.68 The restaurants
where she dined featured international cuisine and chefs. In fact, there is
only one Singaporean, dessert specialist Elaine Wong, in the entire episode,
but hawker centers loom in the background, and an Australian, Antonia
Kidman (sister of movie star Nicole), shows Poh a local hawker center at
the start of the episode. The local is thus navigable (a real Australian, even
if she is a celebrity, can eat here) but is devalued as not so culinarily exciting
as the fine dining offered by international restaurants.
For some travel writers, though, street food at hawker centers is the only
food that matters. An article in Bon Appétit described the dining context
of 16,000 food stalls where many Singaporeans are willing “to commit half
their lunch hour to patiently wait in line for the best Hainanese chicken
rice, bak chor mee (minced pork noodles), or other bright and spicy local
takes on Chinese dishes.” Readers were told that this can be best observed
in “Singapore’s charming and compact Chinatown, where cooks—known as
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  157

hawkers—have spent decades in front of a stove, perfecting unpretentious,

lip-smacking dishes.”69
In the Bon Appétit example, local is dominated by Chinese food tradi-
tions, the “bright and spicy local takes on Chinese dishes.” The food is local
but also specifically Chinese. Local food needs to be explained in knowable
ways, as another Saveur writer put it: “When food people talk about Singa-
pore, what they mostly talk about—sometimes with the mystical awe and
longing you might hear in surfers discussing the winter waves on Oahu’s
north shore—is the city’s wealth of street food.”70 The parallel with Hawaii
is meaningful—Singapore is being identified as a tropical paradise, magical
and slightly unknowable.
The other side of this is the baseness, the heat, the sweat, and the implied
lack of morality. A number of magazine articles pick up on these themes:
“There’s something about the food in Singapore hawker centers—the fecund
variety and volume and cheapness of the stuff—that turns mild-mannered
hungry people into ravenous food sluts, trying to gobble everything in sight.”71
The “food sluts” eat in spaces with oppressive heat and rank smells such as
“the reek of fermented shrimp paste”; they are eating exotic and thrilling
things in places that are “ripe with the odor of belacan, fish skeletons, and
sweat, and packed with a crush of bodies.”72 Such a framing is explicitly Ori-
entalist, evoking the imagery of the exotic and the erotic and relying on an
imagined Orient.
The exotic is clearly identified, and reviews of specific restaurants under-
score difference, as in an Australian Gourmet Traveller restaurant review in
which diners are advised to enter “with an open mind” in the blending of
Chinese medicinal practices with fine dining. Readers are forewarned that
“a resident herbalist whips up organic remedies made from dried caterpillars
and pickled seahorses, which are added to Imperial Chinese dishes such as the
boiled snow frog’s glands with rock sugar—said to improve liver function.”73
But Singapore is still a safe space; it may have to be explained in terms that
Westerners will understand, but it is understandable. An article in Gourmet
about mooncakes, for example, manages to make them sound exotic and
decadent, yet recognizable:
All this month, in the prelude to the Mid-Autumn Festival, the city’s Chi-
nese are buying, selling, giving, and gobbling mooncakes—crispy golden
mooncakes, glutinous rice snowskin mooncakes, mooncakes filled with egg
yolks and durian, lotus seed and olive seed, beans and yams, melon and date,
apricot and walnut, wolfberries and figs, rum raisin, chocolate ganache, even
158  .  chap ter 8

Champagne truffle. An individual cake, which is curiously the same size as a

Hostess Ding Dong, can sell for upwards of $10 at a high-end hotel.74

A “glutinous rice snowskin mooncake” is made accessible by comparison

to a Hostess Ding Dong. The same approach is taken to the nation as well.
Singapore is thus thrilling and exotic, but regulated, leading one author to
comment, “While eating street food in Bangkok or Djakarta can be a game
of microbial Russian roulette, the hawker center stalls in Singapore operate
under stringent health controls, and thus are unlikely to make you sick.”75
The regulated nature of Singapore is both celebrated (it is clean and safe) and
derided: “This being Singapore, of course, actual street food was outlawed
long ago, its vendors taken off the city’s byways and confined to government-
regulated ‘hawker centers’ or food courts—garlic-steeped monuments to
multiculturalism and terrific Asian food, built into the first floors of apart-
ment complexes and market buildings all over the city.”76 In one Food and
Wine article, the regulation of space in Singapore is critiqued and the sub-
version of regulation celebrated in reviews of Club Street restaurants: “With
its maverick restaurant scene, Club Street is defying Singapore’s notoriously
controlling government—and getting away with it.”77
One of my favorite advertisements for Singapore offers an amusing play
on words. An older Indian woman smiles at the camera; she is wearing a red
sari and is surrounded by hessian bags filled with spices. The proportions of
the spices are exaggerated—the cinnamon bark is several feet long, and the
cardamom pods look more like eggs. The text of this 1998 Batey advertise-
ment reads, “Could this be the original spice girl?”78 The reference is to the
nineties girl band the Spice Girls, and this might be Makan Spice.
One of the ways Singapore is made knowable and unthreatening is by
elaborate descriptions of the exotic with the inclusion of Westerners in the
setting. Bar Sa Vanh may be “decorated to look like the opium den it once
was,” but it is patronized by “preppy Aussie expats” and a canoodling Chinese
couple, and the opium has been replaced by jasmine incense.79 Descriptions
of very European spaces also serve to make Singapore seem unthreatening.
In one interview an Italian chef takes a stance against fusion and “resists the
urge to toy too much with local specialties.”80 Yet fusion is generally celebrated
and, more commonly, readers are told something like the following: “Singa-
pore has one of the most vital food cultures in the world. If Barcelona taxi
drivers are passionate about soccer, Singapore cabbies wax rhapsodic about
their favorite curry shops or the best places to buy barbecued stingray.”81
Fusion is not just ethnic mixing, but it is ultimately the exotic blended with
the knowable. According to Jonathan Gold, “In these centers, Malaysian, In-
 food sluts and the marke ting of singapore an cuisine   ·  159

dian, and every brand of Chinese food are blended and reblended, bounced
against the haute-cuisine pretensions of high-class Cantonese and European
cooking, and filtered through the coarse cheesecloth of American fast food
until the food courts seem to resemble something like the pure recombinant
DNA of Pacific Rim cuisine.”82 This “pure recombinant DNA of Pacific Rim
cuisine” serves to remind visitors of the familiarity of Singaporean food. It
is exotic, but not too exotic; it is safely sensual.

* * *
Singaporean cuisine is often appropriated—by the STB, by magazines, by
the state, and by curry protestors. Even the American chef Tom Colicchio
has a sandwich on his “wichcraft” menu based on his memories of eating
street food in Singapore.83 In using food to advertise the nation, internation-
ally and locally, the Singaporean state manages to harness private and public
interests. The need to advertise Singapore to itself, as well as to the world, has
been driven by an insistence on the fragility of Singapore as a nation-state,
making Brand Singapore potentially vulnerable. Allied advertising, like that
for Singapore Airlines and institutions such as the National Museum of Sin-
gapore, offer support to nationalist messages and advertising strategies. The
celebration by many actors of such cultural institutions as hawking resonates
locally and internationally, with food and travel magazines joining in the
celebration of these food traditions. Food offers a contained paradigm of
sensual excess in which food acts as a substitute for sex. Food is assumed to
be apolitical yet, as we have seen, it is deployed precisely because of its social
significance. It is conveniently mutable. As Saveur columnist Jonathan Gold
said of Singapore street food, “It’s dazzlingly varied and addictively delicious.
It inspires mystical awe. Who cares if it’s not exactly on the streets?”84
 conclusion

More Than Just Food

As a city-state of the twenty-first century, Singapore is unusual and

in many ways unique. There are few nations that are entirely urban, but this
may be what comes to pass in many places in the future. The challenge of
feeding a nation from the pantries of other places seems like a phenomenon
of our time, but it has been the reality of Singapore since its settlement. Pre-
cisely because Singapore does not have its own agriculture, the recent anxi-
eties about fake and contaminated food, especially in products emanating
from China,1 are turning food into a national security issue. Apart from the
period of World War II, Singapore has not experienced food shortages and
does not have a history of famine. The port has protected Singapore from
scarcity even though there is no local production; this logic relies in part on
its structure as a city-state. Once goods are in Singapore, there are no distri-
bution issues. That goods might be suspect is troubling. Food, so laden with
personal and national meaning, relies on an economy of trust.

Mixing Food and Politics

The physical landscape of Singapore is ever-changing, and in 2011 the food
landscape of Singapore underwent a change potentially as radical as any
of the architectural and physical changes discussed so far. Food security
was identified as a political priority. The port no longer seemed a guarantee
of food security. In 2011 the Singapore government committed $S400 mil-
lion to sustainability projects; $S50 million was committed explicitly to food
sustainability. In addition, $S10 million from the Ministry of National De-
 more than just food  ·  161

velopment was devoted to a Food Fund to enhance food supply resilience.

Regulation has long been an instrument of control in Singapore, and as the
Chinese food scares of the past few years made clear, it is hard to regulate
outside the nation-state.
In typically adaptive style, the interest in food security has become a plat-
form for economic growth. The island is positioning itself to become a re-
gional leader in food technology and to leverage its infrastructure for knowl-
edge transfer. Singapore has led the way in water recycling; we should not be
surprised that its solutions to food security rely on technological innovation.
Singapore is leading research and development work in aeroponics (growing
plants without soil) and aquaponics (growing plants using recycled liquid
fish waste). A move toward green design and a desire to bring sustainabil-
ity and food production together in Singapore will, of course, also require
a multi-phase physical remaking. Designed but not yet built, the EDITT
Tower heralds what might be to come. The building was commissioned by
the Urban Redevelopment Authority, designed by T. R. Hamzah and Yeang
International, and sponsored by the National University of Singapore. It is a
twenty-six-story high-rise with photovoltaic panels, natural ventilation, and
a biogas generation plant wrapped within an insulating living wall that cov-
ers half of its surface area. The verdant skyscraper was designed to increase
its location’s biodiversity and rehabilitate the local ecosystem.2
Urban agriculture, increasingly common around the world, has also hit
Singapore, with private ventures such as the Edible Garden City Project and
the rooftop gardens like that of the Fairmont Hotel’s restaurant. These are
fledgling projects, and even in a nation where change can be startlingly fast,
Singapore is decades away from any kind of substantive food sustainability.
The Singapore state, however, is interested in the ideological work that urban
agriculture can do. In April 2012, Minister for National Development Khaw
Boon Wan suggested that “while Singapore is highly urbanised, we can also
be like a kampong with urban farmers.”3 Here, kampong (a Malay village) is
thick with meaning. Singapore no longer has kampongs, so it is an appeal
to the past. The notion of a modern kampong is shorthand for community.
A kampong with urban farmers evokes a specific idea of community. The
meaning, however, is even thicker because this terminology is calling on the
idea of a distinction between Singaporeans who identify (or are identified
as) “Heartlanders” and those who are determined to be “Cosmopolitans.”
Heartlanders is a term popularized in 1999 by then Prime Minister Goh
Chok Tong to characterize the working class and lower-middle class of the
Singapore population, a group that is generally less well-educated, speaks
162  . conclusion

Singlish (Singaporean English), lives in HDB housing, and has a local, rather
than a global, perspective on political, economic, and cultural issues. Farm-
ing is the kind of activity that took place in the kampongs of the past. Urban
agriculture is currently the preserve of the elite, yet it is not work that requires
the high levels of education that elites enjoy. Urban farming thus offers an
opportunity to provide a conduit between Cosmopolitans and Heartlanders,
a space where Singaporeans who do not necessarily have a lot in common can
come together. In this sense, the new-found interest in food security heralds
less of a radical change than it first suggests. Food security, food technology,
and urban agriculture are sites of increasing regulation of food and remain
politically charged.
Food can have a political dimension on a smaller scale as well. In 2004
a family of new migrants to Singapore from China registered a complaint
about the smell of the curry being cooked by their Indian neighbors. After
a series of interpersonal negotiations in which the Indian family agreed to
close their doors and windows when they cooked, the Mainland Chinese
family sought mediation via Singapore’s Community Mediation Centre
(CMC). The CMC mediator made a binding recommendation—the Indian
family could only cook curry when their Chinese neighbors were not home.
Despite the outrageousness of the ruling, this was not a news story when
it happened in 2004.
In 2011 the CMC ran some advertisements that celebrated their past suc-
cesses, including the case of the smelly curry. For the CMC this was an
example of successful mediation. For the Singaporean community of 2011
the advertisement was evidence that migrants were being given preference
over locals. Rosalind Lee, for example, wrote to the newspaper, saying, “I am
incensed with a People’s Republic of China family telling my fellowmen not
to cook curry. . . . Almost all Singaporean homes cook curry. The mediator
should tell the PRC family to adjust and adapt to Singapore’s way of life and
not tell the locals to adjust to the foreigner’s way of life!”4 Issues concerning
race, ethnicity, and national origin provide fracture lines in Singapore, and
they are simultaneously the most and least discussed topics in this island state.
The state actively censors material that might be considered to incite racial
tensions, and at a public level a number of race-related topics are considered
“out of bounds.” Issues related to race and ethnicity are nevertheless talked
about extensively and casually by many Singaporeans.
Food is also a well-established site for political satire. In 2007 Mr. Brown,
the now co-opted, once underground podcaster, provided the classic example
of this in his Bak Chor Mee Man skit. In the skit, the owner of the fish ball
 more than just food  ·  163

soup stall symbolized the PAP—which at a time of financial hardship had

increased its salaries, based on the argument that it needed to benchmark to
international standards: “You must pay top dollar for top talent.” The issue
of dependence on the state is discussed via the provision of one chopstick. “I
give you one chopstick,” the hawker says, “so you work hard for the other.”5
By using the setting of a hawker center, Mr. Brown was able to make fun of
the PAP in a way that was socially acceptable—a clear critique, but one that
kept him out of trouble.
He also turned his attention to the smelly curry issue and produced a song
encouraging participation in the Cook a Pot of Curry Day (August 21, 2011),
organized by a Facebook-based citizen’s group with over 58,000 members.
The event called on Singaporeans of all ethnicities to cook smelly curry in
their homes in solidarity with the Indian family who had been asked to re-
strict their curry cooking. Blogs and websites were awash with comments
about Singaporean culinary culture and the centrality of curry to a local
identity, as well as commentary about the need for new migrants to adapt to
that culture. The responses signaled the sensitivity about new migrants and
the centrality of food as a site of national consciousness. The role of migrants
in the controversy was explicit in the Mr. Brown song; at the start of the song
he noted of the new migrants, “They’re not in China now,” and as the tale of
the mediation unfolded in the song, Mr. Brown concluded: “Perhaps we’re
China now.”6
He was picking up on popular sentiment. As one blogger put it: “Curry is
the traditional dish of our Indian community. If our foreign guests do not
accept our tradition, then I don’t think they should be here. It is not just
an issue of our Indian fellow citizens, it is a beautiful symbol of what co-
existence can create.”7 Another anonymous blogger noted: “I strongly urge
every Singaporean to take part in ‘Cook a Pot of Curry,’ not to piss off our
foreign neighbors, but to spread the message of love, tolerance and accep-
tance. Cook curry on 21 August 2011 and let the aromas of curry permeate
through the whole nation. Share your curries with your foreign friends and
neighbors, get them to appreciate curry and also appreciate the cultures of
the various ethnic groups in Singapore.”8
Yet it would be overly simplistic to read the bloggers’ comments and Mr.
Brown’s critique as evidence of fatal fracture lines. Given Singapore’s authori-
tarian political system, the willingness of Singaporeans, many of whom do
not actually cook all that often, to cook smelly curry as a political act is both
remarkable and not at all surprising. That is, there are rules, and rules are
both entrenched and subject to push-back by the citizenry.
164  . conclusion

