Jakob A. Klein

Everyday approaches to food safety in Kunming

The article explores how people in Kunming have interpreted and acted upon food-related environmental health threats, particularly within the contexts of everyday food shopping. It is argued that an increasingly intensified, delocalized food supply system and a state-led emphasis on individual responsibility and choice have produced growing uncertainties about food. However, the article takes issue with the claim that new forms of risk and institutional changes have produced “individualized” responses, arguing that many of the practices Kunmingers have developed to handle food-related risks and their understandings of what constitutes “safe” food have been developed within the frameworks of family ties and regional cuisine. Further, shoppers and purveyors of food have forged new ties of trust and re-emphasized connections between people, food and place. Nevertheless, concerns about the food supply are a source of discontent which is feeding into wider ambivalences towards modernization. This is particularly acute among the economically disadvantaged.

Afterword: Comparing Vegetarianisms

Cross-cultural comparisons have been rare in the recent anthropology and sociology of meat-eating and vegetarianism. The search for general principles that hold true across time and space, which underpinned the heated debates between proponents of ‘symbolic’ and ‘materialist’ approaches to dietary prohibitions, no longer whets most anthropological appetites. As in the current issue, scholars have instead fleshed out the meanings of meat in a single locality or country, or carried out careful comparisons between adjacent locales or within broadly-defined cultural ‘regions’. In this Afterword I first consider some of the differences in approaches to the studies of meat and meat avoidance in two such ‘regions’: the West; and South Asia. With the help of additional cases drawn from research on meat prohibitions in East Asia, I then go on to suggest that a comparative, cross-regional approach to meat avoidances and prohibitions is in fact increasingly important to understanding the social dimensions of vegetarianism, including at ‘local’ and ‘regional’ levels.

Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurants and the Changing Meanings of Meat in Urban China

ABSTRACT This article charts the changing meanings of meat in contemporary urban China and explores the role played by Buddhist vegetarian restaurants in shaping these changes. In Kunming, meat has long been a sign of prosperity and status. Its accessibility marked the successes of the economic reforms. Yet Kunmingers were increasingly concerned about excessive meat consumption and about the safety and quality of the meat supply. Buddhist vegetarian restaurants provided spaces where people could share meat-free meals and discuss and develop their concerns about meat-eating. While similar to and influenced by secular, Western vegetarianisms, the central role of Buddhism was reflected in discourses on karmic retribution for taking life and in a non-confrontational approach that sought to accommodate these discourses with the importance of meat in Chinese social life. Finally, the vegetarian restaurants spoke to middle-class projects of self-cultivation, and by doing so potentially challenged associations between meat-eating and social status.

Consumer and Consumed

The papers that make up this collection were already long in development when the European ‘horsemeat scandal’ in early 2013 threatened to derail still further what fragile trust there remained in food producers and retailers. This scandal entailed the discovery that horsemeat was being passed off in branded ready-made meals and processed foods as other types of more culturally acceptable meat, beef in particular (Lawrence 2013). But earlier animal food-related crises – from the discovery of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in cattle in the 1980s, to the widespread contamination of powdered milk with melamine in China that came to light in 2008 – had already made it abundantly plain that, in the context of industrialising and globalising food supply systems, the animals we eat do not simply sustain our bodies or satisfy our culinary tastes but, in doing so, come profoundly to reshape social, economic and ecological relations and cultural understandings of edibility, taste and health. Connections between humans and animals-as-food are not simply one-way relationships between consumer and consumed, but involve a more complex set of relations concerned, among other things, with ecological change, world markets and local economic conditions, health and food safety, labour relations and changing cultural values. For example, growing meat consumption has been described as part of a wider, increasingly globalised ‘nutrition transition’ away from diets rich in fibres and complex carbohydrates, a transition associated with emergent health concerns including rises in obesity, type II diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, cardiovascular illnesses and certain cancers (Popkin 1993; Drewnowski 1999).

“There is no such thing as Dian cuisine!” Food and local identity in urban Southwest China

The article asks why it is that projects celebrating regional cuisine may be unsuccessful in gaining recognition from people in the region. It explores how a recent campaign in Yunnan, China attempted to construct a “modern” image for the province through promoting a distinctive, “green” regional cuisine. However, in a context of rapid changes to urban space and the food supply, residents in the provincial capital, Kunming, were ambivalent towards the notion of a regional cuisine. It is argued that to gain recognition locally, public celebrations of regional cuisine must resonate with people’s lived experiences and performances of “their” foods.

Chinese meals: diversity and change

Abstract This chapter considers the relevance of traditional Chinese food culture for shaping meals in China, in the light of recent changes in food consumption and the introduction of new approaches to food. It highlights diversities and inequalities in Chinese meals, in particular along regional, ethnic, urban–rural, gendered and generational lines. It is argued that, although the last 30 years have seen dramatic changes and growing differences in food, still many of the basic principles associated with traditional food culture are relevant to contemporary Chinese meal practices and discourses on food.

