Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam Edited by Judith Ehlert and Nora Katharina Faltmann Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam Judith Ehlert • Nora Katharina Faltmann Editors Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam ISBN 978-981-13-0742-3 ISBN 978-981-13-0743-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0743-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955436 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adapta- tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Carina Maier Published with the support of Austrian Science Fund (FWF): [PUB 506-Z29] This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Editors Judith Ehlert Department of Development Studies University of Vienna Vienna, Austria Nora Katharina Faltmann Department of Development Studies University of Vienna Vienna, Austria To Carina, for her clarity, critical thinking and cheerfulness vii This book would not have been possible without the generous support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Its funding of our research project ‘A Body-Political Approach to the Study of Food – Vietnam and the Global Transformations’ (P 27438) marked the beginning of insightful research on Food Anxieties in Vietnam – a hot and yet underexplored social phe- nomenon – and inspired the idea for this edited volume. Thanks to the financial support of the FWF, we were able to bring together academics from various areas of scholarship united in their passion for food issues and empirical contexts. With first draft in hand, the contributors to this book met in person for a writer’s workshop at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna in March 2017. This intensive workshop was crucial in terms of co-reviewing the drafts, thereby refining the book’s common thread of food anxiety and (hope- fully) turning it into a coherent volume. Besides creating linkages between the individual chapters, the face-to-face discussions also established the necessary demarcation of thematically related chapters while creating inspiring dialogue about the particularities of the different disciplinary backgrounds of the authors. This workshop format offered an innovative space for in-depth scholarly debates and networking and – most of all – we definitely cherished the fun! As our get-together was hosted at the ‘academic home’ of the editors, we would like to thank our colleagues at the Department for Development Studies at the University of Vienna. Acknowledgements viii Acknowledgements Thanks to Michaela Hochmuth for her crucial support in the early stages of the book idea through her thematic input, organisational help and overall contribution as a former research assistant on the project; Elke Christiansen for her great photographs of the workshop and Ines Höckner for the workshop documentation. We particularly want to thank head of department Petra Dannecker for her support throughout the book’s gen- esis and her feedback on earlier drafts of the introduction (and especially for constantly pushing us to keep our own deadlines). After the workshop, a couple of feedback loops on the drafts followed, before putting it all together in this edited volume. Thank you, Andrea Kremser, for the great work copy-editing the – at some point chaotic – script and for your flexibility, patience and attentive eye. Thanks to Joshua Pitt and Sophie Li at Palgrave/Springer Nature, who supported the pro- cess from proposal to reviews and final publication with reassuring ease. Also, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and posi- tively challenging comments at an early stage of the proposal, which undoubtedly helped to sharpen our concept ideas. The biggest ‘thank you’ goes to Carina Maier. She has accompanied the whole process of the book from the workshop to manuscript submission as an undeniable organisational talent and reliable contact person for the book contributors and publishing house. Besides her resilience in putting up with all things bureaucratic, she has also provided the much appreci- ated analytical input and critical clarity at numerous stages of the book. We are also grateful for her photography skills, which produced the cover image of this book, the outcome of a joint motorbike trip through Ho Chi Minh City’s back alleys. Carina always saw the bigger picture behind this project and cheerfully encouraged us in this endeavour of editorship. Finally, the completion of this edited volume would also not have been possible without the great patience and support of our families and part- ners giving us the necessary grounding, rest and good food for bringing this project to an end. ix 1 Food Anxiety: Ambivalences Around Body and Identity, Food Safety, and Security 1 Judith Ehlert and Nora Katharina Faltmann Part I Bodily Transgressions: Identity, Othering, and Self 41 2 Power Struggles and Social Positioning: Culinary Appropriation and Anxiety in Colonial Vietnam 43 Erica J. Peters 3 Forbidden from the Heart: Flexible Food Taboos, Ambiguous Culinary Transgressions, and Cultural Intimacy in Hoi An, Vietnam 77 Nir Avieli 4 Obesity, Biopower, and Embodiment of Caring: Foodwork and Maternal Ambivalences in Ho Chi Minh City 105 Judith Ehlert Contents x Contents Part II Food Safety: Trust, Responsibilisation, and Coping 137 5 Trust and Food Modernity in Vietnam 139 Muriel Figuié, Paule Moustier, Nicolas Bricas, and Nguyen Thi Tan Loc 6 Between Food Safety Concerns and Responsibilisation: Organic Food Consumption in Ho Chi Minh City 167 Nora Katharina Faltmann 7 Urban Gardening and