This fascinating and insightful volume introduces readers to food as a window to the social and cultural history and geography of Singapore. It demonstrates how the food we consume, the ways in which we acquire and prepare it, the company we keep as we cook and eat, and our preferences and practices are all revealing of a larger economic, social, cultural and political world, both historically and in contemporary times. Readers will be captivated by chapters that deal with the intersections of food and ethnicity, gender and class, food hybridity, innovations and creativity, heritage and change, globalization and localization, and more. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Singapore culture and society.

Throwing new light on how colonisation and globalization have affected the food practices of different communities in Asia, the Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia explores the changes and variations in the region’s dishes, meals and ways of eating. By demonstrating the different methodologies and theoretical approaches employed by scholars, the contributions discuss everyday food practices in Asian cultures and provide a fascinating coverage of less common phenomenon, such as the practice of wood eating and the evolution of pufferfish eating in Japan. In doing so, the handbook not only covers a wide geographical area, including Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, India, China, South Korea and Malaysia, but also examines the Asian diasporic communities in Canada, the United States and Australia through five key themes: Food, Identity and Diasporic Communities Food Rites and Rituals Food and the Media Food and Health Food and State Matters. Interdisciplinary in nature, this handbook is a useful reference guide for students and scholars of anthropology, sociology and world history, in addition to food history, cultural studies and Asian studies in general.

The year 2019 marks Singapore's Bicentennial milestone since the arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles in Singapore in 1819. It was in anticipation of the arrival of the Bicentennial that this book, Beyond Bicentennial: Perspectives on Malays, was initiated. This book is a collection of articles from prominent individuals and academicians that touch not only on the 200 years since the arrival of Raffles, but goes back much earlier, 720 years earlier, when Sang Nila Utama first set foot on the island in 1299.This book hopes to heighten the readers' sense of history and to reflect upon how Singapore has journeyed over the last two centuries, witnessing the perseverance, trials, challenges, and efforts of Singaporeans, and to see how the nation has gone through a transformation from a feudal setting to a cosmopolitan and multi-racial society.Prior to this book, Majulah! 50 Years of Malay/Muslim Community in Singapore was published in 2016 when Singapore celebrated SG50 — an initiative launched to celebrate the nation's 50 years of independence. The book highlighted the progress, the contributions, and the challenges of the community for the past 50 years since Singapore's independence in 1965.Both books can be read hand-in-hand. While Majulah! 50 Years of Malay/Muslim Community in Singapore called on the community to reflect on the past and to look ahead, this book, Beyond Bicentennial: Perspectives on Malays, calls on readers to reflect and re-examine the position and contributions of the Malays to Singapore's history and its development, as Singapore commemorates its Bicentennial.Related Link(s)

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This book provides a critical assessment of key areas of urban scholarship. In twelve stimulating chapters, expert contributors examine a range of important pressing topics from sustainability and gentrification to feminist interventions and globalization to security and food issues. Six more regionally informed expert reviews examine recent urban research in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, East Asia, the Middle East, Australia and Eastern Europe. The chapters provide polemical assessments and signposts for future research. The book will be an indispensable and accessible guide to urban research across the globe.

Over the past two centuries, global commodity chains and industrial food processing systems have been built on an infrastructure of critical but often-overlooked facilities and technologies used to transport food and to convey knowledge about food. This culinary infrastructure comprises both material components (such as grain elevators, transportation networks, and marketplaces) and immaterial or embodied expressions of knowledge (cooking schools, restaurant guides, quality certifications, and health regulations). Although infrastructural failures can result in supply shortages and food contamination, the indirect consequences of infrastructure can be just as important in shaping the kinds of foods that are available to consumers and who will profit from the sale of those foods. This volume examines the historical development of a variety of infrastructural nodes and linkages, including refrigerated packing plants in Nazi-occupied Europe, trans-Atlantic restaurant labour markets, food safety technologies and discourses in Singapore, culinary programming in Canadian museums, and dietary studies in colonial Africa. By paying attention to control over facilities and technologies as well as the public–private balance over investment and regulation, the authors reveal global inequalities that arise from differential access to culinary infrastructure. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Food History.