Recap
In this book I have shown how food is a site of meaning-making in Singa-
pore. It is a prescriptive society and, far from being excluded from this pro-
cess, food is critical to the development of its rules. We have seen how food
becomes its own form of rule-making both at the gastronomic level and at
the societal level. In “A Brief History of Singapore,” we began to see how the
possibility of breaking some of those rules emerges via a new chronology of
Singapore’s history, one that skews some of the more traditional historical
demarcations by substituting culinary and gastronomic moments.
In Chapter 2, “Making the Past the Present,” we saw how the colonial fig-
ure of Raffles, like colonialism itself, is reified and reproduced by the idea of
Singapore as an emporium. The historic focus on global consumption mir-
rors the current engagement with the global economy which relies on the
idea of Singapore as a cosmopolitan space, constructed by multiculturalism
and as a response to geographic realities. Nostalgia for the colonial past and
for the Singapore of the 1970s has been shifted from something that could
potentially undermine the state narrative of development to a powerful tool
for strengthening national identity. Globalization, another potential force for
national disturbance, has also been yoked to the national narrative, and the
consumption of foreign goods serves not to undermine the local economy
but to strengthen that very economy. The port provides the logic of this—it
is from the port that the goods emanate and at which the people historically
arrived and continue to arrive. It is the port that allows Singaporeans to feel
they are eating the past.
Legacies of the past were also evident in Chapter 3, “Public Spaces, Public
Bodies,” where we saw the regulation of public spaces, from the Botanical
Gardens to the city itself, as part of a colonial and later a developmental
project. Bodies of citizens require regulation, too, and we saw how control
of deviant behavior related to the chewing of gum, the use of toilets, and lit-
tering exists as a way of disciplining errant citizens and also of understand-
ing the migrant past of Singapore. Hawker centers enshrine national values
and can be understood as an assumed symbol of food as classless, raceless,
necessarily apolitical, and therefore useful in the building of national identity
and anxieties; the chapter explained how some of that work is done.
From the public spaces of hawker centers, Chapter 4, “The Kitchen: In-
variably Offstage,” turned to the more ambiguous private spaces of domestic
kitchens. Drawing on Appadurai’s distinction between gastronomic issues
 more than just food  ·  165

and culinary issues, the chapter showed how the process of transforming
ingredients into dishes is “invariably offstage.” In considering what consti-
tutes “architecture” the chapter showed that efforts are made to ensure that
public memory resides in public spaces. Kitchens, when they exist in that
memory, are often imaginary, as in textbooks that asked Singaporean girls to
critique existing kitchens and to imagine new kitchens as a project of moder-
nity. Kitchens are also offstage in popular presentations of domestic homes,
and the home kitchen could be said to have been replaced by nostalgia for
food rather than space. The Magical Spaces art project underscores this and
speaks to the importance of food, its consumption and excretion, as taking
precedence over the kitchen.
Once again drawing on the textual analysis of curricular materials, Chap-
ter 5, “Jam Tarts, Spotted Dicks, and Curry,” considered in more detail the
way attitudes toward food were created in a formal educational setting. In
tracing the genealogy of home economics and accompanying curricular ma-
terials, the chapter locates home economics in a longer tradition of advice
directed at women. The reimagining of the housewife as proto-citizen, via
meal planning and the attitude toward food preparation, led to a discussion
of cleaning. The clean kitchen and the clean citizen are identified as pathways
to both modernity and citizenship. Food as a mechanism for social change
is extended beyond the classroom via social programs, which draw on the
private sector as well as the public sector.
The intersection of private and public interests is clear in Chapter 6, “The
Pizza of Love,” which considered cookbooks as sites of identity-making. A
close textual reading of Menus for Malaya, a menu-planning guide, high-
lights the way identity was being defined at the very moment of its demise.
The colonial fantasy continued beyond the Empire and is examined in the
expatriate context. Moving to more contemporary sources, the chapter ex-
amined the way the local is constructed as street food, not as home cooking.
One of the functions of that framing is to make sense of the idea of hybridity
as authentic cuisine, which speaks directly to policies concerning multira-
cialism. We saw how cookbooks did ideological work, tethering identity to
the nation. Cookbooks thus emerge as nation-making and history-making
devices, and we saw the strategic deployment of tradition toward these ends.
Strategy in the selling of goods and nation is evident in Chapter 7, “Picked
in Their Fresh Young Prime,” which considered advertisements as reflections
of the imperatives of their time. The analysis included a detailed reading of
1950s advertisements. In looking at alcohol advertising and products that
166  . conclusion

emphasized convenience, the tensions between colonialism and modernity

were explored. Contemporary advertisements were then read against the ear-
lier examples. The myth of the migrant with humble beginnings overcoming
the odds is highlighted by the example of Three Legs Cooling Water to show
how private companies rely on narratives that mirror national narratives. The
ongoing presence of international brands is reflective of Singapore’s engage-
ment with the global economy and its lack of agriculture and manufacturing.
Continuing the theme of marketing, Chapter 8, “Food Sluts and the Mar-
keting of Singaporean Cuisine,” turned more directly to the marketing of
the nation. Tourism advertising targets visitors and locals and consciously
uses the themes of ethnic harmony and consumption to sell the nation to
these two audiences. Food emerged as an acceptable site of excessive sensual
consumption. We saw how food developed as a medium by which culture
could be understood—Singaporean culture for visitors, the culture of other
ethnic groups for citizens. Technology is deployed to aid the process, and
the translation of familiar dishes to Singaporean dishes highlighted the way
culture is explained. The chapter then turned to an analysis of the way insti-
tutions such as Singapore Airlines and the National Museum of Singapore
work in tandem with the state to promote Brand Singapore. A close reading
of a food exhibition at the NMS was a pathway to a broader discussion of
hawker food as represented in travel and food magazines. Food matters in
the marketing of Brand Singapore because of its mutability and universal
appeal.

Singapore: A Nine-Layered Kueh?

Singapore’s uniqueness goes beyond its geographical limitations. The car-
tographic “little red dot,” former colony and now economic powerhouse,
appears free of corruption yet can be described as authoritarian. It was a re-
luctant new nation, yet its nationalism has been remarkably successful. The
study of Singapore, like the study of food, is in some ways still in its infancy.
In many respects, this is not the book I intended to write. The food culture of
Singapore is wonderfully rich, and there are many paths I have not taken, sto-
ries not told, sources squeezed out by things I could not resist writing about.
For example, the Hadrami in Singapore, migrants from Yemen who maintain
connections in both the Middle East and Southeast Asia, do not appear, as
I had imagined they would. Yet their culinary techniques, especially the use
of hot coals to flavor dishes, speak very clearly to the movement of peoples
in multiple directions. Singapore does not just produce migrants or receive
 more than just food  ·  167

migrants; it is part of a complex set of transnational flows of people and has

been for over a century. In short, there is much more to tell of Singapore.
There is also so much more to eat of Singapore. The nation is quite literally
a moving feast. On every trip to Singapore, no matter how short the interval
since the last, I am struck by the rate of change. A new building, a new path-
way—upgrades and replacements define Singapore. The chai tao kway (the
fried carrot cake with no carrot at all) that I mentioned in the introduction
was made by a woman in the Arts Canteen of the National University of Sin-
gapore. The stall is gone now, the space long since upgraded, and while there
are many excellent dishes of chai tao kway across the island, none is as good
as my memory of “that” chai tao kway. And so it is for Singaporeans; food is
transient, consumed, but, as a memory, it can also be vivid and lasting.
As the global financial crisis swept over the world, Singapore, with its deep
engagement in the global economy, was also affected. The Singapore pod-
caster Mr. Brown released a song about the financial consequences for Sin-
gaporeans who could no longer afford all they wanted (holidays and “fashion
pants”) and, inevitably, food also made a significant appearance in the song.
Called “Love Song for Singapore,” the lyric addressed the nation directly:
“You promised me paradise, overflowing with abundant rice.” The past is
contrasted with a little exaggeration of the current deprivation: “I used to go
for lunch buffets. Now my breakfast’s half a yeow char kuey” (fried Chinese
bread). The line, “You took so much from me,” is repeated several times, as
in “You took so much from me. Got no cash to go high-tea.” The chorus of
the song, however, is forgiving: “But I’m still in love with you.” This leads to
the conclusion that Singapore “took so much from me. Got no cash, but I’m
happy.”9
Largely, Singaporeans are happy. The Singaporean state has worked tire-
lessly to create a strong nation-state; it is only relatively recently that food
has played a conscious part in this process, but as we have seen, matters
culinary have been very important in Singapore’s history. The sentiment of
Mr. Brown’s bittersweet love song is echoed by many Singaporeans. Many
feel they have made sacrifices for the nation and that the costs are high but
so are the rewards. They are nostalgic. The blogger and physician Leslie Tay,
whose Web site http://ieatishootipost.sg/ became so popular that he has also
published a book of his favorite hawker stalls and dishes, begins that book
by saying that, for Singaporeans, “Nostalgia is a precious commodity.”10
Nostalgia is precious because it stands in for physical and material memo-
ries. But it is also precious because it is politically powerful. My nostalgia
for the crisp and salty exterior of the chai tao kway, for the perfectly sliced
168  . conclusion

spring onions resting against flecks of chili, for the balance of egg and radish,
for the company in which I repeatedly shared this dish, is personal, as are
the food memories of us all. It is, however, inextricably bound with place.
Chai tao kway is, for me, shorthand for Singapore and for a time in my life.
Chicken rice, silky and savory, served with addictive rice enriched with stock,
accompanied by cucumbers, coriander (cilantro), sesame oil, and more-ish
chili sauce, is not just a dish cooked in Singapore, it is a way people come to
know Singapore, as visitor or as citizen. It is the apparent neutrality of food
and its personal meaning that makes it meaningful. Sometimes, chicken rice
is not just chicken rice.
If art offers a way of coming to terms with nation, then art with food as
its subject might offer us another way of broaching the food-nation nexus.
The Singaporean artist Jiahui Tan’s Makan series—ten graphic design rep-
resentations of local dishes—embodies that connection between food, art,
and nation. Makan, a word we have previously encountered, described by
the Singaporean geographer Lily Kong as “a sense of longing” for familiar
and affordable food11 and by the journalist Jonathan Gold as a form of “gas-
tronomic promiscuity,”12 and which literally means “to eat,” is a powerful
term in Singapore. The literary arts festival Food-o-Philia 2013, explicitly
focused on the connection between food and national identity, is consciously
leveraging this power by coining the phrase “to makanise.” Returning us to
Tan’s Makan series, the festival is concerned with the “exploration of food
through the arts.” The directive to participants, “Let’s makanise!,” confirms a
Singaporean belief in food as a medium and in the power of food to address
issues of identity.13
Tan’s work, which ranges from representations of classic dishes such as
laksa to more humble dishes such as half-boiled eggs, highlights the way the
everyday comes to stand for nation. In positing the classic Indian pulled-
tea drink teh tarik in the same series as the drink Milo dinosaur (a Nestlé
powdered chocolate drink made with milk and served cold with some of the
powder on top), Tan is speaking directly to the competing food traditions
in Singapore. He is able, in a very restrained fashion, to convey both literal
texture—the granularity of the Milo is represented by pixilation, while the
aeration of the tea is created by a softening of color, an almost-smudge—and
texture of meaning. The Milo dinosaur is playful; the drink is not depicted
literally but by a dinosaur, and the more elaborate Milo Godzilla (made
with the addition of ice cream and topped with cream) is represented by
the addition of a cream-and-yellow hat on the dinosaur’s head. That is, the
Figure 9. Teh Tarik, 2012. Studio: Fable; Designer: Tan Jiahui. Used by permission.
170  . conclusion