Rural-Urban Supply Chains: Reassessing Images of the Urban and the Rural in Northern Vietnam 205 Sandra Kurfürst Part III The Politics of Food Security 233 8 From Food Crisis to Agrarian Crisis? Food Security Strategy and Rural Livelihoods in Vietnam 235 Timothy Gorman 9 When Food Crosses Borders: Paradigm Shifts in China’s Food Sectors and Implications for Vietnam 267 Hongzhou Zhang 10 Concluding Remarks: Anxiety as Invariant of Human Relation to Food 301 Jean-Pierre Poulain xi Nir Avieli holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and is working as a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is mainly interested in Vietnamese cuisine in its various guises, focusing on several relations of food and tourism, food and gender, and so on. He has been conducting anthropological fieldwork in the central Vietnamese town of Hoi An since 1998. Nicolas Bricas holds a degree in socioeconomics and is working at CIRAD (Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement) in Montpellier, France. His research focuses on food security, food safety and sustainable food systems. He is the director of the UNESCO World Food Systems Chair based in Montpellier. Judith Ehlert is a sociologist and holds a PhD in Development Studies. She works as a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. She is the leader of the research project ‘A Body-Political Approach to the Study of Food – Vietnam and the Global Transformations’ funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Her main research interest lies in food sociology, body theories, knowledge and qualitative research methodologies. Nora Katharina Faltmann is a PhD candidate in development studies at the University of Vienna and a member of the scientific staff of the research project ‘A Body-Political Approach to the Study of Food – Vietnam and the Global Notes on Contributors xii Notes on Contributors Transformations’. Her areas of research interest include food studies from production to consumption and food safety in connection to questions of social inequality. Muriel Figuié holds a PhD in Sociology and is working at CIRAD in Montpellier, France. Her interests lie in food sociology and sociology of risk in relation to animals (meat consumption, zoonosis). She conducts research mainly in Southern countries (Asia, Southern Africa) focusing on health concerns, and trust-building in the context of globalisation. Timothy Gorman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and conducts research on agrarian transformations, climate change and food security in Southeast Asia. His dissertation fieldwork in Vietnam was supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Rural Sociological Society, and USAID’s Borlaug Global Food Security program. In the fall of 2018, he will be joining the faculty of Montclair State University, USA, as Assistant Professor of Sociology. Sandra Kurfürst is Junior Professor of Cross-Cultural and Urban Communication at the Global South Studies Centre (GSSC), University of Cologne, Germany. Her research focuses on urbanism, development and media and communication in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, and the Pearl River Delta. Paule Moustier holds a PhD in Agricultural Economy and is working at CIRAD in Montpellier, France, where she is in charge of the MOISA (Markets, Organisations, Institutions and Stakeholders’ Strategies) research unit. Her research focuses on the organisation and performance of food chains supplying African and Asian cities. Nguyen Thi Tan Loc holds a PhD in Economics and is working at the Fruit and Vegetable Institute of Hanoi (Favri), member of Malica consortium. She has been working on the changes in food consumption and marketing in Hanoi for the last 15 years and is now in charge of the Economics and Marketing Department of Favri. Erica J. Peters holds a PhD in History and is working as an independent food historian. She is Director of the Culinary Historians of Northern California. She received her graduate degree in history at the University of Chicago and is the author of Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century and San Francisco: A Food Biography . Her research interests are food history and French colonial history. xiii Notes on Contributors Jean-Pierre Poulain is a sociologist and anthropologist and holds the profes- sorship of Food Studies: Food, Cultures and Health jointly set up by the University of Toulouse, France and Taylor’s University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He conducts research on the links between food, cultures and health and is interested in food decisions and the transformation of food cultures and food habits. Hongzhou Zhang is a research fellow with the China Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His main research interests include China and regional resources security (food, water and energy), China’s fishing policies and mari- time security. xv Fig. 2.1 Map of French Indochina. (Source: Peters (2012, 24). Reprinted by permission of AltaMira Press) 47 Fig. 7.1 Private appropriation of the sidewalk in Bă ́ c T ừ Liêm. (Copyright to image: Sandra Kurfürst) 214 Fig. 7.2 Gardening in Chuà Láng (Láng Pagoda). (Copyright to image: Sandra Kurfürst) 216 Fig. 8.1 Rice production and undernourishment in Vietnam, 1991– 2014. (Source: Food and Agriculture Organization (2017)) 241 Fig. 8.2 Location of Ba ̣ c Liêu province in Vietnam. (Source: Generated by author using shapefile from the GADM Database of Global Administrative Areas, Version 2.8 (http://www.gadm. org). Used with permission