In this book, contributors examine the many meanings of the term 'nomad' through the study of food habits. Food and beverage products have become just as nomadic as other objects, such as telephones and computers, whereas in the past only food and money were able to move about with their carriers. Food industries have seized control of this trend to make it the characteristic feature of consumption outside the home - always faster and more convenient, the just-in-time meal: 'what I want, when I want, where I want', snacks, finger food, and street food. The terms reveal the contemporary modernity and spread of food practices, but they are only modified versions of older and more uncommon forms of behavior. Mobility, in the sense of multiple forms of moving about using public or individual, and possibly intermodal, means of transport, on spatial scales and temporal rhythms which are frequent and recurring but variable, responding to professional or leisure needs, can serve as a basic premise in order to gain insight into the concept of food nomadism.

A uniquely powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent can also overwhelm previously constructed boundaries and transform social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. This innovative multidisciplinary volume critically examines olfaction in Asian societies with the goal of unlocking its full potential as an analytical frame and lived phenomenon. Featuring contributions from international scholars with deep knowledge of the region, this volume conceptualizes Asia and its borders as a dynamic, transnationally connected space of olfactory exchange. Using examples such as trade along the Silk Road; the diffusion of dharmic religious traditions out of South Asia; the waves of invasion, colonization, and forced relocation that shaped the history of the continent; and other “sensory highways” of contact, the contributors break down essentializing olfactory tropes and reveal how scent functions as a category of social and moral boundary-marking and boundary-breaching within, between, and beyond Asian societies. Smell shapes individual, collective, and state-based memory, as well as discourses about heritage and power. As such, it suggests a pervasive and powerful intimacy that contributes to our understanding of the human condition, mobility, and interconnection. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Khoo Gaik Cheng, Jean Duruz, Qian Jia, Shivani Kapoor, Adam Liebman, Lorenzo Marinucci, Peter Romaskiewicz, Saki Tanada, Aubrey Tang, and Ruth E. Toulson.

Cookbooks. Menus. Ingredients. Dishes. Pots. Kitchens. Markets. Museum exhibitions. These objects, representations, and environments are part of what the volume calls the material cultures of food. The book features leading scholars, professionals, and chefs who apply a material cultural perspective to consider two relatively unexplored questions: 1) What is the material culture of food? and 2) How are frameworks, concepts, and methods of material culture used in scholarly research and professional practice? This book acknowledges that materiality is historically and culturally specific (local), but also global, as food both transcends and collapses geographical and ideological borders. Contributors capture the malleability of food, its material environments and “stuff,” and its representations in media, museums, and marketing, while following food through cycles of production, circulation, and consumption. As many of the featured authors explore, food and its many material and immaterial manifestations not only reflect social issues, but also actively produce, preserve, and disrupt identities, communities, economic systems, and everyday social practices. The volume includes contributions from and interviews with a dynamic group of scholars, museum and information professionals, and chefs who represent diverse disciplines, such as communication studies, anthropology, history, American studies, folklore, and food studies.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food explores the relationship between food and literature in transnational contexts, serving as both an introduction and a guide to the field in terms of defining characteristics and development. Balancing a wide-reaching view of the long histories and preoccupations of literary food studies, with attentiveness to recent developments and shifts, the volume illuminates the aesthetic, cultural, political, and intellectual diversity of the representation of food and eating in literature.

With culinary nationalism defined as a process in flux, as opposed to the limited concept of national cuisine, the contributors of this book call for explicit critical comparisons of cases of culinary nationalism among Asian regions, with the intention of recognizing patterns of modern culinary development. As a result, the formation of modern cuisine is revealed to be a process that takes place around the world, in different forms and periods, and not exclusive to current Eurocentric models. Key themes include the historical legacies of imperialism/colonialism, nationalism, the Cold War, and global capitalism in Asian cuisines; internal culinary boundaries between genders, ethnicities, social classes, religious groups, and perceived traditions/modernities; and global contexts of Asian cuisines as both nationalist and internationalist enterprises, and "Asia" itself as a vibrant culinary imaginary. The book, which includes a foreword from Krishnendu Ray and an afterword from James L. Watson, sets out a fresh agenda for thinking about future food studies scholarship.