Abstract
Resourceful parents and grandparents in Shanghai go a long way in search of safe and healthy food for the children of their families. From an ethnographical perspective, this article delves into the risk of eating in everyday family life in urban China, and it investigates the complexity of navigating the urban food market and trusting advice from Internet sources, mommy groups, friends, and family members in order to avoid often incomprehensible health risks posed by polluted or chemically treated foods. It describes how family caregivers feel a moral obligation of doing their best to handle food risks in everyday life, and how they exchange practical knowledge in private networks. It argues that food risks are tackled with individual strategies aiming towards a feeling of peace of mind (fangxin), and that buying, preparing, and eating safe food is a moral issue within the family.
Introduction
Six-year-old Meimei spotted a colourful children’s candy in a convenience store and begged her mom, Hongyi, to buy it for her. Hongyi gave her the choice between a candy immediately or a fruit juice later. Meimei did not want to wait, and Hongyi started to read the description of content on the backside of the candies. We know the scenario from all over the commercialised world, but according to Hongyi and many other urban Chinese parents, you have to be extra cautious about what food and snacks you buy for children in China. Many urban consumers believe that domestically produced food carries a high possibility of being too cheaply produced, chemically contaminated, or even completely “fake.” Hongyi told me that she prefers snacks produced abroad, like in Korea or Japan, as they are often more “simple” and contain less additives but are often also more expensive than the Chinese products. Hongyi finally settled on a bag of lollipops produced in Korea. Later when walking around in a family-friendly river park in Shanghai Pudong Area, Hongyi explained to me how priorities in life change when you become a parent, and that parents need to learn many new skills of how to navigate the food market as they find it important to secure safe and healthy food for their children. Because Chinese society and market have changed so rapidly, people continuously have to adapt and learn to navigate new conditions. For Hongyi as well as Meimei’s live-in grandparents, researching and keeping updated with the safety of specific food products, brands, and restaurants is something that requires time and energy in their everyday family life (Anonymous 1, 2017).
Over two periods in 2016 and 2017 (six months in total), I stayed with ten different homestay hosts in Shanghai. I spent time shopping, cooking, eating, and talking about food with my hosts and people in their social networks, going on nature outings to organic farms in suburban China and visiting educational urban gardens in the weekends. Most of my interlocutors can be categorised as resourceful urban middle-class citizens. The parents and grandparents of the households invited me to learn about their cooking and their shopping habits, following them to the Shanghainese food markets that they deemed full of health risks for their families, especially their children. To my interlocutors, safe food falls under a broader concern for healthy food, but the fear of unsafe food is especially a driver in their everyday efforts of picking out the right product as it potentially presents serious short-term or long-term health risk for their children. Serving food that is as healthy and trustworthy as possible is clearly a moral issue within their family and a requisite for a good life, and in this article, I shall show that their daily eating is suspended in a web of risk, trust, and morality.
As described in the introduction to this issue, China has continuously seen food safety scandals in recent years, and this has brought about anxiety among many consumers in today’s China (Chen, 2014; Gong and Jackson, 2012; Klein, 2013; Pei et al., 2011; Qiao et al., 2012; Wu et al., 2017; Wu and Zhu, 2014; Yan, 2012). One of the scariest stories my interlocutors often mention is the scandal of the melamine-laced baby formula in 2008, which resulted in several infant deaths and the hospitalisation of thousands of children suffering from kidney problems. Anthropologist Yan (2011) has mapped multiple harmful scandals involving food adulteration, food additives, pesticides use, and fake foods in the past decades. He states that “Chinese society has arguably been affected more by food-safety scares than has any other on earth” (Yan, 2012: 706). The Chinese state’s heightened awareness of its political obligation to protect food safety, as seen in campaign-style inspections and legal actions, is indicative to the grave threat to public health that can tarnish the state’s political legitimacy. Even though the Chinese authorities claim to take serious action against these food safety issues, however, one scandal after another continues to appear in the mediascape of my interlocutors.
In 2000, a group of Chinese and US scholars published Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children and Social Change, which identified a number of crucial issues associated with what Chinese children ate and drank, what constituted healthy food in the eyes of Chinese parents as well as health officials and medical personnel, and yet none of the book’s chapters went deeply into issues of food safety (Jing, 2000). This is indicative of the fact that fear of food safety predominantly has evolved in recent decades. On the basis of a large survey on Beijing citizens’ perception of food safety risk conducted in cooperation with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology in 2007, Zhang and Zhao (2008) found that two-thirds of the urban citizens of Beijing were unsatisfied with the current situation of food safety, and that they attribute it to a lack of governmental management. Most of their informants were concerned about “fake foods” in the categories of food risks. Based on this study, Zhang and Zhao (2008) contend that the urban society of Beijing – if not all of China – has entered a modernity of the risk society, where the risk allocation has deviated from wealth allocation, attracting the attention of lawmakers and administrators (see also Thiers, 2003). Some of the same arguments are presented by Yan (2012) who claims that China has reached the risk society stage, though with a set of specifically Chinese characteristics. Risk society theory, as primarily sketched out by Beck (1992) and Giddens (1994), argues that the risks in postmodern societies are results of technological and scientific developments, and add an overshadowing layer of uncertainty to the risks of the traditional or industrial societies, where natural disasters and job insecurities are among the major risks as perceived by citizens, scientists, and lawmakers. In the wake of rapid technological and scientific development, risk society theorists find that the risks people face are less visible, more intangible, and require advanced laws and technologies to tackle them. That is, strategies that are quite beyond ordinary citizens’ capabilities. Among these postmodern challenges, food safety is a major source for the perception of high risk (Guo, 2005; Walravens, 2019; Zhang and Zhao, 2008).
