A Body-Political Approach to the Study of Food - Vietnam and the global transformations

Due to the global challenge of how to feed the nine billion people who will inhabit the world by 2050, food security is a top priority on the international research and policy agenda. However, instead of asking how to feed the world in the future, implying a strong technocratic systems orientation, the proposed food ethnography applies an actors-oriented perspective to the understanding of how people make sense of what they eat and the meaning they ascribe to food in the context of food abundance. Dramatic food scarcity is paralleled by growing worldwide obesity. Food abundance and its socio-cultural consequences, however, remain fairly overlooked by food scholars. Focussing on Vietnam, the project aims at gaining an empirical understanding of the changing eating cultures in the context of globalization by focusing on the complex nexus of body images, beauty ideals and the socio-cultural control of eating practices in a world of growing plenty. As it represents a genuinely neglected field in anthropological food research, the project will focus on social phenomena such as obesity and the development of dietary regimes in relation to beauty ideals. Following Vietnams intimate experiences with food scarcity in the past, its economic boom turned peoples experience with severe food shortages into one of having growing access to and diversification of (foreign) foodstuffs. Against the backdrop of Vietnams communist ideology and state-party control, and in light of the countrys fierce market integration, the study poses questions concerning the construction and mediation of female and male embodiment, subjectivity and gender identity through the (self-)regulation of eating. The research contributes towards theory building regarding the relation between body images and the control of eating. Gendered practices of eating need to be reconstructed against their embedded experiences with food abundance, global paradigms and socio- cultural norms related to bodily comportment and of beauty ascribed to men and women. The research proposes a body political approach which is social constructionist in orientation and marries Foucaults poststructuralist concept of body and power with a phenomenological approach to eating as an embodied experience. The project will be based on intensive field research conducted by one prae-doc staff and the project leader and combines a multitude of qualitative social science methods in the data collection process. The empirical entry points for the study are the diverse culinary arenas (such as households, nutrition counselling) in Vietnam, defined as social interfaces in which state policies, scientific knowledge, global flows and market forces centring on beauty ideals and food encounter the actors lived experience of eating. Here, the meanings around food and eating are negotiated, power relations unfold in terms of gender and the body images of men and women are (re-)constructed.

This qualitative social science research project centred on changing eating patterns, food consumption and social change in urban Vietnam. The food-consuming human body was an excellent research lens to gain insight into this highly dynamic transition context. Food is more than an ordinary, basic human need. What and how we eat is socially imprinted, and when we eat, we actually bodily incorporate society in many ways. Hence, global food policies, public health management, the agri-food industry and alternative food networks set the authentic scene for what and how urbanites eat and feed their children. In addition, food discourses and expert knowledge provide consumers with messages, information and standards on what it means to properly consume in terms of aesthetic norms, health and sustainability. Lastly, the food people consume and access crucially depends on economic and socio-cultural entitlements and exclusion. Yet, whereas development studies have a persistent bias on food's production side, this research project focussed on thriving consumer societies in the Global South. Herein, urban Vietnam constituted a vibrant case. Against the country's historical experience with war-induced food scarcity and hunger, Vietnam currently exemplifies the economically booming Asia with its aspiring middle classes. Furthermore, Vietnam finds itself in the middle of a so-called 'nutrition transition', with diets changing towards more industrially processed foods that materialise in increasing health-related food concerns. The project was driven by the questions of how consumers manoeuvre in this context of growing food abundance, what new meanings they assign to food and food-consuming bodies, how social positioning works on a food consumption basis and the specific materialisation of healthy, beautiful, slim, fat etc. bodies. Along the empirically relevant topics such as food safety, organic consumption, beauty concepts, body norms, diets and eating disorder development, the research identified the strongly gendered and classed dimensions involved in negotiating and resisting social and cultural change and vividly underscored the embodiment of social change and rising inequality of a post/socialist society.