Shifting configurations of shopping practices and food safety dynamics in Hanoi, Vietnam: a historical analysis

Agric Hum Values (2016) 33:655–671 DOI 10.1007/s10460-015-9645-4 Shifting configurations of shopping practices and food safety dynamics in Hanoi, Vietnam: a historical analysis Sigrid C. O. Wertheim-Heck1 · Gert Spaargaren1 Accepted: 3 August 2015 / Published online: 1 September 2015 © The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract This paper offers a historical analysis of contemporary practices of shopping for vegetables in the highly dynamic context of urban Hanoi during the period from 1975 to 2014. Focusing on everyday shopping practices from a food safety perspective, we assess the extent to which the policy-enforced process of supermarketization has proven to be an engine of change in daily vegetable purchasing while improving food safety. In depicting transitions in shopping practices, we combine a social practices approach with historical analysis. Providing a historical analysis of a broad and complex spectrum of everyday practices of purchasing fresh vegetables, we identify the key drivers of change. We discuss different modalities of shopping and demonstrate that no single retail modernization format can be said to exist. Rather than contrasting an idealized supermarket model with the traditional modalities of food shopping, we offer a varied, more diverse set of shopping practices that displays different strategies for coping with food safety issues. When discussed from a historical perspective, food practices are shown to be highly dynamic, being constantly reinvented and reconfigured by consumers who use their established skills, routines, and social networks to sometimes resist top-down enforced supermarketization while developing the coping strategies that best suit their local circumstances. & Sigrid C. O. Wertheim-Heck Gert Spaargaren 1 Environmental Policy Group, Department of Social Sciences, Wageningen University, Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN Wageningen, The Netherlands Keywords Consumption · Practices theory · Social change · Food safety · Food sovereignty · Retail modernization Abbreviations AFN Alternative Food Networks OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Introduction: a failed transition from market to supermarket shopping in Asia? Public awareness of the hazards associated with the intensification of agricultural production and an ongoing stream of media reports on food safety scandals related to agrochemicals in vegetables has resulted in growing levels of concern among Vietnamese consumers about agrochemical contamination.1 As a result, consumers no longer take food safety for granted and issues of risk and anxiety play a prominent role in the food sector in Vietnam and Southeast Asia in general (Figuié 2004; Kantamaturapoj et al. 2012; Mergenthaler et al. 2009; Othman 2007; Sy et al. 2005; Wertheim-Heck et al. 2014a). The enormous impact of food safety concerns on the Asian food agenda is a relatively recent phenomenon. Particularly in the 21st century, fears surrounding the agro-chemical contamination of vegetables have intensified, resulting in a call for 1 Attitudes towards food safety (online research across eight Asian countries: China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, the Philippines, Singapore, and Japan) revealed consumers in Vietnam to have the least trust in the safety of the foods they consume. Source: http:// ssl.aip-global.com/EN/asia_express/archives/1344; Accessed 23 December 2014. 123 656 transparency and control in the context of the geographically expanding food chains of the rapidly developing and industrializing economies in Asia (Humphrey 2007; Othman 2007). The standard way to confront food safety concerns in the Asian context is to resort to a strategy of retail modernization (Wertheim-Heck et al. 2015). For example, present-day Vietnamese retail modernization policies aim to stimulate supermarket expansion with the goal of realizing a tenfold increase to 1000 supermarkets in Hanoi in the period from 2015 to 2025 (Viet 2014), while reorganizing and reducing the number of traditional food markets (MoIT 2009). It is argued that retail companies can build trust among food consumers through the effectuation of public and private standards that can assure the safety and quality of fresh food (Fuchs et al. 2011; Reardon et al. 2005). In assuring the quality and safety of the foods they sell, supermarkets are considered to de-facto “manufacture” trust (Henson and Hooker 2001) among Asian consumers. The silent assumption behind the retail-led modernization model of the food sector is that as rational actors, foodconcerned Asian consumers will actively cooperate with the suggested shift in the practices and places for assessing, selecting, and buying food. Growing food anxieties, as Vietnamese policy makers in particular presume, will be the driving force behind the shift from market to supermarket shopping. However, the adoption and domestication of supermarkets in the daily practice of shopping for vegetables, despite being acknowledged and valued for offering better food safety, has to date remained a niche phenomenon. The traditional but contested (because it is considered unsafe and “uncivilized”) practice of wet- or fresh-market shopping remains the dominant means of purchasing fresh food (Wertheim-Heck et al. 2014b). Thus, it would seem that transitions in the food buying practices of Vietnamese consumers are not so easily established, as assumed in the dominant retail modernization framework for food safety policies. To understand how food safety concerns are (not) taken up and confronted effectively in the context of contemporary practices of shopping for fresh food in Vietnam, one cannot ignore the country’s recent history. Vietnam made a dramatic transformation from a war-torn country with a highly centralized planned economy, ranking among the world’s most impoverished nations and struggling with food scarcity, famine, and a lack of financial transactions (government issued coupon system), to a socialist-oriented market economic powerhouse with year-round food abundance and a crowded banking network, projected to be one of the fastest growing developing economies in the world by 2050 (PWC 2015). In this paper, we explore the question of how and why the contemporary social practices of purchasing everyday 123 S. C. O. Wertheim-Heck, G. Spaargaren fresh vegetables have emerged and evolved during the past 40 years in northern Vietnam, as well as how this can be shown to relate to the historical dynamics of economic and socio-political change. We provide a historical analysis of contemporary practices of shopping for vegetables within the highly dynamic context of urban Hanoi in the period from 1975 to 2014, wherein supermarket advancement is actively promulgated by official policy, where food safety concerns are paramount, and where consumers seem reluctant to switch from market shopping to supermarket shopping. Focusing on everyda (...truncated)