Studies of risk perceptions point to distrust, and particularly distrust in government, as an important sociological factor. Luhmann (2000) considers the conceptual variations between familiarity, confidence, and trust; and according to him, the difference between confidence and trust lies in the level of risk you perceive to be taking in expecting something not to disappoint. Confidence is what you need to function in a larger society without feeling anxious over every basic action you take. Trust is needed when you choose to take a risk with a possible danger that is greater than the advantage you seek. The concept of trust has no generally agreed definition, but Giddens (1990) defines trust as “confidence in the reliability of a person or system, regarding a given set of outcomes or events, where that confidence expresses a faith in the probity or love of another, or in the correctness of abstract principles (technical knowledge)” (Giddens, 1990: 34; see also Berg et al. 2005). George Simmel explains confidence as “a hypothesis regarding future behavior, a hypothesis certain enough to serve as a basis for practical conduct” (Simmel, 1950: 318–319, Carey, 2017: 3). Based on the work of Misztal (1996) on the nature of trust, Berg et al. (2005) outline different types and levels of trust: Trust as habitus, trust as relational, system-oriented trust, and finally, tacit or reflexive trust, holding that they “are not mutually exclusive as they all contribute to the building of concrete trust relationships” (Berg et al., 2005: 107). Are the citizens’ worries of unsafe food in China simply a case of Beck’s risk society or distrust in abstract systems as in Giddens’ reading of modernity? Several studies with focus on risk society have approached the issues of risk and distrust by making questionnaires. Working as an ethnographer trained in Chinese Studies, I intend to tackle the question above by looking at the complexity of the everyday lives of middle-class families in Shanghai and focus on their moral engagement with food.
Since this special issue about food safety is very much a question of economic and ethical prioritisation for both the producers and the consumers, I find that it is relevant to situate my study within the analytical framework of food ethics and the changing moral landscape of todays’ China (Jing, 2000; Klein, 2009; Kleinman, 2011; Liu, 2000; Stafford, 2013; Steinmüller, 2013; Yan, 2011). It is evident that the Chinese party-state is unable to sufficiently overcome the food safety problems and set the citizens’ minds at ease. This certainly points to interesting academic positions within the discussion of moral economies of food (Fassin, 2012; Scott, 1977; Thompson, 1971) which leads to questions of how the provision of safe food more and more becomes a moral obligation that primarily rests on the family and lays the basis for a moral economy in which the obligations that lie in family relations and relationships to purveyors require the provision and circulation of safe food products. For many urban families today, children are central to the food choices they make in the food market and in the kitchen (Guo, 2000; Watson, 2000), and as my fieldwork data reveal, the children’s health and well-being is principal to the high level of energy that is put into the search for safe food by their parents and grandparents. As individual consumers, my interlocutors feel a moral responsibility to continuously strive to understand the food risks in the market and steer clear of unsafe food if they want to secure their children’s good health.
I will show in this article empirical examples of how distrust in the food producers, vendors, and the Chinese authorities’ system of food safety control make my interlocutors place trust in social relations, brands, and products, but also how distrust can produce strategies, practical knowledge, and intensified relationships. My main concern is to bring empirical examples of how my interlocutors manage the uncertainties of food risks by taking matters into their own hands, how they regard the risks as both concrete dangers of daily eating and as deriving from the immoral behaviour of individuals in the contemporary domestic food market. I will show how they identify trustworthy food products in the market, and how they exchange and evaluate practical knowledge with other caretakers within the family and in their mommy groups. My analytical interest is to understand the complexity of the everyday food strategies that my interlocutors adapt, develop, exchange, and apply as they purchase food in the urban market. Analytically, my main argument is that among my urban interlocutors, food risks are tackled with individual strategies aiming towards a feeling of peace of mind, and that buying, preparing, and eating safe food is a moral issue within the family.
