Moral Economies of Food in Contemporary China

Mikkel Bunkenborg,Anders Sybrandt Hansen

doi:10.1177/1868102620919204

Mikkel Bunkenborg, Anders Sybrandt Hansen

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1868102620919204

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Abstract

Moral Economies of Food in Contemporary China

Highlights

Introduction to the ArticlesWe begin in urban Shanghai with Ingrid Fihl’s article “Risky eating: Shanghai families’ strategies to acquire safe food in everyday life.” Through ethnographic fieldwork in the markets, the kitchens, and the online groups frequented by middle-class Shanghai families, the article introduces us to a range of different responses to the problem of distrust in food on the conventional market
Moving beyond the usual parameters for discussions of morality and food in China, we suggest that the oft-decried absence of morality most likely springs from the co-existence of many moralities and that the concept of moral economies might be retrofitted as a tool for analysing the multiple ethical repertoires that are brought to connect and clash in the production, distribution, and consumption of food
The reporter purchased tomatoes, carrots, and celery carrying the government-authorised organic label, and used her mobile phone to scan the Quick Response (QR) codes on each product, revealing their ostensible place of origin to be a farm in a village in Longwantun Township, sixty kilometres north of Beijing City

Summary

Moral Economies of Food in Contemporary China

This themed issue examines morality through the medium of food. In the sociology and anthropology of China, morality has become a prominent topic in recent years along with claims that contemporary Chinese society is troubled by a pervasive sense of moral crisis (Feuchtwang and Bruckermann, 2016: 31). The reporter purchased tomatoes, carrots, and celery carrying the government-authorised organic label, and used her mobile phone to scan the Quick Response (QR) codes on each product, revealing their ostensible place of origin to be a farm in a village in Longwantun Township, sixty kilometres north of Beijing City When she subsequently visited this farm, she could not locate any vegetable plots matching what she had bought at the supermarket. Things go awry at every link in the food supply chain – production, certification, repackaging, and retail (cf Kjærnes, 2013) – and the viewer may add fake organic food as one more case in the seemingly endless series of food safety incidents that China has suffered in recent years Beneath each of these periodic scares is a constant suspicion that producers are using pesticides, herbicides, and hormones in ways that make their products unfit for human consumption. In Luhmann’s terms, we may understand this historical development as a mass movement away from the familiar – familiar foods and people – and unto a proliferation of interactions between strangers through the medium of food, hereby establishing the centrality of the problem of trust

Strangers and Their Food

Relational Morality

Moral Economies

Introduction to the Articles