Discursively globalized: Singapore and food safety

Food safety knowledge is created, validated, disseminated, and acted upon. It is conflicted, contextual, and contingent. The technology has a history, the knowledge has a history, and how everyday people interact with food safety ideas has a history. Taking three historical examples from Singapore – pure food advertising; anxiety about botulism; and the prohibition of saccharin – this paper suggests that food safety helps us reposition food and globalization. Singapore was, and still is, a step in a long supply chain of comestibles that pass into and through the port, in which the identity and location of the producers is obscured by distance, value adding, and the complexities of global trade. With its early engagement with globalization, Singapore also provides a counter to the view that it is only the contemporary iteration of globalization, with its long supply chains, technologies and the media coverage of these, which makes food both unsafe and feared in the twenty-first century. Drawing on Frederick Cooper’s critique of globalization, this paper looks at the way that knowledge and anxieties about food safety in Singapore were informed by international media coverage to suggest that they were discursively globalized