Seeing and Knowing: Sourcing Safe Food in Zhejiang

Caroline Merrifield

doi:10.1177/1868102620920124

Abstract

At a farm-to-table restaurant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, high-quality food is sourced through direct relationships between restaurant staff and trusted rural suppliers. The restaurant is part of China’s growing food movement, and it shares this core principle of direct purchasing with other movement projects nationwide. At the same time, as the state responds to public anxieties over food safety, it has taken a “transparency” approach, emphasising “traceability” from field to tongue. Although such an approach may seem to follow similar logic to direct purchasing in the food movement, these two ways of pursuing safety are radically distinct. Drawing on evidence from the Hangzhou restaurant’s procurement system and Zhejiang’s “Sunshine Kitchen” food safety policies, I find that state responses to the food safety crisis misrecognise underlying moral-economic problems. By contrast, the restaurant’s farm-to-table purchasing system holds out a compelling model for (re)fashioning forms of moral consensus between growers and eaters of food.

Highlights

Over the decade since the spectacular eruption of the melamine milk scandal in 2008 (Ingelfinger, 2008; Xin and Stone, 2008; Xiu and Klein, 2010), food safety problems have been a constant topic of public concern in China (Yang, 2013)
Consumers are especially worried about the forms of deliberate “faking” and adulteration that made the milk scandal so disturbing (Gong and Jackson, 2012; Liu et al, 2014; Veeck et al, 2015)
President Xi Jinping bluntly summed up the situation in an address to the Central Conference on Rural Work in 2013: Food safety has a high degree of social attention, with a low burning point for public opinion

Summary

Introduction

Over the decade since the spectacular eruption of the melamine milk scandal in 2008 (Ingelfinger, 2008; Xin and Stone, 2008; Xiu and Klein, 2010), food safety problems have been a constant topic of public concern in China (Yang, 2013). I draw on evidence from state policy and food movement activities in Zhejiang Province and Beijing to consider two modes of managing persistent food safety problems in China.

Results

Conclusion