Feeling of Safety
Several of my interlocutors mention the term fangxin (放心), “peace of mind,” in our conversations as something to obtain in their dealings with food. In the Chinese food business, fangxin is commonly used as an adjective to describe what is portrayed as trustworthy products. I find that fangxin is most commonly used to express a feeling of being relieved, to relax, to set one’s mind at rest, to rest assured, to have confidence in, or to trust somebody or something. For example, Lili, a stay-at-home mom in her forties, grows her own organic vegetables in a rented strip of land in the outskirts of the city. After spending a morning harvesting in the field together, I asked her about her reason for going to such lengths to have homegrown vegetables. A passion for growing flowers, she said, developed into growing vegetables when she became pregnant with her son: “Later, when I had a child – and when I was pregnant – I felt that the vegetables I could buy were not fangxin, and so, I transformed my flower garden into a vegetable garden” (Anonymous 2, 2017). Another Shanghai mother and Lili’s good friend, Mingxia, with whom I lived for four weeks, explained to me how her family in fear of unsafe foods never dines out unless it is absolutely necessary, and instead cooks all their meals at home. Now, she told me, she needs to learn how to make better homemade snacks for her son, so that she can compete with the commercial snacks that her son desires from the shops: “In any case, what I make myself is a bit more fangxin” (Anonymous 3, 2017). Wang Wei, the head chef at the elementary school where I volunteered teaching organic vegetable gardening explained to me their safety measures in making sound and safe food for the pupils’ lunch, and I asked him about the reason for inviting parents to visit the kitchen at scheduled events: We need to let our exceptionality stand out, so that people from outside can know that this is a fangxin canteen that is in line with food safety hygiene. It also relates to our food diversity and the nutritional composition, which is all something we need the parents to understand. (Anonymous 4, 2017)
This resonates with the findings of Sternsdorff-Cisterna (2015) in his study of Japanese mommy groups and food safety after Fukushima where he notes the dichotomy between the Japanese term anquan (安全, same in Mandarin Chinese) which characterises the standardised and scientific safety in opposition to the term anxin (安心), that is used to characterise people’s feeling of safety. During my fieldwork, I brought up these abstract terms with interlocutors who I expected to be interested in them from a more intellectual point of view, among others in the company of a small group of urban Chinese women who had met each other at a time where they had all lived in Japan (Anonymous 5, 2017). Evident from these discussions, the same dichotomy between the two terms is also present in Mandarin, but the term fangxin is a more common everyday synonym for anxin. The two characters in fangxin can be literally translated to mean “to place the heart,” to “release the heart,” or to “show the heart,” and they can stand alone as a verb-object constellation, or they can be used as an adjective or adverb to moderate an object or an action. We discussed how, etymologically speaking, the character fang (放) is also a phonetic element depicting the semantic element of a “striking hand,” and it can mean to place, put, release, leave, show, or expand something. The hand is thus actively doing something to the following. The heart, xin (心), is referred to as the home of emotion, of love and worries, and the characters for psychology, xinli (心理), can literally mean “theories of the heart.” The term xiaoxin (小心), literary “little heart,” means to be careful of something. What precisely the active hand is doing to the heart in the term fangxin might then be a matter of further interpretation. From our discussions, I understood that together, these characters could mean that one places one’s heart, determination, or best effort into some issue, or it can be that one releases one’s worrisome heart from a troublesome matter.
I find that the dichotomy of these two interpretations somehow displays the complexity of trusting as indicated by the two sides, the feeling of importance and ethical prioritisation, and the sometimes angst inducing issue of everyday food safety present for my parent interlocutors. In order to ease their hearts and bear the risk of eating, my interlocutors put their best effort into avoiding what they consider as dangerous food. 1 The ever-changing food market in urban China calls for constant inventiveness among my Shanghai interlocutors, and thus, I want in the next sections to delve into ethnographical examples to describe the concrete everyday complexity in which people grapple the concrete issues of food choices in light of shifting evaluations of relationships, practical knowledge, and ethical priorities in order to feel fangxin.
Identifying Harmful Products in the Market
Granny Zhao lives with her extended family in a three-bedroom apartment in Shanghai’s Pudong Area (Anonymous 6, 2017). She is the grandmother of Meimei and the mother-in-law of Hongyi, presented above. The household consists of Hongyi, Meimei, and Meimei’s paternal grandparents, Grandma Zhao and Grandpa Tai. Hongyi’s husband had passed away a few years before, and ever since, the two sets of grandparents have taken turns living with Hongyi and Meimei for half a year at a time, spending the other half in their home city of Wuhan in Central China. During my sixteen-day stay with this family and on later visits, I spent a lot of time with the three ladies of the house, eating, shopping, and participating in children’s activities in the local neighbourhood.
