Equitable access to healthy food is a critical challenge in urban Asia. Food safety governance promotes modern supermarkets over more traditional markets, but supermarkets are associated with unequal access to food. This study investigates how retail policies driven by food safety impact the diets of the urban poor in Hanoi, Vietnam. We do this by linking food retail infrastructures with the food shopping practices and measured dietary intake of 400 women. Our results reveal sub-optimal dietary diversity and reliance on foods sourced through traditional markets, which do not provide formal food safety guarantees. Modern channels supply formal food safety guarantees, but are mainly frequented for purchasing ultra-processed foods. The paper uncovers a conflicting duality governing food security and suggests that the public responsibility for ensuring access of the poor to nutritious and safe foods requires a more diverse retail policy approach.

Nutrition insecurity among urban poor in modernizing Asian metropolises is a critical issue. It is well recognized that in urban Asia the poor are food insecure. Across Asia the food retail environment is transforming rapidly, in which supermarkets increasingly replace traditional food vending, like markets and street vendors that the urban poor depend upon. The question is, how these transformations impact the diets of the urban poor? What drives their food choice? What are their daily shopping practices and how does that affect their dietary intake? To investigate this, we developed a cross-disciplinary nutrition and social practices study with a sequential quantitative-qualitative mixed-method design. Building on empirical evidence from Hanoi, Vietnam, the study links (i) food choice and measured dietary intake, with (ii) food retail environment, through (iii) food shopping practices and preferences of 400 women of reproductive age within the context of (iv) their transformative urban lifestyles. Methods included are a retail census with GPS coordinates to map the food retail environment, a household survey, a 24-h diet recall, multi-generation household interviews and shopping trips. We demonstrate that integrated sociological and nutritional perspectives are productive in rapidly generating evidence to comprehend the complex trade-offs between food safety and nutrition in everyday food consumption practices. We describe and reflect on our theoretical mix of dietary intake and social practices research, and our holistic mixed method approach which besides combining quantitative and qualitative methods, also voices the urban poor first hand.

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.

There is increasing recognition that sustainable diets need to be ‘culturally appropriate’. In relation to food consumption, however, it is often unclear what cultural appropriateness–or related terms, such as cultural or social acceptability–actually means. Often these terms go undefined, and where definitions are present, they vary widely. Based on a systematic literature review this paper explores how cultural appropriateness of food consumption is conceptualised across different research literatures, identifying six main themes in how cultural appropriateness is understood and applied. The paper then critically analyses these themes in relation to sustainable food system transformation. We explore how the themes conceptualise change, finding that cultural appropriateness is viewed in two main ways: either as a relatively static obstacle to be overcome, or as a dynamic and negotiated process. Both perspectives, we argue, entail different scientific, practical and political effects. Each perspective offers particular affordances for understanding and governing sustainable food system transition, although between perspectives there is likely to be a trade-off between theoretical sophistication and practical operationalizability. Based on this analysis we argue that researchers, policymakers and practitioners should be explicit about their commitment to a particular understanding of cultural appropriateness, as this will have implications for scientific and societal applications of their work. This is particularly the case, we suggest, in relation to the transdisciplinary collaborations necessary to effectively address the ‘wicked problem’ of food system sustainability. We conclude by offering a tentative general definition of cultural appropriateness as it relates to food consumption.