Imagined food safeties : an Australian cultural history

The ideas, practices, structures, and material artefacts of food safety have long and telling histories. While usually understood as natural and unchanging, food safety, this thesis argues, is cultural, shifting in time, and differing between places and peoples: it is the product of particular historical processes. This study examines the various ways understandings of food safety have manifested in Australian history.

People's beliefs and actions often diverge significantly from science. I am interested here in why and how we choose to eat - or not eat - what we do. I am interested in the anxieties people have around food and how these concerns are managed. The thesis explores relationships between individuals, private organisations, communities and governments in the production and dissemination of knowledge. It shows food safety in Australian history to be the product of global anxieties and discourses, as well as local conditions. It is not a story of Australian exceptionalism, but of consumption practices and choices that connect individuals to, and underpin, large historical forces and processes, such as imperialism, industrialisation and capitalism. It is a story of ideas of race, class and gender, including identity and the construction of national narratives. Food safety can tell us much about Australian culture.

This is, first and foremost, a study of representations and discourses exploring popular knowledges and norms. Source materials reflect this, with popular print media forming the body of evidence, including from advertisements, articles and letters in newspapers and other periodicals, to colonial travel accounts and prescriptive health literature, but also legislation, trade journals and government investigations. Structured temporally and thematically into overlapping time periods, the study begins with the arrival of print culture in Australia in the late 18th century and ends in the mid-1960s. Rather than an exhaustive study of food safety in Australian history, the thesis seeks to open up new avenues for research through case studies examining particular manifestations of food safety.

I begin by examining encounters of food in the contact zone of colonial Australia. Food itself was a contact zone, a method of communication, encouraging encounters and signalling boundaries of trust; but it also created and maintained distance and conflict between cultures. Turning to the international food systems supplying the 19th century Australian colonies, I argue that place of origin advertising was a semiotic device communicating culturally contingent meanings of food safety and quality to Australians. The problem of food adulteration in the period 1850s to c.1912 is explored alongside the introduction of Australia's first broad food safety laws. Here, the relationship between taste and safety demonstrates how discourses of empire, class and race coalesced around food products such as tea and beer, and remind us of the enmeshed nature of power operating at the intersection of the colonial state and capitalism. Functioning both materially and semiotically, packaging protected foods through the 19th and 20th centuries, increasingly streamlined production and transport, and allowed businesses to attach certain meanings to a product. Case studies demonstrate how food safety knowledges shifted, particularly in introducing changed sensory regimes and new food safety fears.

Emerging knowledges of germs and nutrition were not only scientific, but cultural too; utilised to reinforce social hierarchies of class, race and gender in the 20th century. Food safety was increasingly institutionalised through the implementation of regulations, manifesting in new food authorities, and in educational discourses and interventions. Commercially driven information was represented as objective scientific knowledge, and brands were framed as a guarantee of safety as companies sought trust and repeat sales. The study concludes by examining technologies of cold. If we accept cold technologies as a natural progression of food safety, then we miss critical elements of their development and cease to see them as the construction of capitalist concerns. Rather than necessities, ice and refrigeration were long perceived as luxuries in Australia.

The temperature of our refrigerators, the taste of our beer, and our breakfast choices are all socially produced and have histories deeply embedded in food safety. As a critical feature of daily life for people everywhere, food safety is more than its science and more than the physical experience of compromised food. Food safety shapes, and is shaped by, the lived experience of people everywhere, every day.