Granny Zhao is normally responsible for most of the shopping and cooking in the household, and one day, she took me to the main indoor fresh market in the neighbourhood, where she does most of her shopping for the family. As we walked around the large market, she pointed out where she had bought the groceries for the lavish lunch that she had prepared yesterday in celebration of the Dragon Boat Festival. A table full of traditional Wuhan dishes had taken up most of the space in the small living room to fit the family, Granny Zhao’s sister and brother-in-law, and myself. She knew I was interested to learn about their take on food safety, and so the greater part of our tour of the market consisted of her explaining how she spots which vegetables and other market products are fit to buy and which are not. For Zhao and many others, it is not only a question of spotting which vegetables are fresh or not – like you would need to know when shopping at any fresh markets around the world – but rather a question of spotting also chemical manipulation or pollution. Granny Zhao showed me the cucumbers with yellow flowers still at the tip and said it indicated that they had been pumped with growth hormone. The same could be an issue with the tomatoes. If the skin has small white dots, if they are too round, have no grooves on the top, or if the green stalk is gone, they have probably been induced with something, grown too fast and are unhealthy to consume.
Zhao was also eager to show me where she bought the long roots we had in the soup yesterday and told me that you need to boil these before eating for otherwise they can be poisonous. You want to avoid the lotus roots that look too clean and perfect, as they might have been washed in bleach, and instead pick the spotted, dirty ones. She told me that the mushrooms are all grown without agricultural chemicals, and that I shouldn’t worry about them. She explained that she buys her fish in this market because they are alive in the tubs and she can get them fresh. You should generally choose sea fish over river fish because of possible pollution, but not if they are from the coast of Japan, as they could then be exposed to radiation. You should also avoid fish with yellow eyes, indicating pollution from the water. She buys her meat at the supermarket because she prefers a certain government brand, where she believes it has undergone more quality control than other meat products. Eggs, Zhao also buys in the nearby supermarket for the practical reason that she is afraid that they will break carrying them home. She bought the duck for yesterday’s lunch from a small stall with a Donald Duck logo, because there the duck they make tastes good. She mentioned that their history goes back hundreds of years, back to the Qing Dynasty, and said that if such an old shop has survived without too many complaints for so many years, then they must do it right.
As we went around the market, she stopped to chat with several salesmen and saleswomen, many of them curious of me, her new foreign company. Zhao trusts certain vendors in the market over others because she has bought from them for a long time, but she does not know them intimately and says that they might not tell her the truth if she asks them about the safety and freshness of their products. So you have to learn how to spot the possible harmful products yourself. She pointed to a large billboard hanging in the centre of the market, showing pictures of the seven Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members in charge of the administration of the market. Zhao told me that customers could go to them if they have complaints, and that this would have certain consequences for the shop owners. We then went by the market administration office and she introduced me to the leader of the party organisation. He instructed us on local costumers’ high concerns for food safety and the governance initiatives of the local CCP organ. They give out red banners each year to some of the best sales stalls, and rank is stripped away from those with many complaints. Most of the stalls also show QR codes that you can scan to get a small backstory of the products and the farms from which they arrive. Zhao never used this option herself, but she is glad that they provide the information to customers, and she told me that this level of administration is quite unique. The complaint channel is one of the reasons she prefers this fresh market to other markets, where the quality and safety control systems are less transparent.
When she brings home the groceries, she will rinse most of the fruits, vegetables, and especially green leaves in water with soda powder for about ten minutes. She said, that if there are chemicals on the vegetables, then the water will become dirty, and if not, the water will be clear. She feels that she can sometimes taste that agricultural chemicals have been added. If the taste is bland or off, then it has probably grown too fast and been injected with one thing or another. Then she will avoid buying that brand or from that vendor again. It is sometimes a matter of trying this out and learn from that, she revealed to me. The day after our tour around the market, Granny Zhao went to the kitchen to show me two kinds of egg noodles, both in open bags. One of the noodle packs, she had discovered to be all fake and chemically produced. She can taste it, she said, and when she bites into it after boiling it, it is not soft. She compared it to the other bag with the same kind of noodle, but from a bigger brand. She found it tasted much better and had a better texture and also a slightly different colour. They had eaten three-fourths of the fake noodles, but after telling me about its bad quality, she threw the rest into the trash can next to the sofa in the living room. She would not let the baby, Meimei, eat any of it, she said. Such products, she noted, you would want to buy in the big supermarkets with the big brands.
Taking Risk Reduction into Own Hands
Following my interlocutors to the markets, or looking over their shoulders, as they would make orders of groceries online through their phone applications, they invited me to experience their daily shopping practices and told me how they manage their fears for unsafe food. The parents and grandparents mainly aired concerns about too many additives and other chemicals in processed food that could have negative long-term effects on health. They also feared unhygienic handling of food and “gutter oil” in restaurants, as well as the existence of expired and fake foods on the market. In vegetables, they were mainly concerned about pesticides and other agricultural chemicals such as insecticides and growth hormones, as well as their possible exposure to pollution. In meat, medicine traces, or expired and coloured meat were main concerns.
