Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam

330 Pages·2019·4.19 MB·English

by  Judith Ehlert

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
Editors
Judith Ehlert Nora Katharina Faltmann
Department of Development Studies Department of Development Studies
University of Vienna University of Vienna
Vienna, Austria Vienna, Austria
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
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Cover credit: Carina Maier
Published with the support of Austrian Science Fund (FWF): [PUB 506-Z29]
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To Carina,
for her clarity, critical thinking and cheerfulness
Acknowledgements
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.
vii
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.
Contents
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
ix
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 C oncluding Remarks: Anxiety as Invariant of Human
Relation to Food 301
Jean-Pierre Poulain
Notes on Contributors
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
xi