by Robert J. Hijmans, database developer) 251 Fig. 8.3 Rice output and cropped area, Ba ̣ c Liêu province, 1996–2014. (Source: http://fsiu.mard.gov.vn/data/trongtrot.htm) 252 Fig. 8.4 Farmed shrimp production and area under aquaculture, Ba ̣ c Liêu province, 1996–2010. (Source: http://www.gso.gov.vn/ default_en.aspx?tabid=469) 252 Fig. 8.5 Land-use map of Ba ̣ c Liêu province with district names and case study site (Hòa Bình). (Source: Generated by author using shapefile from the GADM Database of Global Administrative Areas, Version 2.8 (http://www.gadm.org). Used with permis- sion by Robert J. Hijmans, database developer) 254 List of Figures xvi List of Figures Fig. 8.6 Changing class structure in Hòa Bình village. (Source: 2001 survey data collected by Tran Thi Ut (2004); 2014 data collected by author) 256 Fig. 8.7 Gini coefficients for land and income, Hòa Bình Village. (Gini coefficients calculated using ineqdec0 module in Stata, weighted by household size). (Source: 2001 survey data collected by Tran Thi Ut (2004); 2014 data collected by author) 258 xvii Table 5.1 List of the consumers’ surveys conducted by the MALICA consortium and quoted in this chapter 141 Table 9.1 China’s annual grain production and imports 270 Table 9.2 China’s grain production and demand forecasts by different organizations 270 Table 9.3 Trend in per capita consumption of major food products of China (kg) 276 Table 9.4 China’s minimum grain purchase price for rice and wheat (RMB/kg) 279 Table 9.5 China and Vietnam agricultural trade (USD million) 281 Table 9.6 China’s rice imports and smuggling 284 List of Tables xix List of Boxes Box 5.1 Prominent Trends That Will Shape the Growth of Vietnam’s Modern Retail Sector over the Next Few Years, According to US Department of Agriculture (USDA 2013) 147 Box 5.2 “Toxic Chinese Apple”, the Socio-cultural Dimension of Food Anxiety 152 1 © The Author(s) 2019 J. Ehlert, N. K. Faltmann (eds.), Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0743-0_1 1 Food Anxiety: Ambivalences Around Body and Identity, Food Safety, and Security Judith Ehlert and Nora Katharina Faltmann Imagine wandering around an open food market, tempted to satiate your appetite with something fresh and delicious. You come across a market vendor who displays a large pile of something on a silver tray. Given the view of a throng of curvy-shaped knotty things, you are puzzled to distin- guish the actual boundaries between these nearly transparent objects. Only at second look, this bunch turns out to be a catch of dead shrimps with their visceral organs shining through, some with their heads torn off, some with intact bodies. Meanwhile a range of scents is in the air, some appetising, others perhaps more alien. Imagine being the viewer of this scene, what does it arouse in you? Depending on your perspective— eating habits and socio-cultural background, current sensation of hunger, perception of the quality, or knowledge of the surroundings—either delight or disgust. This book is explicitly about such ambivalences of food ranging between delight and disgust. The described scenario could evoke anxiety in the viewer while others might be drawn to the food in question. At the J. Ehlert ( * ) • N. K. Faltmann Department of Development Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: judith.ehlert@univie.ac.at; nora.faltmann@univie.ac.at 2 same time, the scenario hints at the split seconds in which humans make something out as edible or not. According to the ‘omnivore’s paradox’, human food consumption is navigated between the sheer abundance of things that could be eaten physiologically but are constrained by the social and cultural norms that define food and produce as edible or ined- ible, as symbolically enhanced or contaminated in the first place (Rozin 1976; Fischler 1988). Moreover, the categorisation of ‘edible’/‘inedible’ is historically rooted in peoples’ trial and error experiments with potentially harmful substances (Rozin 1976; Fischler 1988). Food can make you sick or keep you healthy, can leave you overindulged or hungry, can nurture social belonging but can also blatantly expose social exclusion. Historical and socio-cultural experiences, norms and discourses around material and symbolic quality can then mark food as pure or dangerous, and as friend or foe by the same token. This ambivalent nature of eating lies at the very heart of the human encounter with food as both matter and meaning and constitutes the lynchpin of this volume. Whereas food is already amply discussed in terms of culinary ‘delight’ by putting at centre stage the role of food allocation in the creation and maintenance of social relationships, commensality, and cohesion, 1 this book rather engages with the conflictive externalities and local embed- dedness of a globalised agri-food system, namely by bringing eating in Vietnam into perspective. The ambivalent and potentially disturbing nature that food can have is reflected in this volume’s cover image 2 : pho- tographed at an open market in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), with the depicted shrimps exemplifying the interconnectedness of global food sys- tems and their embeddedness in Vietnam. With its cultivation at times competing with less lucrative rice growing, and subject to food safety concerns and as regimented item in global trade, shrimp commodity chains symbolise the complexity of global food trade. Vietnam proves to be an excellent case to depict the diverse facets of food ambivalence given the country’s historical context and compressed integration