Like Granny Zhao, several of my interlocutors revealed to me how they applied techniques to spot unsafe, dangerous foods and obtain the best quality available in the market. The list of urban food market options that my interlocutors would mainly make use of in everyday life, often in combinations through the week, was diverse in prices, supply range, freshness, and convenience: (1) Small and large indoor fresh markets with multiple stalls run by small-scale retailers and overseen by party-state authorities; (2) The less controlled outdoor markets run by small-scale retailers or farmers from the outskirts of the city; (3) Travelling community morning markets run by private companies, which tend to sell more expensive products; (4) Conventional domestic and international supermarket chains of varying sizes and with varying branding strategies, including several new up-scale indoor fresh supermarkets with food delivery options; (5) The increasingly more popular online markets with various branding strategies, including many new online organic farm direct markets. Delivery options could be a box to the door at a scheduled time, a cooled box by the door at any time during the day, or to a cooler cabinet in the apartment complex, installed by one of the food delivery companies. Many of my interlocutors preferred to buy greens while they are fresh in the morning, and mainly buy the vegetables of the season. In certain supermarkets, they could purchase vegetables with organic certification, but scandals of organic brands and low trust in the authorities’ certification system was at the back of their heads when evaluating priorities in safety, freshness, and prices. A way to secure fresh meat when buying fish, shellfish, and poultry was to buy them alive and have them slaughtered at the fresh markets.
Several of my interlocutors would prefer products of international supermarket chains, like Carrefour or Metro, because of a belief in higher international control standards. Others, however, would be just as sceptical when buying products from these “faceless corporations” and point to the high localisation in product supply, meaning that the products were still as domestic and likely to be as contaminated as in any other Chinese supermarket. Some consumers would trust certain older Chinese brands over newer ones, and most would avoid brands they had heard negative stories about in the media or from friends, admitting to knowing little about the validity of the stories. But why take the risk? Several of my interlocutors told me how they would return to certain vendors that they have bought food from for years in a belief that these people would be less likely to cheat them, especially when they are looking straight into their eyes and when they have built some level of a friendly relationship. Carrier (2018) sees the basis of moral economy in such relationships that are built by accumulating exchanges between seller and buyer for years. For Granny Zhao, while these relations also add fangxin feelings, they are still not sufficient for completely trusting in the safety of the food products.
I asked Granny Zhao how she learns how to pick out which food items are the better choice to buy and which to avoid. “Xuexi ya” (学习呀), she said: “I study it!” She searches online and she talks to her friends about it. On WeChat, a large online social media platform, she has three or four friend groups, where they among other things will discuss issues of food safety from time to time. In one group, there are around one hundred members from Wuhan, but the other groups are smaller with about twenty members each, and some of them are close friends from her school days. Many of her friends are now grandparents themselves and they share pictures and social updates, as well as news, tips, and tricks that they have found online, including articles on food scandals and what they consider useful food safety knowledge. Zhao resembles many of my other interlocutors of the elder generation in the way she seeks out and shares practical knowledge of how to navigate the urban food market. During the Dragon Boat Festival lunch, Granny Zhao’s sister and brother-in-law had a lot of similar tips and tricks to tell me of how to spot safe and unsafe food products. The grandparent generation will often read online articles on the subject and share them in discussions with friends and family. Besides relying on their personal experience with handling food throughout their lives, they, however, also feel that they also have to acquire new knowledge and practices because of the changing conditions in Chinese society and food markets. The fear of poisonous food is a fairly recent concern in Granny Zhao’s lifespan and a basic circumstance of living and shopping in the big city when she wants to guard the health of her granddaughter in particular. She was born before the 1949 “liberation” under a period of starvation – to which, according to herself, her low height testifies – and she has experienced major changes in the Chinese food availability and challenges from food scarcity and food stamps to food abundance and chemical manipulation. From our conversations, it was clear that she felt that each of the periods from the 1940s until now required of different awareness and techniques for securing the best diet, but that the present one is the most complex and difficult. The many choices that exist today and the unforeseeable consequences of making the wrong choices, however, leave Granny Zhao and many others of my interlocutors with a greater sense of insecurity when navigating the market. She explains, that it is not enough to trust the content description on supermarket products, nor looking into the eyes of her regular vendors. No, she has to rely on her own ability to identify unsafe food, which demands of her continuous research and the development of new practices.