Heritagizing local cheese in China: Opportunities, challenges, and inequalities

ABSTRACT The author discusses the heritagization of local foods in China, based on his ethnographic research into the production, marketing, and consumption of rubing or “milk cake,” a goat milk cheese made in Yunnan province in the southwest of the country. The article draws attention to regional and ethnic dimensions to heritagization processes in China, sheds light on the relationship between heritagization and state projects of agricultural modernization, and raises critical questions about the opportunities and challenges for smallholder producers to create and capture value in the growing market for Chinese local heritage foods.

Food Consumption in Global Perspective

Recenzovaná kniha je sbírkou deseti esejí různých autorů na téma antropologie jídla, která vyšla na počest třicátého výročí vydání knihy Cooking, Cuisine and Class (1982) britského antropologa Jacka Goodyho.1 Myšlenka takto poctít autorův příspěvek do jmenované oblasti vznikla na sympoziu pořádaném Food Studies Centre při School of Oriental and African Studies v Londýně (Klein and Murcott 2014: 1-2). Abychom lépe porozuměli recenzovanému dílu, je třeba si nejprve přiblížit obsah Goodyho práce, jíž tento sborník příspěvků vzdává poctu. V historickém pohledu na vývoj disciplíny antropologie jídla je Goodyho kniha Cooking, Cuisine and Class označována za zlomové, ale částečně nedoceněné dílo (takto např. Mintz and Du Bois 2002: 100, nebo Klein and Murcott 2014: 2-4). Největším přínosem a inovací této Goodyho práce byla skutečnost, že nezkoumala jídlo pouze prizmatem tehdy dominantních symbolicky orientovaných perspektiv, ale byla schopna zachytit ho také v kontextu sociální stratifi kace, materiálních faktorů a historické změny pohledem historické a komparativní analýzy (Klein and Murcott 2014: 2). Tato analýza přitom zohledňuje celou řadu do té doby opomíjených faktorů. Těmi jsou především problematika ekonomického pozadí zacházení s jídlem a zohlednění dodatečných dimenzí, jako jsou výrobní možnosti, logistika, distribuce atd. (Klein and Murcott 2014: 6). Mintz a Du Bois toto období dokonce označují jako okamžik, kdy antropologie jídla dospěla (2002: 100). Co se empirického materiálu týče, Goodyho kniha je postavena na historickokomparativní metodě srovnání euroasijských a afrických společností, kombinované s etnografi ckým výzkumem v různých oblastech západní Afriky. Euroasijské společnosti jsou v knize označovány jako hierarchické, zatímco společnosti africké jako hieratické. Goody si všímá toho, že odhlédneme-li od skladby jídelníčku,

Introduction: Cooking, Cuisine and Class and the Anthropology of Food

In a review essay discussing Jack Goody’s (1982) Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz describes the book as ‘a pioneering work, because it looks broadly at the many-sided relationship between food and the rest of culture’ (Mintz 1989: 185). Later, Mintz and Christine Du Bois (2002) argue that the publication of Cooking, Cuisine and Class in 1982 marked a ‘turning point’ in the development of the anthropology of food and eating. By the time of their writing in 2002, they assert that the field had ‘matured enough to serve as a vehicle for examining large and varied problems of theory and research methods’ (Mintz and Du Bois 2002: 100). Since then, the anthropology of food has continued to prosper and mature. This is evidenced by a growing number of academic conferences, research centres, university course modules and postgraduate programmes and by the proliferation and growing sophistication of publications in the anthropology and wider social science of food, including dedicated journals (e.g., Food, Culture and Society; Food and Foodways; Gastronomica; Food and History), readers (e.g., Watson and Caldwell 2005; Counihan and Van Esterik 2013) and handbooks (e.g., Murcott, Belasco and Jackson 2013; Pilcher 2012; Watson and Klein forthcoming).1

East Asian Science, Technology and Society

In this well-conceived collection of essays, the anthropologist Everett Zhang and his colleagues—several anthropologists, a legal scholar, a public health specialist, a medical sociologist, a historian, a political scientist, and a philosopher—trace the changing modalities of state power and concomitant changes to the perceptions of human life in China from the Mao years to the present period. As Arthur Kleinman points out in his foreword, in the 1970s the Communist Party-State acted “as if its subjects owed it their very lives” (xiv), while today it takes the well-being of China’s citizens as its central concern. This shift in state power has created the conditions for a growing number of Chinese to imagine and pursue an “adequate life,” which according to Everett Zhang in his introduction “entails elevation from merely living a life to living a better life, from insuring biological being to insuring wellbeing” (8). The book comprises twelve substantive chapters, a foreword, an introduction, and an epilogue. In his introduction, Zhang draws on Foucault’s contrast between “sovereignty,” a mode of power in which the king rules in order to ensure his own reign, and “governmentality,” in which the purpose of governance is the security and well-being of the population. To these he adds a third mode of power, “communist revolution,” a combination of dictatorship, mass mobilization, radical egalitarianism, and utopianism that contained elements of governmentality but tended to emphasize sacrifice of the people’s current well-being, or even lives, in the name of sovereign power and utopian ideals. Zhang thus argues that while governmentality has never been entirely absent in the People’s Republic, in earlier decades it was frequently marginalized by a combination of sovereign power and communist revolution. Similarly, while the scope of governmentality has steadily deepened during the reform years beginning in 1978, the two other modes of power are still present and have at different moments