Colonial Anxieties about Meat in Singapore, 1890s–1910s

Abstract Meat mattered in the British Empire, reflecting both ideas about cultural and nutritional status and anxieties about safety, quality, and supply. Animals and their flesh persevered in various forms, circulated in complicated ways across the empire, as did ideas about meat. Singapore, the tropical Southeast Asian city-state, was an important trading port, and one that relied on global markets for meat supplies and for circulating ideas about food safety. By the early twentieth century, newspaper readers in Singapore were very familiar with international food scandals. The publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1905, and the ensuing exposes of the American meat-packing industry, generated hundreds of newspaper columns in Singaporean publications. Canned foods, but especially meat, was at the intersection of anxiety about industrial food production and tropical necessity. The anxiety about the safety of food was discursively globalized, as were the responses, and we can trace elements of both the regulatory and legislative responses in Singapore to The Jungle in some complex ways. Doing so we see that imperial anxieties about food safety reveal influences broader than those of empire, and illustrate how imperialisms are entangled and overlap.