Granny Zhao told me how, in the Mao era, the companies were all state-owned, and that such things as the production and vending of fake noodles could not happen then. Now huairen (坏人), “bad people,” produce it to make money. She often speaks nostalgically about earlier times when producers and sellers were not driven by monetary interests, but had sound collectivist values. From our conversations, it seemed that Granny Zhao’s distrust was not directed towards an abstract Chinese modernity, the Chinese political system, the international market influences, or advanced technologies as such. Rather the huairen were to blame for the unsafe products, and wherever the party-state deploys technologies to control the quality of the food, it was to her an added safety against the swindlers. The ethically wicked behaviour of these huairen strangers, who are either farmers, vendors, cadres, or others in the food supply chain, is mentioned by several of my interlocutors, who may explain them – or even, by some, excuse them – as being shaped by modern social conditions brought about by market economy and too rapid social changes. For most of my interlocutors, however, the basic responsibility and fault still lies with the stunted morality of individuals who seize opportunities to make money and disregard the health of the consumers (see also Lee, 2014; and Yan, 2009 on stranger sociality in China). Zhao’s navigation in the market and in the information that she shares with her friends testifies to how she places trust in the knowledge of her social circles rather than the official quality control system and the strangers who produce and sell food products in Shanghai. For her, the authorities’ control is an added bonus, but the resources are not sufficient to deal with the moral decay of individuals that China witnesses in today’s society. From an analytical point of view, we may say that Granny Zhao’s complex market strategies have been developed in an effort to minimise or control the results of the bad morality of the huairen whenever the state control system was not felt effective enough in itself. For her and my other parent interlocutors, it is safe to say that providing safe food for the family is a moral obligation that drives them to go the extra mile so to say to find the best product, spending both considerable time, money, and energy in the course of their everyday lives.
The above example resonates with the results of the study by Veeck et al. (2008), who compare their collected ethnographic data from 1996 and 2006, respectively, where they interviewed and followed the primary food purchasers of 15–20 urban households to food markets in eastern China. They found that there was not necessarily more anxiety among consumers in 2006 than in 1996, but the sources of their fears had altered, and likewise their strategies of feeling more secure about the food they serve their family. In 2006, they found that their informants had more diverse options of buying good food in the urban market, but most of their informants had reservations about truly trusting the food labelled as organic in supermarkets and products sold directly from organic farmers, as they felt that they had no way of knowing if the organic food they were buying was truly pesticide-free and safe enough. The informants were concerned about the safety of food, but could not identify whether or not food was safe in the market. They tended to trust the bigger supermarket chains more because of the labels on food items.
Veeck et al. hold that while the shoppers they followed in both 1996 and 2006 had legitimate food safety concerns, their responses did not reflect a “crippling fear of the food supply, with an over-arching view of the world as a threatening place” (Veeck et al., 2008: 43). They would attribute their concerns to people – the farmers, manufacturers, and retailers – and not to unknown consequences in the advancement in science and technology. My ethnographical material from Shanghai clearly resembles some of the data collected in Beijing by Veeck et al., and I agree with them that these findings challenge the arguments that China should have reached the risk society in the sense sketched by Beck and Giddens. The shoppers described by Veeck et al. had developed strategies and networks to navigate their food consumption, and many felt fortunate about the widening food supply offers in 2006 as means to handle their food safety concerns. For example, the shoppers saw the access to organically branded food as a positive solution to subdue some of their fears brought about by unsafe food. Veeck et al. note that, according to Beck’s understanding, this proactive agency is also something that belongs to the industrial phase of modernity and not to the post-industrial risk society. This aspect is also stressed by Yan (2012, 2012: 721) in his study of food risks, where he states that “it is common in China for science, technology, and modernization generally to be regarded as the solution to food-safety problems and as the proper way to control food risks.” My interlocutors correspondingly regard modern technology as something positive in the fight against the immoral behaviour of individuals that leads to unsafe food. They can, however, not only rely on safety promised by food companies and the Chinese authorities, but feel an outspoken need to take matters into own hands and try to find solutions to what they experience as concrete dangers.
I find that a decade after the collection of the data of Veeck et al., the strategies of the urban consumers have yet again changed as reflected in my interlocutors’ statements and practices in 2016–2017. The ways to seek information on food are much more varied and complex as it involves a myriad of social communication in both face-to-face relations and various online networks, including a widespread use of mommy groups, as I shall illustrate in the following.
