Between food safety concerns and responsibilisation: Organic food consumption in Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

This chapter analyses the motives behind emerging organic food consumption in urban Vietnam. By outlining the influences on Vietnam’s organic sector through corporate and foreign aid actors and a governmental emphasis on productivity-oriented agriculture and overall food security, it provides a wider frame to understand the space in which consumers of organic food manoeuvre. Contemporary concerns over the health implications of food safety, regarded as the externalities of a modernising local agri-food system, appear as a strong motivator for buying organic food. Moreover, organic food consumption proved to be telling of wider insecurities regarding the responsibility between individuals, state and market in providing safe food. With organic food being a high-priced niche, eating safe becomes an issue of widening social inequality.