irreverence of the drinks is mirrored in their depiction. In Teh Tarik, the

movement of the tea is conveyed by a single line pouring across the page;
like the drink, the representation is elegant (see figure 9). The differences in
texture and meaning of the drinks help define the rules about “local food.”
The ten dishes in the Makan series are instantly recognizable as Singaporean;
this is art as a form of codification of culinary national knowledge.
Nine-layered kueh (Kueh Lapis), a lurid steamed layer cake and another
subject for Tan, makes a compelling symbol of Singaporean society. Many
variants of the cake exist across Southeast Asia, but the ones most common
in Singapore are identified as Nyonyan, which, as we have seen, operates as
a symbol of acceptable hybridity in Singapore. Each layer of the cake is es-
sentially the same: a starchy paste (the kind of flour and its ratios are much
contested, but rice flour, tapioca, and green bean flour are the contenders)
enriched with coconut, usually flavored with pandan leaves and lots of sugar,
with the layers being variously colored. The layers are steamed separately and
then sandwiched together to form the cake, which is then cut into portions
to be eaten as a snack with tea. It is the color rather than flavor that makes
the layers distinct. Or to put it another way, the differences between the lay-
ers are visual but not substantive.
Children (and those of us who still enjoy playing with our food) are re-
puted to enjoy this treat because they can pull each layer apart and eat it
separately. Separate layers, bonded together but easily separated, could be
as much a description of ethnic and racial management in Singapore as of
the way children eat cake. The number of layers is also variable, and as one
food blogger put it: “9 layers kueh not mean that the kueh must be 9 layers,
it simply mean that the kueh has many layers. It can be more than 9 layers
or less, it depends on personal preference”14 (the language is the original).
There is room to interpret what constitutes the kueh just as there is room
to reinterpret what and who constitutes the nation. Rules may be pervasive
and complex, but rules are not always fixed.
A single rule change can dramatically alter the nation, the foodscape,
and the lived experience. Singbridge provides a crucial example of changing
the food rules in Singapore. In late 2012 Singbridge successfully negotiated
an exclusive 1,450 sq km (560 sq mi) food zone in the Chinese province of
Jilin. Singbridge and its subsidiaries are owned by the investment company
Temasek Holdings, which is owned by the Government of Singapore. The
food zone will include agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, food manufac-
turing, and food processing. Controlling numerous steps in the food system
is an attempt to apply Singaporean standards of food safety to “Chinese” food.
 more than just food  ·  171

The establishment of this food zone, twice the size of Singapore itself and
in the sovereign territory of another nation, does important work to secure
Singapore’s food security and to navigate the aforementioned anxieties about
control and regulation of food safety outside national borders. It also changes
the rules about what constitutes the category of “food produced in China.”
What is Chinese, what is Singaporean, what is local, what is a threat, what
is safe, even what is makan; these are redefined and reinterpreted, and new
rules are made. But the rule that stays constant is that rules, like makan, are
central to life in Singapore.
 Notes

Introduction
1. Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 2.
2. Ien Ang and Jon Stratton, “The Singapore Way of Multiculturalism: Western
Concepts/Asian Cultures,” Sojourn 10, no. 1 (1995): 67.
3. Warren Belasco, Food: The Key Concepts (London: Berg, 2008), 2.
4. Christopher Tan, “What Is Singapore Food?” in Heritage Feasts: A Collection of
Singapore Family Recipes, ed. Joyceline Tully and Christopher Tan (Singapore: Miele,
2010), 15.
5. Ibid., emphasis added.
6. Ibid.
7. Lilian Lane, Malayan Cookery Recipes: Tested in Malayan Schools (Singapore:
Eastern Universities Press Ltd., for University of London Press, 1964), back cover.

Chapter 1. A Brief History of Singapore

1. “Habibie: What I Meant by Little ‘Red Dot,’” Straits Times, June 20, 2006.
2. Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Econo-
mies in Crisis (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1990).
3. John N. Miksic and Cheryl-Ann Mei Gek Low, eds., Early Singapore, 1300s-1819:
Evidence in Maps, Text and Artefacts (Singapore: Singapore History Museum, 2005).
4. Tan Tai Yong, “Port Cities and Hinterlands: A Comparative Study of Singapore
and Calcutta,” Political Geography 26 (2007): 852.
5. William Koh, The Top Toast: Ya Kun and the Singapore Breakfast Tradition (Sin-
gapore: Cengage, 2010).
174  .  notes to chap ter 1

6. Goh Chor Boon, Serving Singapore: A Hundred Years of Cold Storage, 1903–2003
(Singapore: Cold Storage, 2003). In her important book Fresh, the cultural historian
Susanne Friedberg makes the argument for the cultural, culinary, and economic
importance of technology such as refrigeration in the pursuit of the preservation of
freshness. And as she notes, “the refrigerator stood out amongst appliances. It was
part of a larger system that connected people and places in new ways, and by doing
so it transformed what it meant to be a food consumer.” Susanne Freidberg, Fresh:
A Perishable History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 45.
7. Cherian George, Singapore: Air-Conditioned Nation—Essays on the Politics of
Comfort and Control, 1990–2000 (Singapore: Landmark, 2000).
8. Stephen Dobbs, The Singapore River: A Social History, 1819–2002 (Singapore:
Singapore University Press, 2003).
9. Lee Guan Kin, “Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Reflections on the Cul-
tural Implications of Modern Education,” in Chinese Migrants Abroad: Cultural, Edu-
cational, and Social Dimensions of the Chinese Diaspora, ed. Michael Charney, Brenda
Yeoh, and Tong Chee Kiong (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), 232.
10. Tania Li, Malays in Singapore: Culture, Economy and Ideology (Singapore: Ox-
ford University Press, 1989).
11. Martin Perry, Lily Kong, and Brenda Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City
State (Singapore: Wiley, 1997), 31.
12. Tulasi Srinivas, “Between Cosmopolitanism and Provincialism: Approaches to
South Asian Culinary Cultures,” paper presented at the Association for the Study of
Food and Society Annual Conference, New York, June 21, 2012.
13. Raffles Singapore, accessed February 2, 2012, http://www.raffles.com/singapore/.
14. Phillip Holden, “At Home in the Worlds: Community and Consumption in
Urban Singapore,” in Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity, ed. Ryan Bishop
et al. (London: Routledge, 2004), 81.
15. Thomas Stamford Raffles to Colonel Addenbrooke, quoted in Sophia Raffles,
Memoir of the Life and Public Service of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles ([1830]; repr.
Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), 380.
16. James Frances Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore,
1880–1940 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2003).
17.  Changi, dir. Kate Woods, Australian Broadcasting Company, 2001.
18. Goh, Serving Singapore, 65.
19. Wong Hong Suen, Wartime Kitchen: Food and Eating in Singapore, 1942–1950
(Singapore: Didier Millet, 2009), 24.
20. Lee Geok Boi, Singapore: Journey into Nationhood (Singapore: Landmark,
1998), 32.
21. Ibid., 39.
22. Sharon Siddique, “Singapore Identity,” in Management of Success: The Mould-
ing of Modern Singapore, ed. K. S. Sandhu and Paul Wheatley (Singapore: Institute
of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), 64.
 notes to chap ter 1  ·  175

23. Albert Lau, A Moment of Anguish: Singapore in Malaysia and the Politics of

Disengagement (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998), 265.
24. Ibid.
25. People’s Action Party, For People, Through Action, by Party: 1954–1999 (Singa-
pore: People’s Action Party, 1999), 15.
26. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000 (Sin-
gapore: Harper, 2000).
27. Albert Lau, “The National Past and the Writing of the History of Singapore,”
in Imagining Singapore, ed. Ban Kah Choon, Anne Parkin, and Tong Chee Kiong
(Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1992), 57.
28. Russell Heng, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Wealth,” in Debating Singapore:
Reflective Essays, ed. Derek da Chunha (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Stud-
ies, 1995), 9–14.
29. Nathan Gardels, “The East Asian Way with Air Conditioning,” New Perspectives
Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2009), http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2009_fall_2010_winter/
16_yew.html.
30. Diane K. Mauzy, “Leadership Succession in Singapore: The Best Laid Plans . . .,”
Asian Survey 33 (1993): 1163–74.
31. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free, 1992).
32. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
33. Amitav Acharya and Richard Stubbs, “The Asia Pacific Region in the Post–Cold
War Era: Economic Growth, Political Change and Regional Order,” in The Third
World Beyond the Cold War: Continuity and Change, ed. Louise Fawcett and Yezid
Sayigh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 118–33.
34. Denny Roy, “Singapore, China, and the ‘Soft Authoritarian’ Challenge,” Asian
Survey 34 (1994): 231–42.
35. Fareed Zakaria, “Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” For-
eign Affairs 73, no. 2 (1994): 109–37.
36. Arif Dirlik, “Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Rein-
vention of Confucianism,” Boundary 2 22, no. 3 (1995): 272. Dirlik argued that the
Confucian revival in East Asia is best viewed as a global postcolonial discourse,
where the discourse of Confucianism was one of power within global capitalism
that ultimately served to bring Orientalism into the center of global power.
37. “No More Mr. Nasty Guy: Singapore; Lee Junior Shows His Softer Side,” Econo-
mist 369, no. 8355 (December 20, 2003): 55.
38. Goh Chok Tong, “National Day Speech 2003,” August 9, 2003.
39. Tan Tarn How, “Next PM—The MP’s Choice?” Straits Times, February 14, 2004.
40. Christopher Tremewan, The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 97.
41. “Good Governance,” Ministry of Education Singapore, accessed November 27,
2002, http://www.moe.gov.sg.
176  .  notes to chap ters 1 and 2

42. Bertha Henson, “Feedback Unit: The Task Ahead,” Straits Times, March 14,
1993.
43. Peh Shing Huei, “Can MPs Hip Hop into Young Singaporeans’ Hearts?” Straits
Times, October 6, 2006.
44. Dobbs, Singapore River, 3.

Chapter 2. Making the Past the Present

1. For example, Brenda Yeoh and T. C. Chang, “Globalising Singapore: Debating
Transnational Flows in the City,” Urban Studies 38, no. 7 (2001): 1033.
2. Sophia Raffles, A Memoir of the Life of and Public Service of Sir Thomas Stamford
Raffles ([1930], repr.: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
3. Ibid., 48.
4. Ibid., 60–63.
5. Ibid., 49.
6. Robert Yeo, The Eye of History (Singapore: Select, 1992).
7. William Peterson, Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 66.
8. Ibid., 69.
9. Yeo, Eye of History, quoted in Peterson, 72.
10. Ibid.
11. Raffles Singapore, accessed May 11, 2011, http://www.raffles.com/EN_RA/Property/
RHS/.
12. Raffles Singapore, accessed May 12, 2011, http://www.raffles.com/EN_RA/Property/
RHS/Restaurants_Bars/Tiffin_Room.htm.
13. Raffles Singapore, accessed May 12, 2011, http://www.raffles.com/EN_RA/Property/
RHS/Restaurants_Bars/Carving_Champagne_Brunch.htm.
14. Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History; Or, How the Past Is Taught (London:
Routledge, 1984), viii.
15. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 353.
16. C. J. W.-L. Wee, “From Universal to Local Culture: The State, Ethnic Identity
and Capitalism in Singapore,” in Local Cultures and the “New Asia”: The State, Culture,
and Capitalism in Asia, ed. C. J. W.-L. Wee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies, 2002), 146.
17. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” in The Post-
Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London:
Routledge, 1995), 383.
18. Ibid., 384.
19. Martin Perry, Lily Kong, and Brenda Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City
State (Singapore: Wiley, 1997), 26.
20. Chua Beng Huat, “Multiculturalism in Singapore: An Instrument of Social
Control,” Race and Class 44, no. 3 (2003): 60.
 notes to chap ter 2  ·  177

21. T. Braddekk, Statistics of the British Possession in the Straits of Malacca (Pinang,
[Malaysia]: Pinang Gazette Printing Office, 1861).
22. Fabio Parasecoli, Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 4.
23. Iain Manley, Tales of Old Singapore: The Glorious Past of Asia’s Greatest Empo-
rium (Hong Kong: Earnshaw, 2010), 6.
24. Jules Verne, Celebrated Travels and Travellers (London: Low, Maston, Searle
and Rivington, 1880).
25. William Temple Hornaday, Two Years in the Jungle: The Experiences of a Hunter
and Naturalist in India, Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula and Borneo (New York: Scribner’s
Sons, 1885).
26. Manley, Tales of Old Singapore, 6.
27. George Hamlin Fitch, The Critic in the Orient (1913; repr. Hong Kong: Forgot-
ten Books, 2010), 80.
28. George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman’s Lady: From the Flashman Papers, 1842–
1945 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1977).
29. Ien Ang and Jon Stratton, “The Singapore Way of Multiculturalism: Western
Concepts/Asian Cultures,” Sojourn 10, no. 1 (1995): 67.
30. Ibid., 68.
31. See, e.g., Robert W. Hefner, “Introduction: Multiculturalism and Citizenship in
Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia,” in The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and
Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 1–58.
32. Khaw Boon Wan, “Passions Can Be Aroused over Sensitive Issues,” Straits
Times, October 9, 1992.
33. Ibid.
34. David Brown, “The Corporatist Management of Ethnicity in Contemporary
Singapore,” in Singapore Changes Guard: Social, Political and Economic Directions in
the 1990s, ed. Garry Rodan (New York: Routledge, 1993), 20. See also David Brown,
“The Politics of Reconstructing National Identity: A Corporatist Approach,” Austra-
lian Journal of Political Science 32, no. 2 (1997): 255–69.
35. Brown, “Corporatist Management,” 20.
36. Peter Bishop, “Eating in the Contact Zone: Singapore Foodscape and Cos-
mopolitan Timespace,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 25, no. 5
(2011): 650.
37. Stan Stalnaker, Hub Culture: The Next Wave of Urban Consumers (Singapore:
Wiley, 2002).
38. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Cre-
ation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001), 413.
39. Alastair Davidson, “Gramsci, the Peasantry and Popular Culture,” Journal of
Peasant Studies 11, no. 4 (1984): 139–54.
40. Paulette Singley and James Horwitz, introduction to Eating Architecture, ed.
Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 16.
178  .  notes to chap ter 2