into global (food) markets. Its past—and in parts current— experience of food scarcity and hunger has created challenges of how to meaningfully manoeuvre in a context of emerging food abundance. Against this dynamic background in (urban) Vietnam, people’s bodily integrity and identity, gendered and class-based consumption, and J. Ehlert and N. K. Faltmann 3 concerns of food safety and security all touch upon—in one way or another—the ambiguous nature of food itself, and also indicate disconti- nuities of broader social transformations. Food anxiety is the book’s common lens through which such ambigui- ties are considered. The very act of incorporating food constitutes the moment and the process in which materially and culturally transformed matter crosses the boundary of the body, thereby dissolving the dichot- omy between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between the self and the world (Fischler 1988, 279). In this understanding, boundaries are crossed at various scales, connecting but also disconnecting the eating body with the multiple contexts it lives in. It is exactly the linking and disrupting quality of foodstuff—a food’s transgressive capacity (Goodman and Sage 2014)—that accounts for its ambivalent nature and makes us speak of ‘food anxiety’. Therein, we understand the lens of food anxiety as consti- tutive for unravelling social theoretical insights into the relationship between the individual and society. 3 What we observe in the vast field of food-related literature is that ‘food anxiety’ is more often than not used without further conceptual explanation or becomes boiled down to para- mount incidences of food scandals. 4 We argue that ‘food anxiety’ has more to offer than being a descriptive term for the emotional and institu- tional management of food safety risks, as we will detail below. This vol- ume brings together authors from various disciplines and while their contributions are united in that they all deal with dimensions of food anxiety in Vietnam, the authors follow their own distinct methodological and theoretical approaches to food. Likewise, this introductory chapter should be seen as one , namely the editors’ interpretation of what follows in the outline of the book parts. By applying our lens of food anxiety, we will frame the three thematic dimensions along which the book is organ- ised: ‘Bodily Transgressions: Identity, Othering, and Self ’ (Part I), ‘Food Safety: Trust, Responsibilisation, and Coping’ (Part II), and ‘The Politics of Food Security’ (Part III). When it came to naming this edited volume, food anxiety as the con- tributions’ mutual lens quickly asserted itself into the title. Since all con- tributions focus on Vietnam, adding the country’s name was also an easy decision. But then it took multiple attempts of testing the conceptual sound of ‘Vietnam and beyond’ and the like to finally come down with Food Anxiety: Ambivalences Around Body and Identity, Food... 4 what is now the title of this book: Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam . In hindsight, the title seems almost inevitable as this book is not about a country and beyond but rather about the (globalising) dynamics of beyond in Vietnam. Bringing in our own perspective from the field of critical development studies, we find it important to stress the ‘dynamics of beyond’. In the (food studies) literature we observe that the mentioned strong focus on the quality of food is very often connected with the Global North. It is, sometimes indirectly, sometimes more overtly assumed that ‘the consumer’ in the Global North is most concerned with quality and safety due to the food abundance provided by a modernised (agri-)food system. Thus, consumers in the Global North are presented as constantly calculating risks in their daily endeavour to eat clean and healthy food, whereas lack of food access—even though a social reality for many 5 —is much less discussed. By contrast, the Global South is gen- eralised as struggling with not having enough to eat and set as an umbrella term essentialising deficiencies more generally. Yet, we find it more fruit- ful to contextualise such ‘food struggles’ along the lines of class, gender, and race and as symptoms of locally embedded capitalist structures bound up in the complex web of historical food trajectories. Besides the editors’ innate interest in such dynamics around food availability and consumerism in Vietnam motivating the compilation of this edited vol- ume, there was also a desire to contribute to literature given the relative paucity of existing research on this topic. Particularly from multidisci- plinary angles, the area of food and anxiety in a wider sense has not yet received the academic attention that we believe it deserves in order to understand societal relations and transformations in Vietnam. Therefore, the twofold aim of this book is to contribute to research on the field of food in Vietnam as well as on phenomena of food anxiety more broadly. Having made this point, it will become apparent throughout much of this book that many forms of food anxiety in current-day globalising Vietnam cannot be understood without the context of the country’s rapid and recent economic integration into global agri-food systems and con- sumer markets. Therefore, we want to begin with examining the trajecto- ries of the globalised agri-food system that Vietnam has grown to be increasingly intertwined with. We will then sharpen the lens of food anxi- ety conceptually. By portraying the book’s contributions and the way J. Ehlert and N. K. Faltmann