Singapore's snackscape (original) (raw)

Edible communities: How Singapore creates a nation of consumers for consumption

Journal of Consumer Culture, 2019

Scholars have noted the power of state-led discourse to create a national identity as an imagined community and have explicitly linked food to state-orchestrated narratives of nationhood. Others have described how a nation is constructed and maintained through everyday ‘banal nationalism’. This article combines the two to observe how state-led and everyday nationalisms are combined into a national promotional food narrative in order to attract travellers and the economic benefits they bring. Through thematic content analysis of all the food-related texts on the Singapore Tourism Board’s website this article uncovers dominant ideologies shaping tourism strategies aimed at driving consumption. Contrasting themes of heritage and innovation, unity and diversity, and local and international in food culture are presented to visitors, at the same time as defining the local people as consumers to further stimulate consumption. These findings drive analysis of how consumption may be depicted...

Singapore's Rising Hawkers: Food, Heritage, Imagination, and Entrepreneurship

Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 2021

This paper describes Singapore's food scene at hawker centres, open-air complexes with food stalls serving local food. Hawker centres illustrate how 'heritage' is being reimagined as familiar foods and old techniques are being transformed by changing palates and modern technology. The recent UNESCO inscription of hawker centres on the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list has led to international exposure and revived local interest. Called to preserve their 'community dining rooms', Singaporean youth have responded, setting up food stalls at hawker centres and bringing with them their business drive and tech skills. With modern production and marketing plans, these new hawkers include next generation hawkers who take on their family stall, professionally trained chefs, burned-out corporate workers, and others willing to enter the labour-intensive occupation. An entrepreneurial spirit leads, resulting in hawker entrepreneurs, or 'hawkerpreneurs', entrepreneurs that have turned to food vending.' The following analysis of these hawkerpreneurs is meant to open the discussion of how food, along with its preparation and marketing, is imagined as a 'living heritage', and what the UNESCO inscription means within this shifting context. The paper argues that the essence of heritage is conserved by these new hawkers, who now must be savvy in business, digital marketing, and social media. The research draws upon ethnographic observations of hawker centres (old and new), government material, historical documents, local media, and documentaries.

We Are What We Eat: The Evolution of Chinese Food in Singapore

BiblioAsia, 2022

This essay explores the distinctiveness of Chinese Singaporean culture through the lens of food. It highlights how Chinese hawker food in Singapore reflects the intermingling of different early Chinese migrant groups as well as the influence of other cultures.

Fluidity of places in everyday food consumption: Introducing snackscapes

International Journal of Consumer Studies, 2017

Snack consumption encompasses the repetitive habits of consumers in various everyday life spaces. Despite the pervasiveness of snack consumption worldwide, the phenomenon of snacking has not been given extensive attention, unlike other areas of food consumption research. Yet, snacking shows certain distinctive features, such as fluidity of places. This study leans on foodscape literature and introduces the concept of snackscape, which enables us to showcase the multiplicity of places in snacking culture. While prior foodscape studies are located in certain tangible places, such as urban surroundings, festival sites or particular geographical areas, snackscapes demonstrate how snacks may be consumed, for instance, on the move from one place to another, or in a variety of places that are not part of one's ordinary routines, such as on a picnic or a holiday trip to a foreign country. The findings show how places of habitual snack consumption vary from time to time—or are even on th...

A taste of the past: Uncovering food histories through Malayan newspapers

Research into local foodways often neglects the unusually rich minefield of data that newspapers offers. The digitization of local newspapers offers greater access to this invaluable resource for research into social history. The benefits and challenges of using newspapers in food research, particularly in unveiling the faces and flavours behind local street food, the evolution of particular dishes, their colloqialisation into place names and language are examined in this paper. A local condiment, belacan and a snack, curry puff as reported in Malayan English papers, are used as case studies to flesh out these issues.

Connotations of ephemeral spaces of consumption: a case study of Singapore’s Little India

2012

The practice of consumption is intrinsically integrated into our post-modern society and is fundamental in exercising, defining and re-defining people and group identity. Consumption occurs somewhere and somewhen it is a spatial activity, it is shaped by time and space. The site of this investigation, the touristic enclave of Little India, appears to hold a “distinct” culture of consumption within Singapore and ephemeral spaces of consumption that are continuously produced and re-produced everyday and every night seem to be essential for the distinctive behavior of consumers. This case study analyzes the processes of production, de-production, reproduction of the mentioned temporary spaces of consumption and their significance for a multicultural/multiethnic society.