Negotiating Unsustainable Food Transformations: Development, Middle Classes and Everyday Food Practices in Vietnam

Arve Hansen

doi:10.1057/s41287-021-00429-6

Abstract

Amidst calls for making food systems more sustainable, new unsustainable food transformations unfold alongside economic development. Explanations for unsustainable food transformations in emerging economies vary greatly, but there is widespread agreement that demand from new middle classes play a crucial role. Yet this demand is to a large extent co-created by systems of provision, and middle-class consumers are constantly navigating food transformations in a search for healthy and safe food. Focusing on Vietnam’s dramatic food transformations, and combining attention to the political economy of food with a social practice approach to consumption, the paper zooms in on the how middle-class households in Hanoi negotiate the rapid transformations of food systems and food environments. The paper concludes that new thinking on sustainable food systems is urgently needed and argues that vital insights can be gained by studying food practices and their interaction with everyday geographies of consumption.

Highlights

That the world is facing a dramatic ‘triple crisis of malnutrition’ has been well established, with undernutrition, micro-nutrient deficiencies and overnutrition coexisting, often within the same country
Poverty and food supply remain the main focus, all forms of malnutrition are discussed as sustainable development challenges (FAO et al 2018, 2019; World Bank 2019; Swinburn et al 2019; Reisch and Gwozdz 2019)
Scholars have pointed towards the ‘corporate food regime’ (McMichael 2013), the spreading of the ‘industrial grain-livestock complex’ (Weis 2007, 2013) or capitalism’s dependence on ‘cheap food’ (Moore 2015) as central, where the ‘world food economy’ sees increasing concentration of power over food (Clapp 2016), and capitalist logics favour industrialised agriculture and fast and highly processed food, to the detriment of people, animals and the environment (Weis 2013). Both in development and nutrition research, much attention is given to the changing diets of new middle classes in emerging economies

Summary

Introduction

That the world is facing a dramatic ‘triple crisis of malnutrition’ has been well established, with undernutrition, micro-nutrient deficiencies and overnutrition coexisting, often within the same country. The fact that low- and middle-income countries are facing significant overnutrition challenges, combined with the environmental impacts of changing diets (Poore and Nemecek 2018), has led to a necessary broadening of the focus on food in global development and sustainability agendas.

Results

Conclusion