41. Pauline Adema, “Foodscapes: An Emulsion of Food and Landscape,” Gastro-

nomica 7, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 3.
42. Stalnaker, Hub Culture, 2.
43. R. H. Bruce Lockhart and Robert Hamilton Bruce, Return to Malaya (New
York: Putnam’s, 1936).
44. “Singapore: Britain’s Far Eastern Fortress,” Life, July 21, 1941, 61.
45.  Lost Images: Films from the Ivan Polunin Archive (Singapore: The Moving Visu-
als Company, 2009).
46. David Cohen, “Nanny Loosens Up,” Metro Magazine, April 2000, 86–93.
47. Urban Redevelopment Authority, Historic Districts: Conservation Guidelines for
Chinatown Conservation Area/Urban Redevelopment Authority (Singapore: Urban
Redevelopment Authority, 1991).
48.  The Ministry of National Development Network: Shaping the Future (Singapore:
Ministry of National Development, 1995).
49. Cherian George, Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation; Essays on the Politics
of Comfort and Control, 1990–2000 (Singapore: Landmark, 2000), 189.
50. Ibid., 190.
51. Kwok Kian Woon, Ho Weng Hin, and Tan Kar Lin, Between Forgetting and
Remembering: Memories and the National Library (Singapore: Singapore Heritage
Society, 2000).
52. George, Air-Conditioned Nation, 193.
53. Wei-Wei Yeo, “City as Theatre: Singapore, State of Distraction,” in Postcolonial
Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes, ed. Ryan Bishop, John Phil-
lips, and Wei-Wei Yeo (New York: Routledge, 2003), 247.
54. “Ya Kun Kaya Toast,” accessed June 20, 2011, http://www.yakun.com.
55.  The Ties That Bind: In Search of the Modern Singapore Family (Singapore:
AWARE, 1996).
56. Nicole Tarulevicz, “History Making in Singapore: Who Is Producing the Knowl-
edge?” Themes for Thought on Southeast Asia: A Festschrift to Emeritus Professor
Nicholas Tarling on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday, special issue of the New
Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 11, no. 1 (June 2009): 402–25.
57. Lysa Hong, “The Lee Kuan Yew Story as Singapore’s History,” Journal of South-
east Asian Studies 33, no. 3 (October 2002): 554.
58. Phillip Holden, “A Man and an Island: Gender and Nation in Lee Kuan Yew’s
The Singapore Story,” Biography 24, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 402.
59. Ibid.
60. William Koh, The Top Toast: Ya Kun and the Singapore Breakfast Tradition
(Singapore: Cengage, 2010).
61. Rose Arnold, “Madeleines and Other Aides-Mémoire: The Importance of Food
References in Proust’s Recherche,” in Food and the Memory, ed. Harlan Walker (Lon-
don: Prospect, 2001), 30.
 notes to chap ters 2 and 3  ·  179

62. Vasiliki Kravva, “Food as a Vehicle for Remembering: The Case of the Thes-
salonikan Jews,” in Food and the Memory, ed. Harlan Walker (London: Prospect,
2001), 137.
63. Ibid., 139.
64. Philip Iddison, “Memory as a Culinary Skill and Necessity,” in Food and the
Memory, ed. Harlan Walker (London: Prospect, 2001), 120.
65. Gerald Mars and Valerie Mars, “Food History and the Death of Memory,” in
Food and the Memory, ed. Harlan Walker (London: Prospect, 2001), 157.
66. John F. Carafoli, for example, writing of his family’s experience of Italian migra-
tion to the United States, framed the culinary journey as “remembering, forgetting, and
learning to remember again.” He is engaged in an attempt to “recover memory through
cooking” in order to “fight amnesia—because food will always be a powerful magnet
to draw our buried memories.” John F. Carafoli, “Amarcord: The Flavour of Buried
Memories,” in Food and the Memory, ed. Harlan Walker (London: Prospect, 2001), 55.
67. Ferda Erdinç, “Journeys Through Smell and Taste: Home, Self, Identity,” in
Food and the Memory, ed. Harlan Walker (London: Prospect, 2001), 91.
68. Ibid., 98.
69. Andrew F. Smith, “False Memories: The Invention of Culinary Fakelore and
Food Fallacies,” in Food and the Memory, ed. Harlan Walker (London: Prospect,
2001), 254.
70. Ibid., 255.
71. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979), 9.

Chapter 3. Public Spaces, Public Bodies

1. “Health Alert as Even More Eat Out,” Straits Times, December 1, 2010.
2. “Singapore Botanic Gardens,” accessed January 25, 2011, http://www.sbg.org.sg/
aboutus/ourhistory.asp.
3. Emma Reisz, “City as Garden: Shared Space in the Urban Botanic Gardens of
Singapore and Malaysia, 1786–2000,” in Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities
and Global Processes, ed. R. Bishop et al. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 124.
4. Ibid., 127.
5. Ibid., 124.
6. Tania Li, Malays in Singapore: Culture, Economy and Ideology (Singapore: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
7. Martin Perry, Lily Kong, and Brenda Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City
State (Singapore: Wiley, 1997), 31.
8. Ole Johan Dale, Urban Planning in Singapore: The Transformation of a City
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14.
9. Perry, Kong, and Yeoh, Developmental City State, 29.
10. Brenda Yeoh, “Municipal Sanitary Ideology and the Control of the Urban Envi-
ronment in Colonial Singapore,” in Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective:
180  .  notes to chap ter 3

Essays on the Meaning of Some Places in the Past, ed. Alan R. H. Baker and Gideon
Biger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 148–72.
11. Warwick Anderson, “Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics
of Pollution,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 640.
12. Ann Laura Stoler, “Gender and Morality in the Making of Race,” in Carnal
Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 41–78.
13. Michael Bourdaghs, “The Disease of Nationalism, the Empire of Hygiene,”
Positions: East Asia Cultural Critiques 6, no. 3 (1998): 660.
14. Dominique Laporte, A History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-
Khoury ([1978]; translation Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
15. Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s China-
town (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1.
16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze,” Economic
and Political Weekly 27, nos. 10/11 (March 7–14, 1992): 541.
17. G. L. Ooi, “The Housing and Development Board’s Ethnic Integration Policy,” in
The Management of Ethnic Relations in Public Housing Estates, ed. G. L. Ooi, Sharon
Siddique, and K. C. Soh (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993), 17.
18. Chih Hoong Sin, “The Limits of Government Intervention in Fostering an
Ethnically Integrated Community—a Singapore Case Study,” Community Develop-
ment Journal 37, no. 3 (2002): 227.
19. L. K. Ching and A. Tyabji, “Home Ownership Policy in Singapore: An Assess-
ment,” Housing Studies 6, no. 1 (1991): 15–28.
20. Chih Hoong Sin, “The Quest for a Balanced Ethnic Mix: Singapore’s Ethnic
Quota Policy Examined,” Urban Studies 39, no. 8 (2002): 1349.
21. Linda Low, “The Political Economy of the Built Environment Revisited,” in
City and State: Singapore’s Built Environment Revisited, ed. G. L. Ooi and K. Kwok
(Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1997), 90.
22. Chih, “Quest,” 1351.
23. Perry, Kong, and Yeoh, Developmental City State, 238.
24. Chih Hoong Sin, “Segregation and Marginalisation Within Public Housing:
The Disadvantaged in Bedok New Town, Singapore,” Housing Studies 17, no. 2 (2002):
287.
25. Sharon Siddique, “Ethnic Relations and Grassroots Organisations,” in The Man-
agement of Ethnic Relations in Public Housing Estates, ed. G. L. Ooi, Sharon Siddique,
and K. C. Soh (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993), 40.
26. See, e.g., Sim Loo Lee, Lim Lan Yuan, and Tay Kah Poh, “Shelter for All: Sin-
gapore’s Strategy for Full Homeownership by the Year 2000,” Habitat International
17, no. 1 (1993): 85–102.
27. Chih, “Segregation and Marginalisation,” 272.
28. Chua Beng Huat, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 124–46.
 notes to chap ter 3  ·  181

29. M. Castells, L. Goh, and R. W. Y. Kwok, The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic
Development and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore (London: Pion, 1990),
328.
30. Fadhel Martini and Wong Tai Chee, “Restaurants in Little India, Singapore:
A Study of Spatial Organisation and Pragmatic Cultural Change,” Sojourn 16, no. 1
(2001): 147–61.
31. Laurence Wai-Teng Leong, “Commodifying Ethnicity: State and Ethnic Tour-
ism in Singapore,” in Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies,
ed. Michael Picard and Robert Wood (Honolulu: Hawaii Press, 1997), 72.
32. See, e.g., Bourdaghs, “Disease of Nationalism,” 637–73.
33. Goh Chok Tong, quoted in M. Nirmala, “Singaporeans Now More Polite After
15 Years of Courtesy Drive,” Straits Times, September 3, 1993.
34. Zakir Hussain, “Discipline Got S’pore into the First World,” Straits Times, June
30, 2010.
35.  Singapore: The Next Lap (Singapore: Times Editions for the Government of
Singapore, 1991), 77.
36. Taxi driver, quoted in Douglas Kennedy, “Courting Comfort,” New Statesman
and Society 3, no. 124 (October 26, 1990): 28.
37. Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the
Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in
the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (New York: Cass, 1977).
38. Koh Buck Song, quoted in “Singapore: Rich Nation, Poor Manners,” Straits
Times, January 15, 1996.
39. Nirmala, “Singaporeans Now More Polite,” 1.
40. Lee Kuan Yew, quoted in ibid.
41. “What Can You Do with Late Guests?” Her World Brides (February–March
1999), 32.
42. Teo Suyin, “Exercise Etiquette,” Female, December 1997, 214.
43. M. Nirmala, “Countries Can Progress or Regress on Courtesy Road,” Straits
Times, September 3, 1993.
44. “Eviction for Killer Litter,” Straits Times, August 1, 1986.
45. “A Litterbug’s Mane of Shame,” Straits Times, February 22, 1993.
46. Quek Siew-Wah and Des Iskandar Yusni, quoted in ibid.
47. Ang Yiying, “Using Shame to Tame Littering: Sembawang GRC to Put up
Photos of High-Rise Litterbugs on Noticeboards, in Newsletter,” Straits Times, July
12, 2010.
48. Hoe Pei Shan, “‘Envoys’ to Help Curb Littering: Queenstown Launches First
Community Patrol Group to Get Litterbugs to Pick up Trash and Provide Feedback
to NEA,” Straits Times, June 22, 2010.
49. Lynn Lee and Peh Shing Huei, “Why Littering Is so Hard to Sweep Away,”
Straits Times, January 12, 2008.
50. Ibid.
182  .  notes to chap ter 3

51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage,” 544.
55. Quoted in Lee and Huei, “Littering.”
56.  I Not Stupid, VCD, directed by Jack Neo (Raintree Pictures, 2002), cover.
57. Ibid.
58. Lee and Huei, “Littering.”
59. Goh Chin Lian, “A Day in the Vest of Shame,” Straits Times, June 20, 2010.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Adeline Koh, letter to the editor, “‘Cultural’ or Not, Rojak Influences Help to
Build This Nation,” Straits Times, September 18, 2006.
63. Ong is quoted in Tan Shzr Ee, “Enough About Chewing Gum Already,” Straits
Times, February 25, 2005.
64. “Man Who ‘Fished’ Money out of Donation Box Jailed,” Straits Times, Septem-
ber 5, 2004.
65. Lua Wenui, letter to the editor, Straits Times, May 31, 2004.
66. Jeffrey Soh Ying Cheun, letter to the editor, “Why We Should Stick with the
Chewing Gum Ban,” Straits Times, June 2, 2004.
67. Lua Wenyi, letter to the editor, “Don’t Ban Gum . . . Legalise It,” Straits Times,
May 31, 2004.
68. Yeo Eun-Young, letter to the editor, “Don’t Ban Gum . . . Teach People Not to
Abuse It,” Straits Times, May 31, 2004.
69. Arlina Arshad, “Gum’s Still a Sticky Problem,” Sunday Times, May 23, 2004.
70. Goh Chock Tong, “National Day Speech: First-World Economy, First-Class
Home,” August 9, 1999.
71. Jason Wong, letter to the editor, “Time for Laws Against Inconsiderate Cough-
ing or Sneezing in Public,” Straits Times, July 1, 2009.
72. Daryl Chin, “Joint Effort to Flush out Dirty Toilets Islandwide,” Straits Times,
December 17, 2010.
73. Daryl Chin, “Coffee Shop Loo Gets Five Stars,” Straits Times, December 4, 2010.
74. Lee and Peh, “Littering.”
75. Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food (Singapore: National
Environment Agency, 2007), 19.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 26, emphasis added.
78. Ibid., 29.
79.  Hawker Inquiry Commission (Singapore: Singapore Government, 1950), 12.
80. Memorandum on the Hawker Problem by the Acting Municipal Health Of-
ficer, in ibid., app. A, 35.
81.  Hawker Inquiry Commission, 15.
82. W. C. Hutchinson, Letter, ibid., app. A, 34, emphasis added.
 notes to chap ters 3 and 4  ·  183

83. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 27.

84. Juniper Foo, “SBS Bans Cross-Sex Acts, Except Liang Po Po,” Straits Times,
May 13, 1994.
85. William Peterson, Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 137.
86. “Mr Brown Show,” accessed December 5, 2011, http://www.mrbrownshow.com/
2009/08/19/the-mrbrown-show-national-day-rally-2009/.
87. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 29.
88. Goh Chin Tong, quoted in Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 30.
89. “eGov innovation,” accessed January 25, 2011, http://www.egovasia.enterprise
innovation.net/content/singapore-agency-opts-anacle-systems-manage-hawker
-centers.

