What we eat may be a signifier of identity – religious, ethnic, class - or location – temporal or geographic. Comestibles are used to police the borders of race and gender. Food allows us to see how other categories of knowledge are defined too. In this panel we use food to think about categories such as edibility, desirability, safety, and health. Taking as her case study siri and pinang (betel leaf and nut), Kathleen Burke prompts us to rethink the concept of edibility. Betel leaves and nuts are masticated and in early modern Indonesia the Dutch who encountered it dismissed the practice as chewing rather than eating. In denying the consumption and edibility of betel Burke suggests that the Dutch were also denying the status of its consumers, specifically Indonesian and enslaved women who used siri and pinang in their role as healers, creators and narrators of knowledge about the human and non-human world. Rethinking what counts as food, allows us to rethink what counts more broadly. Beyond edibility, food can be desirable or not. Taking sechium edule (choko) as her example Alison Vincent traces the history of this Jamaican plant in Australia to show how desirability was constructed. Introduced by the Queensland Acclimatisation Society, choko was heralded as a commercial crop but despite favorable conditions and attempts to integrate it into British-inspired recipes, it did not succeed. The choko found favor as domestic produce in mid-century Australia where its blandness allowed it to be vegetable or fruit, bulking out other produce. By the 1970s it was out of fashion, and Vincent reveals how the journey of this plant reflects the changing tastes of a nation. Nicole Tarulevicz explores the intersections between cold technologies and the ideas about safety and health that consequently developed in colonial Singapore. Commodities like beer and ice-cream provided a temporary solution to the problem of tropical heat, which was believed to threaten colonial well-being. These commodities were fortified with nutrients that were also thought to be lacking in local foods. Cold food and drink blurred ideas about safety and health because if not carefully prepared they could also be vectors of disease. Tarulevicz demonstrates that new technologies became entangled with industrial production and new regimes of regulation, which in turn constructed new ideas of what was safe and healthy. Health also came to mean eating less, or not eating. Using the iconic Australian Women’s Weekly magazine as her focus, Lauren Samuelsson shows how this bastion of mainstream media shaped ideas about what food was ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Australia’s most popular women’s magazine did not simply showcase desirable bodies, it shared its readers advice about dieting, disseminating self-reported diets and strategies alongside recipes and dieting articles. In teaching Australian women how to prepare and consume specific foods, Samuelsson shows how the Weekly shaped Australian ideas about what was healthy. Asking what is food, what is delicious, what is safe, what is healthy, prompts us to ask questions of the past that continue to shape lived experiences.