Java Coffee, French Sardines and Malaga Raisins: Marketing Place in Colonial Australian Food Culture

Abstract

Abstract In nineteenth-century colonial Australian newspapers, foods were commonly identified by their place of origin. Advertisements spoke of global networks and exchanges, listing Scotch herring, Mauritius sugar, Ceylon coffee, Valencia raisins, and so forth. Disparate places were connected in newspaper advertisements and on the plates of Australian colonists. There is a substantial body of literature concerned with place of origin advertising, yet the historical roots of this phenomena have received less attention, particularly in relation to colonial food chains. Place of origin advertising was a semiotic device, a trustmark, communicating culturally contingent meanings of food safety and quality. Trustmarks were shortcuts that helped to make sense of complex food systems. Burgeoning global and industrialized food chains fed Australia in the nineteenth century, circulating goods and ideas through and beyond the networks of empire; place marketing inferred transparency and connectivity of supply chains. Using case studies of fish, coffee, and dried fruits, this article demonstrates how place labeling spoke to Australians about potential concerns around labor, class, race, culinary hierarchies, and new technologies. Discursive sources shaped “imaginative geographies,” which, accurately or not, likely informed ideas of food quality. Places attached to foods meant something to the nineteenth-century consumer, and by examining potential meanings, we can better understand how ideas of places and people informed Australian food choices.