Chapter 4. The Kitchen

1. An exception would be Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan, Memories of Philippine
Kitchens (New York: Stewart Tabori and Chang, 2006). This work conforms to the
broader trend of popular, not scholarly, work on kitchens.
2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 209.
3. Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contem-
porary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (January 1988): 11.
4. Ibid., emphasis in original.
5. Ibid.
6. Paulette Singley and James Horwitz, introduction to Eating Architecture, ed.
Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004); see also Petra
Hagen Hodgson, introduction to The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste, ed. Petra
Hagen Hodgson and Rolf Toyka (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007).
7. Wong Yunn Chii, Singapore 1:1—Island: A Gallery of Architectural and Urban
Design (Singapore: KaroCraft, 2007), 8.
8. Ibid., 246.
9. Ibid., 320.
10. Yim Chee Pang, Asthetically Yours, Singapore (Singapore: Roseapple, 2006), 11.
11. Scholars and visitors to public history sites alike will be familiar with the “quaint-
ification” of the past. This is certainly not a new or narrow trend, as Dona Brown
pointed out; the quaint was, for example, a major component of nineteenth-century
New England tourism. See Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in
the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 167.
For British historical tourism, the design of quaint towns, or what E. C. Relph called
“quaintspaces,” plays a critical role in allowing tourists to “experience” the past. Visitors
to the gold rush town of Sovereign Hill in rural Victoria, Australia, for example, can
imagine themselves in the past as they walk through reconstructed streets with shops
and costumed museum attendants. The domestic realm and everyday lived experience
are featured in these constructions of the past. See E. C. Relph, The Modern Urban
Landscape: 1880 to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 253.
184  .  notes to chap ter 4

12. Kwek Mean Luck, “Singapore: A Skyline of Pragmatism,” in Beyond Descrip-

tion: Singapore Space and Historicity, ed. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei
Yeo (London: Routledge, 2004), 119.
13. Maurizio Peleggi, “Consuming Colonial Nostalgia: The Monumentalisation of
Historic Hotels in Urban Southeast Asia,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 46, no. 3 (December
2005): 263.
14.  Our Heritage Is in Our Hands (Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority,
Preservation of Monuments Board, 1994), 3, quoted in Belinda Yuen, “Reclaiming
Cultural Heritage in Singapore,” Urban Affairs Review 14, no. 5 (July 2006): 836.
15. The cultural historians June Freeman and Rita Mielke, for example, both ac-
knowledge this importance. Speaking of the English kitchen, Freeman notes that “the
idea of the kitchen exerts a powerful hold” on the imagination and suggests that the
social and moral functions of the kitchen are as important as the “household tasks for
which it formally exists.” More broadly, but still within a Western framework, Mielke
sees the kitchen as one of the “most important spaces where our lives are played out,”
since the kitchen functions as “a center of communication and companionable shared
times.” June Freeman, The Making of the Modern Kitchen: A Cultural History (New
York: Berg, 2004), 1 (emphasis in original); Rita Mielke, ed., The Kitchen: History,
Culture, Design (Berlin: Feierabend Verlag, Ohg, 2005), jacket.
16. Cecilia Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2011), 10.
17. L. K. Ching and A. Tyabji, “Home Ownership Policy in Singapore: An As-
sessment,” Housing Studies 6, no. 1 (1991): 15–28; see also Chua Beng Huat, Political
Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore (London: Routledge, 1997), 124.
18. Freeman, Making of the Modern Kitchen, 6.
19. Chih Hoong Sin, “Segregation and Marginalisation Within Public Housing:
The Disadvantaged in Bedok New Town, Singapore,” Housing Studies 17, no. 2 (2002):
287.
20. Sharon Siddique, “Ethnic Relations and Grassroots Organisations,” in The
Management of Ethnic Relations in Public Housing Estates, ed. G. L. Ooi, Sharon
Siddique, and K. C. Soh (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993), 40.
21. Norman Edwards, The Singaporean House and Residential Life, 1819–1939 (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
22. Ibid., 197.
23. Leong-Salobir, Food Culture, 61.
24. Ibid., 198.
25. Lee Kip Lin, The Singaporean House, 1819–1942 (Singapore: Tien Wah, 1988).
26. John Cameron, Our Tropical Possession in Malayan India: Being a Descriptive
Account of Singapore, Penang, Province Wellesley, and Malacca; Their Peoples, Products,
Commerce and Government (London: 1865), 77, quoted in Lee, Singaporean House, 44.
27. Ibid.
28. Julian Davison, Black and White: The Singapore House, 1898–1941 (Singapore:
Talisman, 2006).
 notes to chap ter 4  ·  185

29. Ibid., 1.
30. Bedmor and Shi, Romancing the Tropics (Singapore: ORO, 2007).
31. Robert Swatt, Swatt Design: Liveable Modern (Melbourne: Images, 2006).
32. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo, eds., Beyond Description: Singa-
pore Space and Historicity (London: Routledge, 2004).
33. Wei-Wei Yeo, “Of Trees and the Heartland: Singapore’s Narratives,” in Ryan
Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo, ed., Beyond Description: Singapore Space
and Historicity (London: Routledge, 2004).
34. John Phillips, “Urban New Archiving,” in Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo, Beyond
Description, 216.
35. Monica Gwee, Selina’s Dream Kitchens (Singapore: Epigram, 2009).
36. Ibid., 109.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 111.
39. Ibid., 115.
40. Mary Robinson and Rita Fernando, Advanced Cookery for Malaysian Schools
(Singapore: University Education Press, 1964).
41. P. M. Abbey and G. M. Macdonald, ‘O’ Level Cookery (Singapore: McGraw-Hill
Far Eastern, 1971), 342.
42. Christina M. C. Fones, Let’s Learn to Cook (Singapore: MacMillian, 1970), 11.
43. Ibid., 12.
44. Ibid., 13–14.
45. Ibid., 327.
46. Hamidah Khalid and Sita Majah, eds., New Home Economics: Book 1 (Singa-
pore: Longman, 1983), 22.
47. Ibid., 30.
48. Ibid., 22.
49. Caroline Davidson, “Historic Kitchen Restoration: The Example of Ham
House,” in The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy: 20 Years of the Best Food Writing from
the Journal Petits Propos Culinaires, ed. Alan Davidson and Helen Saberi (Berkley:
Ted Speed, 2002), 129–38.
50. “Nation: Symbols of Australia—Suburbia,” accessed April 6, 2010, http://www
.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/nation/suburbia/.
51. Sonic, “A Sense and Place in Time,” accessed February 21, 2007, http://yesterday
.sg/detail/a_sense_and_place_in_time/.
52. Sonic, “Big Splash and All That,” accessed February 21, 2007, http://yesterday
.sg/detail/big_splash_and_all_that/.
53. “ieat-ishoot-ipost,” accessed February 21, 2007, http://ieatishootipost.blogspot
.com.
54. Rambling Librarian, “White Rabbit Candy . . . again,” accessed March 8, 2007,
http://yesterday.sg/detail/white_rabbit_candy_again/.
55.  The Magical Spaces Project (Singapore: 5Ft Creatives, 2007), 52.
56. Ibid., 58.
186  .  notes to chap ters 4 and 5

57. Ibid., 103.
58. Ibid., 86.
59. Henry Miller, quoted in ibid., 77.
60. Ibid., 81.
61. Ibid., 82.
62. Kelvin Ang, “Magical Spaces—Can They Be Saved?” in ibid., 12.
63.  Ibid., 188.
64. Ibid., 191.
65. Pauline Adema, “Foodscapes: An Emulsion of Food and Landscape,” Gastro-
nomica 7, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 3.
66. Ibid.

Chapter 5. Jam Tarts, Spotted Dicks, and Curry

1. Lilian Lane, Malayan Cookery Recipes: Tested in Malayan Schools (Singapore:
Eastern Universities Press, for University of London Press, 1964), back cover.
2. In the United States the term home economics is dated to the 1899 Lake Placid (New
York) Conference, which heralded the introduction of home economics into elementary
and high schools as a response to new places for women in land-grant colleges. In this
context, home economics was about both household management and employment.
The American Home Economics Association, which came out of the conference and
was responsible for much of the subsequent curricular development, stressed this dual
function, envisaging that students might seek work in the food industry, including
hotels and restaurants, as well as in allied domestic fields such as the textile industry.
3. Dena Attar, Wasting Girls’ Time: The History of Politics of Home Economics (Lon-
don: Virago, 1990), 25.
4. As the sociologist Stephen Mennell pointed out, cookery books were among
the first published materials in Europe, and within decades of the invention of the
Gutenberg press, books of cookery had been published in most European languages.
The domestic science specialist Sharon Y. Nickols made the point that even in very
early literature, such as the writings of Xenophon, the process of giving household
advice was well established. Stephen Mennell, “Plagiarism and Originality—Dif-
fusionism in the Study of the History of Cookery,” Petits Propos Culinaires no. 68
(November 2001): 31; Sharon Y. Nickols, “From Treatise to Textbook: A History of
Writing About Household Management,” Family and Consumer Sciences Research
Journal 37, no. 2 (December 2008): 111.
5. Sarah A. Leavitt, From Catherine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History
of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
6.  Wellington Independent 23, no. 3120 (February 10, 1871): 4.
7. Attar, Wasting Girls’ Time, 25.
8. Jennifer Mylander, “Early Modern ‘How-To’ Books: Impractical Manuals and
the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World,” Journal for Early Modern
Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2009): 124.
 notes to chap ter 5  ·  187

9. Robert Appelbaum, “Rhetoric and Epistemology in Early Printed Recipe Col-

lections,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (2003): 1–35.
10. P. M. Abbey and G. M. Macdonald, ‘O’ Level Cookery (Singapore: McGraw-Hill
Far Eastern, 1971), 27.
11. Mrs. M. H. Robinson and Mrs. R. Fernando, Elementary Cookery for Malaysian
Schools (Singapore: Creative Service, 1964), 1.
12. Abbey and Macdonald, ‘O’ Level Cookery, 23.
13. Ibid.
14. Hamidah Khalid and Sita Majar, eds., New Home Economics: Book 2 (Singapore:
Longman, 1983), 44.
15. Ibid., 46.
16. Lucy R. Samuel, Young Housewife’s Companion: A Collection of Some Favourite
Malayan Recipes (Singapore: Straits Printers, c. 1957), iii.
17.  The Next Lap (Singapore: Times Editions for the Government of Singapore,
1991), 1.
18. Vivienne Wee, “Children, Population Policy and the State in Singapore,” in
Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 195.
19. Lee Kuan Yew, “Lee Kuan Yew on Marriage, Education and Fertility in Singa-
pore,” Population and Development Review 13, no. 1 (1987): 179–85.
20. Lee Kuan Yew, “National Day Speech,” August 9, 1983.
21. “Three, Only if You Can Afford It,” Singapore Bulletin 15, no. 7 (April 1987): 2;
“DPM: Have Three or More Children,” Singapore Bulletin 15, no. 7 (April 1987): 3.
22. Michelle M. Lazar, “Equalising Gender Relations: A Case of Double-Talk,”
Discourse and Society 4, no. 4 (1993): 443–65.
23. Nirmala Purushotam, “Between Compliance and Resistance: Women and the
‘Middle-Class’ Way of Life in Singapore,” in Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, ed.
Sen Krishna and Maila Stivens (London: Routledge, 1997), 131.
24. Singapore Department of Statistics, “Singapore Census of Population 2000—
Advance Data Release No. 8—Marriage and Fertility,” Singapore Government Press
Release, February 15, 2001, 3.
25. Allan Cameron and Ethel Chong, Towards Understanding Food and Cooking,
rev. ed. (Singapore: Federal, 1978), 207.
26. Ibid., 215.
27. Ibid., 216.
28. Ibid., 218.
29. Ibid., 219, emphasis in original.
30. Ibid., 223.
31. Cecilia Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2011), 40. See also Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and
Conquerors (London: Vintage, 2006).
32. Cameron and Chong, Towards Understanding Food, i.
188  .  notes to chap ters 5 and 6

33. Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contem-

porary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (January 1988): 8.
34. Cameron and Chong, Towards Understanding Food, i.
35.  Syllabus for Domestic Science (Singapore: Ministry of Education, 1976).
36. Ibid., 104.
37. Cameron and Chong, Towards Understanding Food, 210.
38. Ibid., 211.
39. John E. Finn, “The Perfect Recipe: Taste and Tyranny, Cooks and Citizens,”
Food, Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (2011): 504.
40. Ibid., 516.
41. Cameron and Chong, Towards Understanding Food, 249.
42. Ibid., 250.
43.  Food for Thought: A Handbook on Food Safety and Hygiene (Singapore: Ministry
of the Environment, 1989), 101.
44. Ibid.
45.  Syllabus for Domestic Science in Primary and Secondary Schools (Singapore:
Ministry of Education, 1961), 1.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48.  New Home Economics, 2d ed. (Singapore: Longman, 1986), 110.
49. Ibid.
50. Lee Siow Mong, quoted in Syllabus for Domestic Science (Singapore: Ministry
of Education, 1976).
51. Ibid.
52.  New Home Economics, 90.
53. Khoo Paik Choo, Malaysian Cookery for Schools (Kuala Lumpur: Longmans
of Malaysia, 1966), xiii.
54. Ibid., 20.
55. Toh Chin Chye, quoted in The Proof Is in the Eating: Recipe Book in Chinese,
English, Rumi and Tamil (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1969), 3.
56.  Eating the Healthy Way (Singapore: Education Department, Training and
Health Division, 1987), 1.
57. Ibid.
58.  Eating Out: Better Choice at Hawker Centers (Singapore: Food and Nutrition
Department, 1996).
59. Ibid., 59.
60.  Food for Thought, title page.
61. Ibid., 66.

