Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This introductory chapter to the edited volume puts food in Vietnam in global perspective in terms of agricultural development, food system modernisation, and socio-cultural relations, and conceptually outlines food anxiety as the book’s common lens. This lens proves central for understanding the ‘dangerous’ side of food as material matter and symbolic meaning. ‘Food anxiety’ uncovers the politico-economic context and the socio-cultural embeddedness of eating and the struggles of urban consumers and food producers with ambivalences around the security and quality of food, their bodily integrity and identity. From the perspective of critical development studies, this chapter opens up the following discussions around power and the inclusive and exclusive nature of food globalisations in local contexts.

Peters demonstrates that during the French colonial period in Vietnam, language about food revealed people’s anxieties about the changing social hierarchy. Contemporary advertisements, travel narratives, administrative reports, ethnographies, folktales, missionary correspondence, and newspaper editorials help illustrate how new food practices disrupted rigid social hierarchies, whether those hierarchies pre-dated the French arrival in Southeast Asia or emerged during the colonial period. Peters argues from this textual evidence that French people bore the most anxiety in the colonial environment: the French developed a cultural norm against eating local dishes, while other groups such as Chinese immigrants or the Vietnamese urban middle class appreciated opportunities to try previously unfamiliar foods. Generally, Peters argues that those aspiring to rise in society expressed more openness toward trying new ingredients and new dishes than those fearful of losing their social position.

, literally “forbidden [from the] heart”, is the term used in Vietnam when referring to taboos, yet the sense of complete prohibition associated with taboos in Western cultures is incompatible with Vietnamese food cosmology. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the central Vietnamese town of Hoi An since the late 1990s, this chapter follows the consumption of two kinds of meats that are publically condemned but may be consumed in specific contexts: he-goat meat () and “jungle” meat (). These meats are served in food venues that specialize in alcohol and are associated with excessive drinking, extreme masculinity, and illicit social relations. Michael Herzfeld’s notion of Cultural Intimacy is applied so as to explain the ambivalence and resulting anxieties, and their alleviation.

Child obesity is increasingly addressed as a public health problem in Vietnam and framed as one of the most severe food-related risks globally. By drawing on theories of the body and from the perspective of mothers feeding their children, this chapter stresses the ambivalences women face in their capacity of caring through food. It puts eating and feeding as subjective embodied experience in context by retracing how different authorities of biopower such as the public health sector, the food industry, and the family work on the bodies of mothers and children, admonishing and regulating food in concert with conflicting body ideals in children. Rather than obesity as supposed food-related risk number one, it is the complex struggle of ‘good motherhood’ that essentially drives women’s food-related anxiety.

The authors detail the deep transformation of the Vietnamese food system during the last decades, in relation with the industrialization of food production and the extension of the food market chains. The consequences are a growing food anxiety among consumers and an evolution in the process of trust building: the urban consumers still rely on their own know-how to keep their home as a safe place to eat as well as on their day-to-day personal relations with their usual retailers. But trust building has also evolved to include the trust in some stakeholders such as supermarkets rather than in public control. This diversity in the ways of building trust in food can be seen as a characteristic of modernity in emerging Asian economies.

This chapter analyses the motives behind emerging organic food consumption in urban Vietnam. By outlining the influences on Vietnam’s organic sector through corporate and foreign aid actors and a governmental emphasis on productivity-oriented agriculture and overall food security, it provides a wider frame to understand the space in which consumers of organic food manoeuvre. Contemporary concerns over the health implications of food safety, regarded as the externalities of a modernising local agri-food system, appear as a strong motivator for buying organic food. Moreover, organic food consumption proved to be telling of wider insecurities regarding the responsibility between individuals, state and market in providing safe food. With organic food being a high-priced niche, eating safe becomes an issue of widening social inequality.

This chapter explores the sites of production of what consumers in Vietnam perceive to be clean and safe vegetables, that is, urban gardens in Hanoi and rural areas. Adhering to the historical continuity of home gardens, the chapter identifies a semantic shift of gardens from aesthetics to utility in the light of food anxiety. Furthermore, the chapter examines the terms of access to and social control over public and sacred spaces used for gardening. Apart from urban gardening, urbanites draw on personal networks of rural-urban food supply to ensure food safety. The chapter suggests that the rural emerges as a signifier of safe foods based on the prevailing image of the countryside in Vietnam as the place of intimate social relations and contact with nature.

The global food crisis of 2007–2008 caused rice prices to skyrocket, raising fears among Vietnamese consumers and policymakers over long-term supplies of this key staple. In response, the Vietnamese government promulgated a new food security policy which promoted intensive rice agriculture and limited the cultivation of alternative crops. In this chapter, Gorman first explores how “food security” came to be defined by the Vietnamese state as the maximization of rice production, and then uses survey data to trace the impact of this output-oriented policy on rural communities. Drawing on critical theories of agrarian change, Gorman argues that this emphasis on rice monoculture has eroded the livelihoods of small farmers, driving many out of agriculture altogether and contributed to the concentration of land among large producers.

This chapter aims to provide a preliminary overview of the macro trends that are emerging in regard to Chinese food security strategy at the national level and the food preferences at the household level and its implications for Vietnam. Moving away from the traditional micro-perspective analysis which focuses on the economic, social, and environmental impacts of various forms of Chinese agro-capitalism, this chapter adopts a macro-perspective: examining how Vietnam fits into China’s new food security strategy as well as the shifting dietary preferences of Chinese consumers and its potential implications for Vietnam’s food sectors.

The question of ‘risk’ in food safety has become particularly important, for scholars and more widely. The risk paradigm focuses attention on health and tends to reject other dimensions. But contemporary crises cannot be reduced to the question of food safety; they interact with food security, food fraud, and social controversies. The concept of ‘compressed modernity’ has been proposed to account for the fact that what Europe experienced in two centuries took place in a mere two generations in some Asian countries. This chapter uses the perspectives of risk and anxiety to focus on complementary dimensions of the relation of the human being to food, allowing for a better understanding of contemporary food crises, and creating the conditions for a more global analysis.