Abstract
Studies of contemporary food production document both the environmental and ethical problems of mass production and the ongoing search for sustainable alternatives. Industrial food infrastructures characterised by long supply chains and a sense of ethical disconnection between producers and consumers often appear to undermine consumer trust and require remedial measures in the form of technologies of trust. Post-Mao China is a case in point: food safety is a constant headache for both regulators and consumers and the 2008 milk scandal was but a low point in a seemingly endless series of incidents involving sub-standard and dangerous food. While regulators are pushing traceability and certification, the promise of perfectly transparent production and distribution of food inspires limited confidence, and people pursue a variety of alternative strategies, including building personal relations with producers and vendors, do-it-yourself farming, and accessing the special produce grown for government units. Based on fieldwork among farmers and officials in rural Hebei, this chapter explores how contemporary food infrastructures in China call for the deployment of technologies of trust that range from low-tech cultivation of social relations with producers to high-tech systems of transparency based on surveillance and laboratory testing of foodstuffs.
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Notes
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In terms of providing a genealogy for the term, it is hardly just an etymological coincidence that the character 供, composed of the characters for ‘person’ 人 and ‘to share’ 共, also means ‘to offer as sacrifice or tribute’. Offering up sacrifices to deities is called 上供 and if the term ‘special supplies’ 特供 conjures up the logic of a redistributive economy, it is not exclusively associated with the socialist economy of Maoism, but also with imperial and religious logics of redistribution.
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Acknowledgements
The research project ‘Moral Economies of Food in Contemporary China’ was funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The chapter has benefitted from discussions with colleagues in this research project, Anders Sybrandt Hansen and Ingrid Fihl and with the other contributors to a special issue of Journal of Current Chinese Affairs that grew out of the project: Caroline Merrifield, Ellen Oxfeld, Erika Kuever, Jakob Klein, and Jamie Coates. Thanks to Jia Meina, Judy Farquhar, Lai Lili, Yan Hairong, and Zhao Xudong for memorable conversations about food in China.
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Bunkenborg, M. (2022). Food Infrastructures and Technologies of Trust in Contemporary China. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_36
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