Exchanging Practical Food Knowledge
Feifei is a mother in her early thirties, with whom I worked alongside teaching organic gardening to school children (Anonymous 7, 2017). She is a member of three community mommy groups. Two of them are from communities in which she previously resided and the third is the community mommy group of her good friend. The biggest group has over 500 members, and Feifei seldom sees fathers or grandparents in the member lists. Besides disseminating general community information, they communicate about what they perceive to be good food products, and they sometimes arrange to buy in bulk together. They exchange second hand clothes and artefacts, and they ask each other for advice on where to buy certain things, and they give suggestions for good programs for children’s extracurricular education. When Feifei reads other mothers’ advice, she will evaluate the information for any discrepancies and judge if it lives up to her own moral standards: For example, if some family allow for heat-expanded food, but my family does not buy that at all, and this person also arranges a food event, I might not participate … I might not [participate] unless we know these mothers well, or if she is respected as an expert in the area, in which cases our confidence level will be higher. (Anonymous 7, 2017)
Lili, the stay-at-home mom who grows her own vegetables, described to me how her life and her way of thinking changed after becoming a parent: It changes a lot to have a kid. It’s not easy being a mom in China at all. You have to learn a lot of things…. I think China has too many problems. As a mom you have to go inspect for yourself. (Anonymous 2, 2017)
Another of my “middle-class” interlocutors, Yingyue, is a mother and communication employee in her late twenties, who strives to gain as much scientific knowledge as possible. She often receives food safety knowledge from her own mother, who spends a lot of time researching food safety online, but she herself also exchanges insights with her two mommy groups (Anonymous 8, 2017). As a Fudan University alumnus, she is eligible to be a member of the Fudan mommy group. The mothers in this forum are extremely ambitious, she tells me, so a lot of the discussions in the group revolve around children’s education and fostering their personalities. She also follows a well-known health clinic in Beijing (崔玉涛育学园, Cui Yutao Yuxueyuan) that publishes articles and books, and posts updates in an online forum with wide ranging information on healthy pregnancy and childcare. Via their app, she can for example get information about what is fit to feed her one-year old son, and she can follow member discussions on food and health. Yingyue showed me pictures on her phone from a recent lecture by Dr. Cui Yutao. She participated in the lecture to learn parenting skills as she sees it as a moral issue to be better fit for raising her infant son. In the age group of her son, Yingyue’s mommy group has 374 members, and they will typically ask questions if for example their kid is ill and have the other mothers weigh in with suggestions of treatment. Yingyue also sometimes follow a commercial parent group called One Hour Daddy (一小时爸爸, yi xiaoshi baba), where a group of fathers publish chemical tests on childrens products and food, and then sell the safe items in their web shop. According to Yingyue, they do not seem to be experts themselves, but they are engaged in their research and care because they are parents themselves.
For Feifei, Lili, Yingyue, and several others of my interlocutors, receiving advice from other parents is one of the primary ways they gain awareness on healthy and safe children’s food and improve on their shopping and cooking routines. According to them, it seems quite standard for urban mothers in Shanghai to be members of one or several mommy groups, many of which have online forums. They often consist of close friends, parents from their neighbourhood community, from their kids’ kindergarten or elementary school classes, or from sport teams. On top of this, some of my parent interlocutors follow online debate forums facilitated by private health care clinics and “safe food” companies, some of which are branded as being established by concerned parents. Based on what they learn from their social circles and from online information, they deploy techniques to feel fangxin. Some buy certified organic products or buy from trusted companies. Some grow their own organic vegetables, or buy directly from organic farms. Some create relationships with vendors. Some find the best practices to handle food products in the kitchen. Some study the science of food safety. And like Granny Zhao, some apply the widespread method of spotting harmful products in the market as another tool in their consumer toolbox.
As illustrated above, the mothers that I followed and interviewed, however, not only exchange food safety knowledge and practices. They also exchange fears, gossip, and moral considerations (see also Gong and Jackson, 2012; Klein, 2009; Oxfeld, 2010). Many find the fact that their networks consist of other parents who like themselves have ethical incentives to do good towards their own children a reason to place trust in their advice. Besides ethical intentions, another aspect to evaluate, however, is the expert level of their social relations before trusting their practices and adapting food safety strategies. For an example of this, we return to Hongyi, Granny Zhao’s daughter-in-law.
Intimate and Social Mistrust
Hongyi told me that when you are a new mother, you have to learn a lot of new practices and you can feel very insecure, so it is nice to share experiences and fears with other parents (Anonymous 1, 2017). Her own mother could not remember much from when she took care of her as a baby, so Hongyi had to search for advice outside the family. Since not many of her friends had children, she also entered online forums with parents of children of the same age group, where they discussed the issues occurring with the age development stages of their children, and which food to serve them and which to avoid, including experiences with specific brands of children’s snacks and healthy foods. Hongyi told me that the other mothers gave advise with good intentions, but since they are not doctors or chemical experts, she explained how she herself would often do more online research into the products that they recommended before giving them to Meimei.
Even though they are a great help with child care and domestic chores, the arrangement of living with a set of grandparents for half a year at a time comes with certain challenges, especially when it has to do with providing the proper food for the child. Hongyi, for example, told me of the differences in the media-use between the generations and the kind of food safety knowledge this brings about. They all share a lot of online articles, including food safety articles, with friends, but their social circles are quite different. The older generation tends to immediately trust information they read online, Hongyi thought, where she herself is more sceptical as a more experienced netizen. She knows that there are many fake news stories going around the Internet, as well as articles spreading unuseful information about safe foods. Sometimes her parents and parents-in-law come to her for advice on certain online sources and information because they know that they are not as trained in critical media use as she is. When it comes to them, the food knowledge and practices, the differences between the generations of the household are quite clear. The older generation is more traditional in the way they cook, for example. Also typically for people from Wuhan, they like the heavy tastes with lots of salt and oil, which is unhealthy, Hongyi told me. It took her a long time to convince even her own mother to put less salt and oil in the food when they came to live in Shanghai. But regarding the food Meimei eats, they now listen to Hongyi’s demands. Snacks and sweets are also something that only Hongyi buys for her, as she is quite attentive to additives and does not trust the older generations’ knowledge and attention to this matter. Even though, the distrust in the external channels seems to enhance trust in direct relationships, Hongyi’s scepticism of the knowledge of her own parents and parents-in-law is still too strong for her to feel safe in leaving food choices for her daughter up to them alone.
