Beer and Ice Cream in 20th-Century Singapore: Cold, Safe, and Healthy

Despite its contemporary moniker of the “air-conditioned nation,” the equatorial Southeast Asian island-nation of Singapore was slow to embrace cold storage and associated cold technologies. Cold drinks such as beer, and cold desserts particularly ice cream, were gateway commodities. Whilst these comestibles are not currently considered healthy foods, in the colonial era they were routinely advertised as such. Tropical heat was understood to pose a particular threat to colonial bodies, gustatory coldness could therefore provide health benefits. Blending ideas about health and cold took place as globally technology was profoundly changing what was eaten and how it tasted, yet consumers still had to be persuaded through advertising.

In tracing the slow establishment of cold storage, alongside efforts by drinks and dessert manufactures to persuade customers of the merits of their products, we can see how technologies and comestibles simultaneously shaped ideas about what was safe, healthy, and necessary. Beer and ice-cream offered fortification. The advertising for these products relied on assumptions about dietary inadequacy in Singapore caused by a paucity in local foods, and on ideas about the specific challenges of tropical environs. Fortified foods advertised their health-giving qualities, including vitamins and imported minerals. Nutritionism and new technologies thus coalesced to reflect ideas about food and health in colonial Singapore.

The clean and modern spaces of industrial production posited commercial beer and ice-cream in direct, consumed in reputable establishments or the home, in contrast to those sold by itinerant hawkers, and in carts and stalls. The tension between industrial manufacturing and informal production and sales was also reflected in practices of regulation, which looked to make the informal more like the industrial. Technologies of cold were thus entangled with industrial production and with new regimes of regulation that policed what was considered safe and healthy.