Chapter 6. The Pizza of Love

1. Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contem-
porary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (1988): 16.
2. Ibid.
 notes to chap ter 6  ·  189

3. Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks
They Wrote (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 6.
4. Nicola Humble, Culinary Pleasures: Cookbooks and the Transformation of British
Food (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 2.
5. Ibid., 278.
6. Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine,” 19.
7. Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook,
ed. Anna Johnston and Ralph Crane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xiii.
8. P. Allix, Menus for Malaya (Singapore: Malaya Publishing, c. 1953), 1.
9. Ibid., 2.
10. Ibid., 94.
11. Ibid., 2.
12. Ibid., 5.
13. Ibid., 114.
14. Ibid., 118.
15. Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
16. Cecilia Leong-Salobir, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2011), 40.
17. Allix, Menus for Malaya, 1.
18. Ibid., 82.
19. Ibid., 98.
20. Ibid., 74.
21. Ibid., 125.
22. Ibid., 74.
23. Ibid., 62, emphasis added.
24.  Seasoned in Singapore (Singapore: American Women’s Association, 1983), 9.
25.  Entertaining in Singapore (Singapore: American Women’s Association, 1987),
172–73.
26. Ibid., 107.
27. Doris Lau Siew Lang, Cook with Love: A Collection of Easy-to-Cook Local Recipes
(Singapore: Ray of Hope, 2006).
28. Chan Kwee Sung, One More Story to Tell: Memories of Singapore, 1930s–1980s
(Singapore: Landmark, 2005), 46.
29. James Hooi, The Guide to Singapore Hawker Food (Singapore: Hospitality Host,
1985), title page.
30. Carlos C. Lorenzana and Lourdes G. Martinez, Favourite ASEAN Recipes (Ma-
nila: Anvil, 1993), 35.
31. Chua Beng Huat and Ananda Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Sin-
gapore,” in Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia, ed. David Y. H. Wu and Chee-Beng
Tan (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001), 162.
32. Roger Owen, “Imaginary Restaurants with Real Food in Them: Reflections on
the Quest for Authenticity in South-East Asian Food,” in Authenticity in the Kitchen:
190  .  notes to chap ter 6

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2005, ed. Richard Hosk-
ings (Devon: Prospect, 2006), 359.
33. Ibid., 358.
34. Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine,” 15.
35. M. Freeman, “Sung,” in Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical
Perspectives, ed. K. C. Chang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 141–76.
36. Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Contemporary Sociology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
37. Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine,” 5.
38. Ibid., 13.
39. Lee Geok Boi, Nonya Favourites (Singapore: Periplus, 2001), 2.
40. Ibid.
41. Chua and Rajah, “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food,” 176.
42. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
43. Rosalin Soon, Grandmother’s Recipes: Tales from Two Peranakan Kitchens (Sin-
gapore: Saik Wah, 2007).
44. Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine,” 9.
45. Ibid.
46. Janet Salaff, State and Family in Singapore: Restructuring a Developing Society
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
47. Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine,” 22.
48. William Peterson, Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 79.
49. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964),
169.
50. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6.
51. Ibid.
52. T. N. Harper, “The State and Information in Modern Southeast Asian History,”
in House of Glass: Culture, Modernity and the State in Southeast Asia, ed. Yao Souchou
(Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2001), 213–40.
53.  The Singapore Cookbook: Over 200 Tantalizing Recipes (London: Greenwich, 2004).
54. Ibid., 12.
55. “The New Mrs. Lee’s Cookbook: Nonya Cuisine,” accessed July 20, 2010, http://
www.amazon.com/New-Mrs-Lees-Cookbook-Cuisine/dp/9812327045.
56. Ibid.
57. “Shermay’s Cooking School,” accessed July 20, 2010, http://www.shermay.com/
cookbooks.htm.
58. “Shermay’s Cooking School, About Us,” accessed July 20, 2010, http://www
.shermay.com/about_shermay_recipiesbykysmum.htm.
59. Wendy Hutton, ed., The Food of Singapore: Authentic Recipes from the Manhat-
tan of the East (Singapore: Periplus, 1994).
 notes to chap ters 6 and 7  ·  191

60. Ibid., 8.
61. Ibid., 23.
62. Owen, “Imaginary Restaurants,” 357.
63. Ibid.
64. David Tan and Amy Aoi, The Only Confinement Food Recipes You Need (Sin-
gapore: Pan Asia, 2004), 3.
65. “Amy Nanny Employment Agency,” accessed October 7, 2011, www.amynanny
.com.
66. Goh Chok Tong, National Day Speech, Singapore, 9 August 1996 (Singapore:
Ministry of Information and the Arts, 1996), 2.
67. Violet Oon, A Singapore Family Cookbook (Singapore: Pen, 1998), 7.
68. Brochure by the National Archives of Singapore (Singapore: National Archives,
2002), 1.
69. Ibid., 4.
70. George Yeo, “The 30th Anniversary Celebration of National Archives of Sin-
gapore” (speech, Minister for Information and the Arts, Singapore, April 30, 1998).
71.  Cooking with Singapore Families (Singapore: Archipelago, 2004).
72. Ibid., 7.
73. “White Paper on Shared Values” (Singapore: Singapore Government, 1991).
74. Yu-Foo Yee Shoon, quoted in Cooking with Singapore Families, 8.
75. Willie Chen, quoted in ibid., 12.
76. Nur Iman Rostam, quoted in ibid., 52.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Joyceline Tully and Christopher Tan, Heritage Feasts: A Collection of Singapore
Family Recipes (Singapore: Miele, 2010), 9, 123.
80. Christopher Tan, “What Is Singapore Food?” in ibid., 15.
81. Wee Wei Ling and Chan Heng Wing, quoted in ibid., at 25 and 123, respectively.
82. Ibid., 18.
83. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology Knowledge of the Human
Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970).
84. Humble, Culinary Pleasures, 3.
85. Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine,” 22.

Chapter 7. Picked in Their Fresh Young Prime

1. T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in
America (New York: Basic, 1992), 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Madhu Agrawal, “Review of a 40-year Debate in International Advertising:
Practitioner and Academician Perspectives to the Standardization/Adaptation issue,”
International Marketing Review 12, no. 1 (1995): 26.
4. David L. Brown, Export Advertising (New York: Ronald, 1923), 190.
192  .  notes to chap ter 7

5. Joe Moran, “Mass Observation, Market Research, and the Birth of the Focus
Group, 1937–1997,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 4 (2008): 842.
6. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Cardinal, 1957).
7. Jeffrey Auerbach, “Art, Advertising, and the Legacy of Empire,” Journal of Popular
Culture 35, no. 2 (2002): 16.
8. Chua Beng Huat, Life Is Not Complete Without Shopping: Consumption Culture
in Singapore (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2003).
9. Auerbach, “Art, Advertising, and the Legacy of Empire,” 1.
10. P. Allix, Menus for Malaya (Singapore: Malaya Publishing, c. 1953), [v]. Further
page references to this work in this chapter appear in the text.
11. Alina Wheeler, Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole
Branding Team (Hoboken: Wiley, 2009), 2.
12.  Willis’s Singapore Guide (Singapore: A. C. Willis, 1934), 58.
13. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
14. Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the
Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in
the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 1977), 1.
15. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families And the Nos-
talgia Trap (New York: Basic, 2000), 171.
16. Alatas, Myth of the Lazy Native, 115.
17. “Lingham’s, A Taste of Malaysia Since 1908,” accessed March 23, 2011, http://
www.lingham.com/aboutus.htm.
18. Fatimah Hashim, “Dutch Baby Changes Name to Dutch Lady,” accessed Janu-
ary 15, 2013, Business Times Malaysian, 5 May 2000, http://www.btimes.com.my/.
19. “Ovaltine,” accessed March 24, 2011, http://www.ovaltineusa.com/HealthAnd
Nutrition.aspx.
20. Peter Yeo, “Where’s the Beef, When with the King You Can?” Today 26 (Oc-
tober 2010), B4.
21. Ibid.
22.  I Not Stupid, VCD, directed by Jack Neo (Raintree Pictures, 2002), cover.
23. Ibid.
24. Fareed Zakaria, “Culture as Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,”
Foreign Affairs 47, no. 2 (1994): 110.
25. Ien Ang and Jon Stratton, “The Singapore Way of Multiculturalism: Western
Concepts/Asian Cultures,” Sojourn 10, no. 1 (1995): 67.
26. Ibid., 68.
27. Wen Ken Group advertisement, in Asian Supermarket, Incorporating Asian
Retailer (April 1997), n.p.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Baba King advertisement, in The Peranakan, July–September 2009, 7.
 notes to chap ters 7 and 8  ·  193

31. Katong Catering advertisement, in The Peranakan, January 2010, 9.

32. Singapore Pools advertisement, in The Peranakan, July–September 2009, 32.
33. Adeline Foo, The Kitchen God (Singapore: Booksmith, 2008).
34. SCS advertisement, in Eat, August 2005, inside cover.
35. SCS Family Baking Workshop advertisement, in Eat, August 2005, 36.
36. Orient Rice Chips advertisement, in Eat, August 2005, 3.
37. Paramount Restaurant advertisement, in Singapore Tatler, February 2005, 5.
38. Lao Beijing advertisement, in Singapore Tatler, February 2005, 3.
39. Monica Khoo, “Portrait of a Lady,” Singapore Tatler, February 2005, 115–19.
40. Singapore’s Best Restaurants 2005 advertisement, in Singapore Tatler, February
2005, 179.
41. SomethingToGo advertisement, in Singapore Tatler, March 2005, 69.
42. Vanessa Langford, “The Big Bling,” Singapore Tatler, January 2005, 135–39.
43. Emma Burgess, “Weight a Minute!” Singapore Tatler, January 2005, 156–57.
44. Miele advertisement, in Singapore Tatler, January 2005, 170–71.

Chapter 8. Food Sluts and the Marketing of Singaporean Cuisine

1. Susan Pitchford, Identity Tourism: Imaging and Imagining the Nation (Bingley,
U.K.: Emerald, 2008), 113.
2. Chris Tremewan, The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore (New York:
St. Martin’s, 1994). See also: Christopher Lingle, Singapore’s Authoritarian Capitalism:
Asian Values, Free Market Illusions and Political Dependency (Barcelona: Edicions
Sirocco, 1996).
3. David Brown, Contemporary Nationalism: Civic, Ethnocultural and Multicultural
Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 93.
4. “I learnt that ice could really melt people’s hearts,” Uniquely Singapore adver-
tisement, Singapore Tourist Board (2000).
5. John Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore, 1965–1990: The Cultural
Politics of Pluralism in a Multiethnic Society (London: Ashgate, 1998), 36.
6. Ibid., 37.
7. Stuart Hall, “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question,” in Un/Settled Multi-
culturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. B. Hesses (London: Zed,
2000), 210.
8. “It’s Easy to See Why Diet Books Seldom Make it to the Singapore Bestseller
List,” Uniquely Singapore Advertisement, Singapore Tourism Board (2000).
9. “Why Must a Day Have Only Three Meals?” Uniquely Singapore advertisement,
Singapore Tourism Board (2000).
10. “Singapore Tourism Board,” accessed November 23, 2010, https://app.stb.gov.sg/
asp/abo/abo.asp.
11. “Singapore Medicine,” accessed December 9, 2010, http://www.singaporemedicine
.com/index.asp.
194  .  notes to chap ter 8

12. “Singapore Education,” accessed December 9, 2010, http://www.singaporeedu

.gov.sg/htm/abo/abo01.htm.
13. “Overseas Singaporean Unit,” accessed November 27, 2011, http://www2.overseas
singaporean.sg/.
14. “Singapore Tourism Board, Brand Overview,” accessed November 23, 2010,
https://app.stb.gov.sg/asp/des/des05.asp.
15. Ibid.
16. “Singapore Tourism Board, Tourism, Shopping & Dining,” accessed November
23, 2010, https://app.stb.gov.sg/asp/str/str08.asp.
17. “Your Singapore,” accessed November 25, 2010, http://www.yoursingapore.com/
content/traveller/en/browse/dining.html.
18. “Your Singapore,” accessed November 23, 2010, http://www.yoursingapore
.com/content/traveller/en/browse/dining/signature-dishes.html).
19. “Your Singapore, Dining, Fried Sesame Ball,” accessed November 23, 2010, http://
www.yoursingapore.com/content/traveller/en/browse/dining/signature-dishes/
fried-sesame-ball.html.
20. “Your Singapore, See & Do, Chinatown,” accessed November 25, 2010, http://www
.yoursingapore.com/content/traveller/en/browse/see-and-do/culture-and-heritage/
cultural-precincts/chinatown.html.
21. Ibid.
22. “Your Singapore, Dining, Signature Dishes,” accessed November 25, 2010, http://
www.yoursingapore.com/content/traveller/en/browse/dining/signature-dishes.html.
23. Karamjit Kaur, “SIA Will Tender Out Coveted Ad Contract,” Straits Times,
January 9, 2007.
24. Singapore Airlines advertisement, in Orientations: A Discovery of Asia and the
Pacific (November 1973), 12–13.
25. “The City Called ‘Instant Asia,’” Orientations: A Discovery of Asia and the Pacific
(November 1974), 68.
26. Ibid.
27. Paula Hamilton, “The Knife Edge Age: Debates About Memory and History,”
in Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and
Paula Hamilton (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), 24. “To control a mu-
seum,” the art historian Carol Duncan argued, is “to control the representation of
a community and its highest values and truths.” Carol Duncan, Civilising Rituals:
Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 8.
28. Goh Chok Tong, “Our Museum Must Capture the Memories of Our Nation,”
in Speeches ’90: A Bimonthly Selection of Ministerial Speeches 14, no. 6 (November—
December 1990): 14.
29. Kevin Y. L. Tan, “The National Museum as Maker and Keeper of Singapore
History,” in The Makers and Keepers of Singapore History, ed. Loh Kah Seng and Liew
Kai Khiun (Singapore: Ethos, 2010), 125.
30. Ibid., 134.
 notes to chap ter 8  ·  195

