Abstract
Equitable access to healthy food is a critical challenge in urban Asia. Food safety governance promotes modern supermarkets over more traditional markets, but supermarkets are associated with unequal access to food. This study investigates how retail policies driven by food safety impact the diets of the urban poor in Hanoi, Vietnam. We do this by linking food retail infrastructures with the food shopping practices and measured dietary intake of 400 women. Our results reveal sub-optimal dietary diversity and reliance on foods sourced through traditional markets, which do not provide formal food safety guarantees. Modern channels supply formal food safety guarantees, but are mainly frequented for purchasing ultra-processed foods. The paper uncovers a conflicting duality governing food security and suggests that the public responsibility for ensuring access of the poor to nutritious and safe foods requires a more diverse retail policy approach.
Highlights
Equitable access to healthy food is a critical challenge in urban Asia
Our research focuses on Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, which serves as an illustration for comparable Asian contexts regarding the food and nutrition security implications of rapid urban population growth, food system transformations and subsequent nutrition transitions
We take a novel practice-oriented perspective by including the habitual nature of food consumption(45) and assessing how this is affected in a transforming food retail environment. Building on these social practice approaches to consumption, we explore the relation between the healthfulness(46) of the food retail environment and the dietary intake of
Summary
Equitable access to healthy food is a critical challenge in urban Asia. Food safety governance promotes modern supermarkets over more traditional markets, but supermarkets are associated with unequal access to food. Economic development, accelerated by the influx of foreign direct investment (FDI), has resulted in the supermarketization of food retail systems across Southeast Asia (SEA). This stimulates modern supermarket development at the expense of traditional food vending structures such as informal vending and wet markets. In Asia the replacement of formal wet markets by supermarkets has been demonstrated to exclude lower-income populations, as supermarkets are unaffordable, unfamiliar, or unwelcoming for them.(11) Inadvertently, the basic human right of access to safe and healthy food for all is being challenged. There is a knowledge gap on how, and to what extent, transformations in the retail food environment have practical implications for food choice and dietary intake among low-income consumers
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