Virtual "Food Studies" Seminar Series

The Finest Obtainable? American Food and Drink in Colonial Singapore

^{Wednesday, 5 August 2026}

Singapore’s potential as a trading hub was recognised very early by the United States, as evidenced by the establishment of a consular presence. Individual travellers and officials could see the potential of Singapore as a market and as stepping stone to other regional markets, but it was a slow process establishing American products in Singapore. Success required negotiating the colonial context in terms of bureaucracy, importers who gave preferential treatment to British goods, and consumers who had allegiance to familiar European and British brands. But it also required negotiating the colonial context of race and class, which different companies and products managed with varied levels of success. There were many more Coolies than colonial elites, but they had less to spend. Working out who should be targeted and what should be sold was thus a complex equation. The quality of American goods also varied. Consumers were doing their own negotiating – of price, safety, and desirability. Yet some American goods – cold storage, domestic refrigeration, and alcohol – profoundly shaped colonial desires. America’s relationship with Singapore is obviously nowhere near as dominant as Britain’s, but in the empty milk, soup and sardine cans and the failed sales of chewing gum, and rye whisky cocktails, we can see a more complex story about the gustatory and consumptive practices in a major British empire port.

From the Sacred to the Profane? Pinot Priests, Pilgrims and Palooza

^{Wednesday, 1 July 2026}

The production and consumption of wine has long been associated with explicit religion, from Dionysus to the communion wines of varied Christian orders. Indeed, the production of fine wine – in particular Pinot Noir, a highly terroir-sensitive varietal – is seen to originate, historically and genealogically (Appadurai 1996), with the development of Burgundian climat (small, empirically terroir-delineated parcels of land) by 10th-11th century Cistercian monks and later with Dom Pierre Perignon’s, a Benedictine monk from Hautvillers, Champagne, ‘Golden Rules of Winemaking’ published in 1718. The rise of modern secularism has witnessed the significant truncation of explicit religions, with Durkheim (2001 [1912]), Bailey (1982), Latour (2010) and others arguing a correlated increase in implicitly religious beliefs and practices. A number of intersecting modalities, including sovereign individualism and the exaltation of scientific rationalism, are widely associated with implicit religion/religiosity and these find variegated resonance in contemporary Pinot Noir production and consumption. In this presentation I explore these resonances before briefly considering how current sociological wine scholarship is seduced by ‘methodological statusism’.