31. Ibid., 135.
32. Ibid.
33. Susan Douglas, “Notes Towards a History of Media Audiences,” Radical History
Review, no. 54 (Fall 1992): 131.
34. Stuart Hall, quoted in A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy,
ed. Brian Graham et al. (London: Arnold, 2002), 41.
35. “National Museum Singapore,” accessed November 22, 2010, http://www.national
museum.sg/nms/nms_html/nms_content_6c.asp.
36. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
37. Lola Lenzi, National Museum of Singapore Guide (Singapore: Editions Didier
Millet, 2007), 93–95.
38. “National Museum Singapore,” accessed November 22, 2010, http://www.national
museum.sg/nms/nms_html/nms_content_6c.asp.
39. Shamini Flint, Sasha Visits the Museums (Singapore: Sunbear, 2008).
40. Shamini Flint, Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder
(Singapore: Piatkus, 2009).
41. “Sunbear Publishing,” accessed November 23, 2010, http://www.sunbear
publishing.com.
42. Robbie B. H. Goh, “Textual Spaces, Social Identities and Race in Singapore
Advertising,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 152.
43. Lenzi, National Museum of Singapore Guide, 96.
44. Ibid., 92.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 93.
47. Exhibit text, Living Galleries—Food, National Museum of Singapore.
48. Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food (Singapore: National
Environment Agency, 2007), dust jacket.
49. Kiat-Jin Lee, “The Semiotics of Singapore’s Founding Myths of Multiracialism
and Meritocracy,” American Sociologist 42 (2011): 267.
50. Simon Tay, quoted in Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 15.
51. Yaacob Ibrahim, quoted in Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 13.
52. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 167.
53. Ibid., 19.
54. Ibid., 106.
55. “Overseas Singaporean Unit,” accessed November 28, 2011, www.overseas
singaporean.sg.
56. “The Pleasure Monger,” accessed November 29, 2011, http://thepleasuremonger
.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/stop-feeling-homesick-make-your-own-chwee-kueh.
57. Calvin Trillin, quoted in Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, “Singapore Takeout (New York):
Feeding the Homesick,” accessed November 29, 2011, http://atigerinthekitchen
.com/2011/09/singapore-takeout-new-york-feeding-the-homesick/.
196  .  notes to chap ter 8

58. Rachel Lee and siblings, quoted in Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 161.
59. Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres, 101.
60. “Asia One Wine, Dine & Unwind: Singapore in Saveur,” accessed December
14, 2010, http://wineanddine.asiaone.com/Wine%252CDine%2B%2526%2BUnwind/
News/Food%2B%2526%2BWine/Story/A1Story20070622–15041.html.
61. “Gourmet: Evelyn Chen, Eight Great Places to Taste the ‘Real’ Singapore,” ac-
cessed December 14, 2010, http://www.gourmet.com/travel/2009/07/eight-great
-places-to-taste-the-real-singapore.
62. “Saveur,” accessed December 14, 2010, http://www.saveur.com/article.jsp.
63. “Gourmet: Recipes & Menus, Singapore Sling,” accessed December 14, 2010,
http://www.gourmet.com/recipes/1950s/1953/08/singapore-sling.
64. “Gourmet: Karen Coates, Travel Smart: Southeast Asia’s Colonial Past,” accessed
December 14, 2010, http://www.gourmet.com/travel/2009/09/singapore-cambodia
-burma-hotels.
65. Ibid.
66. “Gourmet Traveller: Restaurants & Reviews,” accessed December 15, 2010,
http://www.gourmettraveller.com.au/rginternationalsearch.htm.
67. “Food & Wine: Restaurants & Travel, Singapore,” accessed December 15, 2010,
http://www.foodandwine.com/activities/list/singapore-asia.
68. “Singapore,” Poh’s Kitchen: On the Road (ABC TV, September 7, 2011).
69. “Bon Appétit,” accessed December 14, 2010, http://www.bonappetit.com/magazine/
2008/10/singapore.
70. Jonathan Gold, “Singapore Street Food,” Saveur no. 8 (2007), http://www.saveur
.com/article/Travels/Singapore-Street-Food.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. “Gourmet Traveller: Restaurants & Reviews,” accessed December 14, 2010,
http://www.gourmettraveller.com.au/imperial_herbal_restaurant.htm.
74. “Gourmet: Karen Coates, Mooncakes Over Singapore,” accessed December 14,
2010, http://www.gourmet.com/travel/2007/09/mooncakes.
75. Gold, “Singapore Street Food.”
76. Ibid.
77. “Food & Wine: Singapore Fling,” accessed December 14, 2010, http://www
.foodandwine.com/articles/singapore-fling.
78. “Could this be the Original Spice Girl?” New Asia Advertisement, Singapore
Tourist Board (1998).
79. “Food & Wine: Singapore Fling.”
80. Ibid.
81. Gold, “Singapore Street Food.”
82. Ibid.
83. Tom Colicchio and Sisha Ortúzar, “Chef ’s Special: Fried Calamari Sandwich,”
Saveur (April 2011), 88.
84. Gold, “Singapore Street Food.”
 notes to conclusion  ·  197

Conclusion
1. Kaz Ross, “Faking It: Food Quality in China,” International Journal of Asia Pacific
Studies 8, no. 2, special issue, Food and Asia (July 2012): 33–54.
2. “T. R. Hamzah & Yeang,” accessed September 1, 2012, http://www.trhamzahyeang
.com/project/skyscrapers/edit-tower01.html.
3. “City Farmer News: Community Bonding Through Urban Farming in Sin-
gapore,” accessed June 1, 2012, http://www.cityfarmer.info/2012/04/01/community
-bonding-through-urban-farming-in-singapore/.
4. “Daily Telegraph: Singapore’s Anti-Chinese Curry War,” accessed October 1, 2011,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/singapore/8704107/Singapores
-anti-Chinese-curry-war.html.
5. “The Mr Brown Show: Bak Chor Mee Man 2,” April 19, 2007, http://www
.mrbrownshow.com/2007/04/19/the-mrbrown-show-top-dollar/.
6. “Curry Night (with Lyric and Singalong): Mr Brown Show Production,” October
3, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhLozqBqPMk.
7. “Miss Tam Chiak, Cook a Pot of Curry,” accessed October 12, 2011, http://www
.misstamchiak.com/2011/08/cook-pot-of-curry.html.
8. Ibid. In 2013 the controversy was revisited by playwright Alfian Sa’at in Cook a
Pot of Curry which featured the Mr. Brown Curry Night song.
9. “National Song by Mr Brown—With Subtitles,” accessed December 13, 2011,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfL-zdAIN_U.
10. Leslie Tay, The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries (Singapore:
Epigram, 2010), 7.
11. Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food (Singapore: National
Environment Agency, 2007), 106.
12. Jonathan Gold, “Singapore Street Food,” Saveur no. 8 (July 2007), accessed July
5, 2013, http://www.saveur.com/article/Travels/Singapore-Street-Food.
13. “Food-o-Philia 2013,” accessed May 31, 2013, http://www.theartshouse.com.sg/
Programmes/RegularSeries/FoodOPhilia.aspx. Food-o-Philia 2013 is hosted by the
government-funded, not-for-profit literary and arts center The Arts House.
14. “Food Yoo,” accessed January 3, 2013, http://www.foodyoo.com/recipes/Malaysia/
9_layer_kueh/9_layer_kueh.htm.
 Index

Abbey, P. M.: O Level Cookery, 69, 79–80 appropriation, 98, 101–2, 159
Adema, Pauline, 32, 74 architecture, 59–62, 66–68, 73–75, 165,
Advanced Cookery for Malaysian Schools, 69 177n40
advertising, 116–20, 165–66; alcohol, 120– Arnold, Rose, 37
22; food-related, 8, 95–96, 123–36, 155; Asian Values debate, 6, 129
kitchen gadgets, 122–24, 135; tourism, 13, Auerbach, Jeffery, 117
107, 137–44, 166. See also Singapore Tour- Australian butter, 132
ism Board authenticity, 101–7, 129–32, 155, 165
advice manuals, 7. See also cookbooks; text- Ayam Brand Green Peas, 118–20
books
afternoon tea, 85, 126–27. See also high tea; baking, 77, 84–85, 91, 95, 132
tea baking powder, 125
air-conditioning, 14, 20, 72 beer. See alcohol
Alatas, Syed Hussein, 45 belachan (belacan), 1, 5, 157
alcohol: beer, 107, 118, 121; brandy; 120–21; Belasco, Warren, 4
cocktails, 15, 127, 143; gin, 15, 121; Long bodies: cooling of, 109, 130; disciplined bod-
Island Tea, 143; rum, 121, 157; Singapore ies, 44–56, 58, 89, 144–45, 164; fat bodies,
Sling, 15, 98, 143, 156; whiskey, 5, 21; wine, 128–29, 134; as organizing principle, 2,
96–97, 121, 133–34 5–6; and the student, 80, 86–87. See also
Allix, P.: Menus for Malaya, 95–97, 117–22, hygiene
165 Bourdaghs, Michael, 42
American Women’s Association of Singa- brands. See advertising
pore, 98–99 breakfast, 5, 37, 81, 89
Anderson, Benedict, 104–5 Brown, David, 31, 138
Anderson, Eric, 148–49, 151
Anderson, Warwick, 42 Cameron, Allan: Towards Understanding
Ang, Ien, 30, 129–30 Food and Cooking, 83–85
Ang, Kelvin, 74 chai tao kway, 1, 167–68
Aoi, Amy, 109 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 28, 42
Appadurai, Arjun, 59–60, 84, 92–94, 99, Changi (prison camp), 16–17
101–4 Changi (TV series), 17, 174n17
Appelbaum, Robert, 79 Changi International Airport, 25
200  . inde x
char kway teow, 100, 152, 197n10 Elementary Cookery for Malaysian Schools,
chewing gum, 51–53, 164 80
chicken rice, 102, 168 Entertaining in Singapore, 99
chilli, 1, 83, 125–26, 168 Erdinç, Ferda, 37–38
Chinatown, 34, 143, 156 expatriate cookbooks, 98–99
Chong, Ethel: Towards Understanding Food
and Cooking, 83–85 fakelore, 38
Chua Beng Huat, 100–101, 117 family, 2, 6, 39, 68, 73; education and, 89,
citizen participation, 22, 90, 163 132; family nucleus, 43–44, 64; family of
citizenry, 19, 21, 45, 163 the nation, 36, 113; food history and, 5, 37,
citizens: bodies of, 2, 44–45, 166; child-citi- 110–12, 114; housing and, 44, 63–64, 67;
zens, 51; development of, 46, 58; ideal, 21, imagined family, 82–83, 122; migration
40, 81, 108, 165; marketing to, 10, 22, 100, and, 15, 41,162–63
139; non-citizen, 104; proto-citizens, 86, family planning, 21, 43, 81–83, 108
91, 165; racial categorization of, 44, 139, Farquhar, William, 148–49
166; stake in the nation, 43, 46; teaching feng shui, 68
history for, 22, 100, 139; threat from, 53, Fernando, Rita: Advanced Cookery for Ma-
64; weak, 50, 86 laysian Schools, 69; Elementary Cookery
citizenship, 50, 79–80, 91, 165 for Malaysian Schools, 80
Clammer, John, 140 Ferro, Mark, 28
Cold Storage Company, 13, 17, 20, 64, 124, Finn, John E., 86
174n6 Fitch, George Hamilton, 30
Cold War, 6, 20–21 Flashman, 30, 177n28
Coleman, George Drumgoole, 13 Flint, Shamini, 148–50
confinement (post-pregnancy) foodways, Fones, Christina M. C., 69–70
108–9 food as metaphor, 51, 105, 111, 128; hybridity
consumption, 135, 164. See also shopping and, 6, 33, 102; kitchens and, 64, 66–68,
consumption culture, 32–33 74; multiracialism and, 3–4, 6, 33; nation
cookbooks, 8, 79, 92–115, 165 and, 20, 33, 37
cookery, 78 food courts. See hawkers; hawker centres
Cooking with Singaporean Families, 111 Food for Thought: A Handbook on Food
Cook with Love: A Collection of Easy-to- Safety and Hygiene, 90
Cook Local Recipes, 99 Food of Singapore: Authentic Recipes from
Coontz, Stephanie, 122 the Manhattan of the East, 107
cosmopolitanism: class and, 32, 161–2; food Food Republic, 71–72
nostalgia and, 9, 35; historic, 25, 30, 32–33; food safety, 86, 90–91, 170–71. See also hy-
multi-racialism and, 30–33, 103, 164; na- giene
tionalist discourse and, 6, 31, 116, 136 foodscapes, 6–7, 39, 71, 170; concept of,
courtesy, 44–47 32–33, 74–76, 177n36, 178n41
Crane, Ralph, 94, 189n7 food security, 17, 23, 160–62, 170–71
cross-cooking, 107–8 food sluts, 157, 166, 196n70
curry, 83–84, 89, 96–97, 118, 158–59; smelly Foucault, Michel, 67, 114
curry, 162–63, 197n8. See also tiffin Fraser, George MacDonald, 30, 177n28
frozen food, 13–14, 90, 97, 124, 131. See also
donuts, 142–43 ice cream
Douglas, Susan, 147 fusion cuisine, 5, 33, 101–3, 143, 158
Dutch Baby Milk, 97, 126–27, 192n18
garlic, 84, 109, 158
Eating Out: Better Choice at Hawker Cen- Gellner, Ernest, 104
ters, 90 gender, 47, 77, 91, 120–22, 165
Eating the Healthy Way, 90 George, Cherian, 14, 34–35
Edwards, Norman, 64–65 globalization, 24–25, 30–31, 36
 inde x · 201