From the examples above, I find that the exchange of information on everyday food safety techniques produces both trust and mistrust in social relations. In their searching for safe food, Hongyi and Granny Zhao do continuously evaluate the expert level, life experience, and ethical motives of people in face-to-face relationships, even in close family relations. This underlines a grand narrative that the world of food in urban China is a rather unsafe one as they meet food and people with suspicion, but also that they feel that they both can and must take matters into their own hands. In this regard, I find that – unlike the responses Veeck et al. (2008) received from their informants in 2006 – my interlocutors see risk as a very pressing factor in their everyday lives as food produced and sold by strangers enter the family sphere. They do however build and adapt strategies to manage their perceptions of risk in order to gain the feeling of fangxin.
Here, I would like to add that distrust is not only energy consuming, but also generative of intensified social relationships, practical food knowledge, and new health practices in family life. In their search for safe food, my interlocutors find communality with others in the same situation. How to deal with food safety seems to be an issue that is widely discussed in social circles online and over the dinner tables. Analytically, I find that social distrust in urban Chinese society influences – and in many instances reinforces – relational trust in face-to-face relationships in the exchange of food and information, requiring a continuous judging of the intention as well as the expert level and ethical incentives of the other. Online forums, such as mommy groups, are spaces where many parents receive and share information of what are the better choices in terms of providing healthy and safe children’s food. This information is then filtered, evaluated, and applied when urbanities like Hongyi and Granny Zhao go out into the world to acquire food in the market.
Conclusion
Along with other ethnographic studies on the risk of unsafe food, I find that it is important to delve into the practical and everyday food experiences in families. What my fieldwork data reveal is a complexity of different food safety strategies produced and exchanged among resourceful Shanghai family caregivers. In the course of their everyday lives, they spend a lot of energy, time, and money searching out what they believe to be safer and healthier food for their family members. The techniques that my interlocutors make use of point to various directions, as they relate to both the discernment of products, the correct handling of products in the domestic space, and the placement of trust in information, vendors, brands, and social relations. An important thing to note on the complexity of food choices is that the consumers’ techniques are used in combination and applied in great variety. The strictness of the implementation of their consumer principles also is context dependent; varying according to their company and for whom the food is intended, for example their children, their friends, or just themselves.
As I have tried to show ethnographically, behind the continuous worries about unsafe food lies a form of mistrust towards huairen, “bad people,” who act immorally to make money in the food market. Their immoral actions might be a by-product of the postmodern societal developments, but my interlocutors’ distrust does not seem to be in the abstract society and the powers of modern technology. For them, technology and science hold just as much promise to circumvent the risk as cause the risk. The way to avoid the unsafe food products ending up in their children’s dinner bowls, is, however, first and foremost to take matters into their own hands. I wish to underline that moral economy of buying safe food in the market is not simply an external matter regarding with consumers’ market strategies to avoid the products manipulated by the huairen. It is very much an internal family matter directed toward the end goal of an everyday economy of preparing and serving safe food as a moral obligation towards providing a good and healthy life for themselves and their family.
Analytically, I have tried to show that the families’ strategies of obtaining safe food all aim towards a sense of having done something in the pursuit of safe food, towards a feeling of peace of mind (fangxin), rather than reaching absolute and scientific safety (anquan) that seems out of their reach. My interlocutors recognise that they are not experts themselves, but they must do their best and make decisions every day of what food to serve the family. For this, they grasp at some sets of knowledge and practices in order to seek out, produce, apply, and disseminate practical food safety knowledge. Their strategies, however, reveal how trust evolves in concrete situations and relations. Thus, I found that trust could best be studied in concrete situations and social relations, not as collective social phenomenon but rather as a sort of individual activism. I find that the fangxin approach in their everyday life, that is their efforts to set their minds at ease and feel a sense of food safety, make them constantly share knowledge and take action on an individual basis. The way family caregivers in resourceful Shanghai families act on their risk perception concerning food safety is a complex matter that relates to their multifaceted evaluation of own and other people’s ethical incentives and expert knowledge, often varying according to situations and the particular questions, and often with great insecurity. Despite a high degree of mistrust, the family has to eat, and so, the family caregivers have to trust in some advice as they buy, treat, and consume food products.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support from the Independent Research Fund Denmark for the research of this article as part of the collective project Moral Economies of Food in Contemporary China, PI Associate Professor Mikkel Bunkenborg.
Note
Author biography