Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam

This open access book approaches the anxieties inherent in food consumption and production in Vietnam. The country’s rapid and recent economic integration into global agro-food systems and consumer markets spurred a new quality of food safety concerns, health issues and distrust in food distribution networks that have become increasingly obscured. This edited volume further puts the eating body centre stage by following how gendered body norms, food taboos, power structures and social differentiation shape people’s ambivalent relations with food. It uncovers Vietnam’s trajectories of agricultural modernisation against which consumers and producers manoeuvre amongst food self-sufficiency, security and abundance. Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam is explicitly about ‘dangerous’ food – regarding its materiality and meaning. It provides social science perspectives on anxieties related to food and surrounding discourses that travel between the local and the global, the individual and society and into the body. Therefore, the book’s lens of food anxiety matters for social theory and for understanding the embeddedness and discontinuities of food globalizations in Vietnam and beyond. Due to its rich empirical base, methodological approaches and thematic foci, it will appeal to scholars, practitioners and students alike.

Food Anxiety: Ambivalences around Body and Identity, Food Safety, and Security -- Part I – Bodily Transgressions: Identity, Othering, and Self -- 1 Power Struggles and Social Positioning: Culinary Appropriation and Anxiety in Colonial Vietnam -- 2 Forbidden from the Heart: Flexible Food Taboos, Ambiguous Culinary Transgressions, and Cultural Intimacy in Hoi An, Vietnam -- 3 Obesity, Biopower and Embodiment of Caring: Foodwork and Maternal Ambivalences in Ho Chi Minh City -- Part II – Food Safety: Trust, Responsibilisation, and Coping -- 4 Trust and Food Modernity in Vietnam -- 5 Between Food Safety Concerns and Responsibilisation: Organic Food Consumption in Ho Chi Minh City -- 6 Urban Gardening and Rural-Urban Supply Chains – Reassessing Images of the Urban and the Rural in Northern Vietnam -- Part III – The Politics of Food Security -- 7 From Food Crisis to Agrarian Crisis? Food Security Strategy and Rural Livelihoods in Vietnam -- 8 When Food Crosses Borders: Paradigm Shifts in China’s Food Sectors and Implications for Vietnam -- Conclusion.