global pantry, 4, 11, 164 Hutton, Wendy: Food of Singapore: Authen-

glutinous rice balls, 142 tic Recipes from the Manhattan of the
Goh Chok Tong, 20–21, 175n30; views of, 45, East, 107
53, 109, 146, 161 hybridity: authenticity and, 101, 165; in cui-
Goh Chor Boon: Serving Singapore: A Hun- sine, 33, 100–104, 151–52; nation and the,
dred Years of Cold Storage, 1903–2003, 33, 101; as symbol, 131, 170
174n6 hygiene: food and personal, 6, 39, 41–42;
Goody, Jack, 102 hawkers and 54–58, 68–69; orderliness
Grandmother’s Recipes: Tales from Two Per- and, 80, 86–90
anakan Kitchens, 103
Great Singapore Sale, 30, 141 ice cream, 13–14, 27, 124, 128; Milo Godzilla,
green design, 161 168; public health and, 55–56, 90–91
Guide to Singapore Hawker Food, 100 ice-kachang, 139–40
Gwee, Monica, 67–68 Iddison, Philip, 37
identity, 2, 32, 37, 93, 104–5; colonial, 95–96,
Habibie, B. J., 10 165; cookbooks and, 92, 99, 104, 165; eth-
halal food, 1, 85, 132 nicity and, 44, 72, 102–3; food (general)
Hall, Stuart, 140, 147 and, 24, 29, 37, 73–74; food (local) and, 9,
hawker, 21, 54–58, 80, 114, 152–57 72, 101, 163, 168; heartlanders and, 32; his-
hawker centres, 80, 90, 140, 153, 162–63; tory and, 37, 105, 114; multi racialism and,
air-conditioning of, 14, 20, 72; food, 100, 31, 94, 111, 115; nation and, 51, 105, 107, 139,
150–55, 167; in public imagination, 20, 39, 165; nostalgia and, 37, 73, 105, 164; public
64, 113, 153–59; as public spaces, 39, 61, space and, 6–7, 32, 39, 155, 164; Singapor-
154; regulation of, 54–58, 107; stalls, 57, ean, 8, 20, 109, 129, 139. See also national
100, 128, 167 identity
Hawker Inquiry Commission (1950), 55–56 importers, 119–20
heartlander, 32, 52–53, 67, 161–62 I Not Stupid, 50, 129
Heng, Russell, 19 invented tradition, 23, 103, 105, 121, 147,
heritage, 62, 71–73, 112–14 192n13
Heritage Feasts: A Collection of Singaporean
Family Recipes, 112–14 Japanese occupation, 16–18, 46, 174n19
high tea, 15, 27, 167. See also afternoon tea; Jefferson, Thomas, 61–62
tea Johnson, Anna, 94, 189n7
history: founding myth, 104; as knowledge
28–29; oral history 110; and periodiza- kampong, 161–62
tion, 5–6, 23; of Singapore, 11–23, 28–29, kaya toast, 111, 132. See also Ya Kun Kaya
41–42, 66–67 Toast
Hobsbawm, Eric, 103, 105, 147 Khalid, Hamidah: New Home Economics,
Holden, Phillip, 36 70, 88
home cookery, 72 Khaw Boon Wan, 31
home economics, 77–82, 186n2. See also Khoo Paik Choo: Malaysian Cookery for
textbooks Schools, 188n53
home ownership, 63. See also Housing De- Khor, Amy 50
velopment Board kitchen, 7, 59–76, 165; wet and dry, 65–66
homesickness, 150, 154–55 kitchen gadgets, 122–24
Hooi, James: Guide to Singapore Hawker Koh, William: The Top Toast: Ya Kun and
Food, 100 the Singapore Breakfast Tradition, 13,
housewife, 80–81, 86–89, 165 35–37
Housing Development Board (HDB), 7, 34– Koh Buck Song, 46
35, 42–44, 49, 61–64; kitchens and, 67–68 Kong, Lily, 54, 56, 153–55, 168
Hudd, Sandra, 14, 71 Kopitiam, 13
Humble, Nicola, 94, 115 Kravva, Vasiliki, 37
202  . inde x
Lai Wah Restaurant, 23, 38 national memory, 35, 67, 110, 167; public
laksa, 85, 100, 151–52, 168 memory, 35, 60–62, 113, 145, 165. See also
Lane, Lillian: Malayan Cookery Recipes: nostalgia
Tested in Malayan Schools, 173n7, 186n1 Menus for Malaya, 95–97, 117–22, 165
Laporte, Dominique, 42 meritocracy, 21–22, 106, 153, 195n49
Lau, Albert, 19 migration: Chinese, 3–4, 15, 36, 162–63; con-
Lau Pa Sat, 12, 14; Festival Pavilion at, 140 temporary, 4, 24–25, 162–63; historical,
Lau Siew Lang, Doris: Cook with Love: A 3–4, 15, 38, 41. See also under family
Collection of Easy-to-Cook Local Recipes, Milo dinosaur, 139, 168
99 modernity: Asian Values and, 21, 82; eco-
Lears, T. J. Jackson, 116 nomic, 21, 143; evidence of, 20–21, 42, 165;
Leavitt, Sarah A., 78 food and, 89, 103, 106, 124; gender and,
Lee, Shermay, 106 82, 106; heritage and, 25–28, 166; poten-
Lee Geok Boi: Nonya Favourites, 102–3 tial, 65–70; technology and 122, 124–25
Lee Hsein Loong, 21–22, 106 monosodium glutamate (MSG), 125
Lee Kip Lin, 65–66 mooncakes, 143, 157
Lee Kuan Yew, 19–21, 44–49, 106; autobiog- “Mr. Brown” (podcaster), 56, 162–63, 167
raphy of, 19, 36, 45, 175n26; nation and, Mrs. Lee’s Cookbook, 106–7, 110
26, 129–30; reproductive policy and, 40, multiracialism: harmony and, 31, 94, 103–5,
82; Singapore School and, 6, 21 139; metaphor for, 3, 33; national narrative
leftovers, 84–85 and, 38, 115; race relations and, 31, 145, 165.
Leong-Salobir, Cecilia, 63 See also racial harmony
Let’s Learn to Cook, 69–70 Mylander, Jennifer, 79
littering, 47–50, 164
Little India, 25, 181n30 nasi goreng, 97
local (ideas of), 32–33, 99–100, 157, 162 national cuisine, 3, 92; and meaning, 100–
Lockhart, R. H. Bruce, 33 103, 114, 150–51
Lost Images, 34 national identity, 7–8, 105, 110–11, 126, 138–
39; ethnic identity and, 31–32, 102; food
Macdonald, G. M.: O Level Cookery, 69, and, 92–93, 111, 164, 168
79–80 nationalism, 30–31, 126, 166; memory and,
MacRitchie, James, 13 145–48, 153, 194n27; tourism and, 138
Magical Spaces Project, 73–74, 165 National Museum of Singapore (NMS), 33,
maids, 25, 63, 68, 95–97; kitchen advertising 137, 146–53, 159, 166
and, 96–97, 123; social threat of, 50, 129. national narrative, 13, 81, 108, 164, 166; eth-
See also servants nic identity and, 38, 93–94, 115; food and,
Majah, Sita: New Home Economics, 70, 88 23, 93–94, 166; history and, 26, 36–37; the
makan, 154–55, 157–58, 168–71 personal and the, 5, 166
Malaya, 12, 18, 96–97, 126 national values, 164
Malayan Cookery Recipes: Tested in Malayan nation-making, 7, 38–39, 104, 111, 138, 165
Schools, 173n7, 186n1 Neo, Jack, 50, 129
Malaysian Cookery for Schools, 188n53 neo-Confucianism, 21
Manley, Iain, 29–30 neo-Orientalism, 9, 137, 175n36
Marmite, 127 New Home Economics, 70, 88
Mars, George, 37 Newton Circus Centre, 20
Mars, Valerie, 37 nine-layer kueh, 150, 166, 170
Mass Rapid Transit (MRT), 13, 25 Nonya Favourites, 102–3
McClintock, Anne, 28 nostalgia, 9, 32–35, 94, 167–68; food and, 9,
memory: of architecture, 16, 27, 59–71, 156, 38, 71–73, 165; history and, 33, 38, 94, 164;
165; food, 3, 37–38, 72; of home, 3, 115; place and, 9, 59, 76, 167
 inde x · 203

Nyonyan cusine, 102–3, 106–7, 170 Rajah, Ananda, 100–101

Reisz, Emma, 40–41
O Level Cookery, 69, 79–80 rice, 25, 84, 89
Ong Keng Sen, 51–52 roasted chestnuts, 72
Only Confinement Cookbook Recipes You Robinson, Mary: Advanced Cookery for Ma-
Need, 109 laysian Schools, 69; Elementary Cookery
Oon, Violet, 110 for Malaysian Schools, 80
Owen, Roger, 101, 107–8 rojak, 6, 33, 90
Ross, Kaz, 197n1
Packard, Vance, 117 Rostam, Nur Iman, 111
Parasecoli, Fabio, 29 roti prata, 152
Peleggi, Maurizio, 62 rules: breaking, 53, 103, 163–64; food and,
People’s Action Party (PAP), 57, 138, 146, 2–3, 7–9, 60, 109, 164, 171; hygiene, 42, 50;
163; colonial Britain and, 6, 18–19, 42, 51; making of, 7, 77, 170–71, society of, 1–3,
family and, 82–83, 111; historic, 6, 18–23, 67, 161
31–32, 42–43; housing and, 42–44, 63; race
and, 31, 44, 82, 139 Said, Edward, 59
Peranakan, 4, 64, 72, 102–3, 106–107, 131, 152. sambal, 1, 5, 100
See also Nyonyan Sasha Visits the Museums, 148–50, 195n39
Peterson, William, 26 Satay Club, 20
Pitchford, Susan, 138 Seasoned in Singapore, 98–99
pizza, 73, 111–12 Selina’s Dream Kitchens, 67–68
Poh Ling Yeow, 156 servants, 63–66, 69, 79, 95–96, 122–23. See
Poh’s Kitchen: On the Road, 156 also maids
Polunin, Ivan, 34 Shah, Nayan, 42
port, 11, 15, 32, 38, 164; food and the, 11, 30, shopping, 43, 80, 99, 142–43, 156; malls, 52–
107, 118, 120–21; food security and the, 17, 53, 74; as national pastime, 107, 109, 117;
22, 160; globalization and the, 6, 24–25, paraphernalia, 18, 30, 91, 99, 141
164; historic, 4, 18–20, 24–25, 41, 117; as a Singapore: agriculture and, 11, 17; demogra-
port city, 8, 11–12, 33, 116, 126; trade and phy of, 10, 15, 24–25, 31–34, 41; economy
the, 12, 15–16, 29–30, 89, 126 of 11; geography of 10, 22–23, 41
private space, 73–74, 164. See also public Singaporean Cookbook, 105
space Singaporean Family Cookbook, 110
Prosperity Toss. See Yusheng Singapore Botanic Gardens, 39–40
public health, 42, 54–57, 89–90 Singapore Girl, 144–45
public space, 40; boundaries with private, Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places,
81–82; memory and, 62, 67; regulation of, Food, 153
6, 57–58, 153–54, 158, 164. See also private Singapore International Airlines (SIA), 144,
space 159, 166. See also Singapore Girl
Purushotam, Nirmala, 82–83 Singapore 1:1 Island, 60–61
Singapore River, 14–15, 174n8
quaintspace, 71, 183n11 Singapore School, 6, 21
Singapore Sling. See alcohol
racial categories, 18, 44, 139–40 Singapore Tatler, 117, 133–35
racial harmony, 149–50, 166. See also multi- Singapore: The Next Lap, 181n35, 187n17
racialism Singapore Tourism Board (STB), 141–43,
Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 12, 16, 25–26, 41, 154–55, 159
174n15 Smith, Andrew F., 38
Raffles Hotel, 15, 26–28, 98 Soon, Rosalin: Grandmother’s Recipes: Tales
Raffles Hotel Cookbook, 94 from Two Peranakan Kitchens, 103
204  . inde x
Srinivas, Tulasi, 15 textbooks, 7, 68–70, 77–89, 165. See also
Stalnacker, Stan, 32 cookbooks; home economics
Stoler, Ann, 42 Three Legs Cooling Water, 130–31, 166
Stratton, Jon, 30, 129–30 tiffin, 27
street food: history and, 52–54, 72, 147, 150– toilets, 73–74, 164; and etiquette, 53–54
53; as home cooking, 72, 100, 165; viewed Towards an Understanding of Food and
from outside Singapore, 155–59. See also Cooking, 83–85
hawkers tradition, 36–38, 82–85, 94–97, 102–9, 113–14,
Syllabus for Domestic Science, 87 131–33
translated dishes, 142–43, 158
Tan, Christopher, 4–5, 112–14, 155 Tremewan, Christopher, 21
Tan, David, 109 Tully, Joyceline: Heritage Feasts: A Collection
Tan, Jiahui, 168–70 of Singaporean Family Recipes, 112–14
Tan, Kevin, 146
Tan Tai Yong, 12 vegetarianism, 1, 85
Tay, Leslie, 167 Verne, Jules, 29
Tay, Selina, 67–68
tea: black, 16, 35, 107, 152, 170; cup of, 80, water, 20, 22–23, 41–42, 161
126; green, 143; teatime, 127. See also after- Wee, C. J. W.-L., 28
noon tea; high tea; teh tarik Wei-Wei Yeo, 35, 67
tea equipment, 148, 152 wheat, 89–90
teh tarik, 168–70. See also tea Wong Yunn Chii, 60–61
Telok Ayer Market. See Lau Pa Sat
Temasek, 4, 104 Ya Kun Kaya Toast, 13, 35–37
Temasek Holdings, 170 Yu-Foo Yee Shoon, 111–12
Teo, Arron, 74–75 Yusheng, 23, 38
nicole tarulevicz is a lecturer in Asian Studies in the School
of Humanities at the University of Tasmania, Australia.
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