Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-qdpjg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-16T21:20:37.906Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Everyday Approaches to Food Safety in Kunming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2013

Jakob A. Klein
Jakob A. Klein*
Affiliation:
SOAS, University of London. Email: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The article explores how people in Kunming have interpreted and acted upon food-related environmental health threats, particularly within the contexts of everyday food shopping. It is argued that an increasingly intensified, delocalized food supply system and a state-led emphasis on individual responsibility and choice have produced growing uncertainties about food. However, the article takes issue with the claim that new forms of risk and institutional changes have produced “individualized” responses, arguing that many of the practices Kunmingers have developed to handle food-related risks and their understandings of what constitutes “safe” food have been developed within the frameworks of family ties and regional cuisine. Further, shoppers and purveyors of food have forged new ties of trust and re-emphasized connections between people, food and place. Nevertheless, concerns about the food supply are a source of discontent which is feeding into wider ambivalences towards modernization. This is particularly acute among the economically disadvantaged.

Keywords

food safetyrisktrustfood shoppingurban Chinaindividualization
Type
Special Section on Dying for Development
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 214 , June 2013 , pp. 376 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: SAGE.Google Scholar
Beck, Ulrich, and Beck-Gernscheim, Elisabeth. 2002. Individualization: Individualized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. London: SAGE.Google Scholar
Broughton, Edward I., and Walker, Damian G.. 2010. “Policies and practices for aquaculture food safety in China.” Food Policy 35, 471–78.Google Scholar
Caplan, Pat. 2000. “Eating British beef with confidence: a consideration of consumers' responses to BSE in Britain.” In Caplan, Pat (ed.), Risk Revisited. London: Pluto Press, 184–203.Google Scholar
Croll, Elisabeth. 1983. The Family Rice Bowl: Food and the Domestic Economy in China. London: Zed Press.Google Scholar
Ellis, Linden J., and Turner, Jennifer. 2007. “Surf and turf: environmental and food safety concerns of China's aquaculture and animal husbandry.” China Environment Series 9, 19–40.Google Scholar
Ellis, Linden J., and Turner, Jennifer. 2008. “Sowing the seeds: opportunities for U.S.–China cooperation on food safety.” China Environment Forum, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication-series/sowing-the-seeds-opportunities-for-us-china-cooperation-food-safety. Accessed 1 December 2010.Google Scholar
Gale, Fred, and Huang, Kuo. 2007. “Demand for food quantity and quality in China.” Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Report 32, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-report/err32.aspx. Accessed 1 December 2010.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Gong, Qian, and Jackson, Peter. 2012. “Consuming anxiety? Parenting practices in China after the infant formula scandal.” Food, Culture and Society 15 (4), 557–578.Google Scholar
Hamburger, Jessica. 2002. “Pesticides in China: a growing threat to food safety, public health, and the environment.” China Environment Series 5, 29–44.Google Scholar
Herzfeld, Michael. 2006. “Spatial cleansing: monumental vacuity and the idea of the West.” Journal of Material Culture 11 (1–2), 127–149.Google Scholar
Jing, Jun (ed.). 2000. Feeding China's Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Kjærnes, Unni, Harvey, Mark and Warde, Alan. 2007. Trust in Food: A Comparative and Institutional Analysis. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Klein, Jakob A. 2009. “Creating ethical food consumers? Promoting organic foods in urban southwest China.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 17 (1), 74–89.Google Scholar
Klein, Jakob A. Forthcoming. “Eating green: ecological food consumption in urban China.” In Kim, Kwang-ok (ed.), Tasteful Trends: Identity, Power and the Mobility of East Asian Food. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Lee, James. 1982. “Food supply and population growth in southwest China, 1250–1850.” The Journal of Asian Studies 41 (4), 711–746.Google Scholar
Lo, Vivienne. 2005. “Pleasure, prohibition, and pain: food and medicine in traditional China.” In Sterckx, Roel (ed.), Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 163–185.Google Scholar
Mintz, Sidney W. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Mintz, Sidney. 2006. “Food at moderate speeds.” In Wilk, Richard (ed.), Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 3–11.Google Scholar
Sanders, Richard. 2006. “A market road to sustainable agriculture? Ecological agriculture, green food and organic agriculture in China.” Development and Change 37 (1), 201–226.Google Scholar
Stafford, Charles. 2000. Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tam, Waikeung, and Yang, Dali. 2005. “Food safety and the development of regulatory institutions in China.” Asian Perspective 29 (4), 5–36.Google Scholar
Tilt, Byan. 2013. “Industrial pollution and environmental health in rural China: risk, uncertainty and individualization.” The China Quarterly 214.Google Scholar
Veeck, Ann. 2000. “The revitalization of the marketplace: food markets of Nanjing.” In Davis, Deborah S. (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 107–123.Google Scholar
Veeck, Ann, Yu, Hongyan and Burns, Alvin C.. 2010. “Consumer risks and new food systems in urban China.” Journal of Macromarketing 30 (3), 222–237.Google Scholar
Wang, Zhigang, Mao, Yanna and Gale, Fred. 2008. “Chinese consumer demand for food safety attributes in milk products.” Food Policy 33, 27–36.Google Scholar
Xiu, Changbai, and Klein, K.K.. 2010. “Melamine in milk products in China: examining the factors that led to deliberate use of the contaminant.” Food Policy 35, 463–470.Google Scholar
Yan, Yunxiang. 2003. Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Yan, Yunxiang. 2009. The Individualization of Chinese Society. Oxford and New York: Berg.Google Scholar
Yan, Yunxiang. 2012. “Food safety and social risk in China.” The Journal of Asian Studies 71 (3), 705–729.Google Scholar
Yang, Guobin. 2013. “Contesting illness on the internet: the case of tainted milk powder.” The China Quarterly 214.Google Scholar
Zhang, Li. 2006. “Contesting spatial modernity in late-socialist China.” Current Anthropology 47 (3), 461–484.Google Scholar
Zhang, Li. 2008. “Private homes, distinct lifestyles: performing a new middle class.” In Zhang, Li and Ong, Aihwa (eds.), Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 23–40.Google Scholar
Zhongguo nongyao fazhan baogao bianweihui (eds.). 2005. Zhongguo nongyao fazhan baogao (Pesticide Development in China: A Comprehensive Report). Beijing: Zhongguo huanjing kexue chubanshe.Google Scholar