Mike Crang

This book investigates the current and potential roles of food consumption to address sustainability challenges in China. Focusing on the megacity of Guangzhou, it looks at sustainability and food from the perspectives of government, commercial, and third sector actors, and through the lived experiences of consumers. It charts the rapidly transforming landscapes of retail across urban China and the ways they are shaping and are shaped by everyday food consumption practices. Using a multi-method research approach of quantitative and ethnographic data, it provides readers with a rich and comprehensive understanding of the relationships and tensions between contemporary practices of food consumption and pressing sustainability challenges. It unpacks the complex foodscape in contemporary Chinese cities, from traditional wet markets to online deliveries, from supermarkets to farmers markets and alternative food providers, to understand the values and practices promoting and hindering sustainability in food consumption. The book is intended for academics from advanced undergraduate level through to Masters, postgraduates and scholars across key social science disciplines including Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, and Business, and internationally given the global interest in the focus on China. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

This chapter places the spotlight on the diverse supply chains shaping Guangzhou’s foodscape, connecting understandings of sustainable consumption with political economies of production and distribution. Against the backdrop of a Chinese food system prioritizing food security and safety, it considers how issues of sustainability underpin, either conspicuously or inconspicuously, the workings of traditional and modern parts of the mainstream food system, as well as how they are dealt with overtly in niche alternative food markets. The chapter also shows where sustainability, both its environmental and social dimensions, can be compromised, particularly in mainstream and modernizing parts of the food system. Through the analysis we draw out where agency and responsibility are located, emphasizing how state, commercial and third sector influences intertwine through diverse supply chain structures.

This chapter presents the findings of the consumer survey designed to evaluate cognitive dimensions of sustainable consumption and prevailing trends and values. The overall aim with the survey was to establish how consumer characteristics and values affect the extent to which consumers in China engage in behaviours reflective of food sustainability. The chapter assesses consumer characteristics and values of both a self-oriented nature (e.g. health concerns) and an others-oriented nature (e.g. altruism). The survey also considered two types of consumer behaviour reflective of food sustainability – sustainable consumption behaviours such as consuming homegrown or fair trade labelled goods and sustainable curtailment behaviours, such as reducing one’s consumption of particular products. Overall, the chapter explains how and why consumers surveyed largely report sustainable consumption and curtailment behaviours being influenced by “self-related” reasons including health matters and frugality.

This chapter shows how versions of sustainable food consumption are practised by Chinese consumers, focusing on those residing in the neighbourhoods of our Guangzhou study. It demonstrates how consumption in Guangzhou is practised through a foodscape where modern and highly digitized supermarket formats and food delivery services operate alongside thriving traditional wet markets, emerging alternative markets and a growing restaurant sector. The chapter explores the following interconnected fields through which ordinary food consumption with implications for sustainability can take place (i) the pursuit of food freshness; (ii) valuing cultural heritage, memory and place; (iii) considerations of health; (iv) emerging connections with foods supplied through Alternative Food Networks (AFNs); (v) food fashions and digital influence and (vi) urban food production.

This chapter sets out the aims of the book and provides an outline of its structure. To introduce the themes of food system sustainability and sustainable food consumption, it presents an overview of debates in these fields and describes how food is produced, processed, transported, retailed and consumed and how the governance of food has evolved in a complex web of interactions across many actors across the globe. Thus, the chapter highlights how food systems today are seen as complex socio-ecological systems operating across multiple spatial, temporal and jurisdictional scales, including in China. Following this, the chapter provides an overview of the book’s structure and remaining chapters.

This chapter reflects on the variegated urban foodscapes with sustainable, as well as unsustainable, dimensions and asks how the culinary heritage of China and the habits of routine create a dynamic set of “ordinary ethics”. Examining various values and understandings of “good food”, consumption of food in practice is shown to be always laden with sustainable dimensions of all sorts, enabling us to think of the possibilities for more sustainable outcomes. The conclusion offers approaches that go beyond the notion of individualized consumers embedded in various neo-liberal, market-led approaches, but also encoded in much of the literature that sets out to address a “values-action” gap in terms of “willingness to pay” a premium for sustainably sourced food. Instead, it shows how evolution in food consumption in China is embedded in wider cultures as an evolving “habitus” shaping practices.

This chapter sets out the book’s conceptualization of sustainable food consumption across urban China and in Guangzhou. It does so in three parts, beginning first by acknowledging a large social science and humanities literature on consumption. The second part conceptualizes sustainable food consumption more specifically, engaging in turn with the framing of sustainability in the food system, prevailing perspectives on sustainable consumer behaviour and choice and theories of practice emphasizing the habitual dimensions of everyday life in which consumption and its environmental and social implications are embedded. The third part of the chapter then develops theorization of sustainable food consumption in cities.

This chapter presents an overview of the institutional, commercial and cultural settings for sustainable food consumption in China more broadly, and in Guangzhou specifically. China has become one of the largest food markets in the world, and it continues to grow rapidly. In terms of institutional context, the chapter explains that the state has historically been the major actor in modes of food provisioning. Concerns with the effects of pollution on food and damage to the environment are reflected in the country’s five-year plans. Market-led reforms have created a complex institutional foodscape from large “dragonhead” state-related providers and contracts with small farms to a consumer market mixing transnational/national retailers and traditional wet markets. The chapter highlights the diversifying “foodscape” (understood as a landscape of food retail outlets, markets and food service) of Guangzhou.

This chapter outlines the methodology used for the research underpinning the book. It first explains the geographical dimensions of the methodology, addressing the Chinese urban foodscape more broadly as well as focusing in greater depth on consumption practice in Guangzhou. It then fleshes out the rationale for a multi-method approach. Following that, the chapter explains in turn: the design and implementation of the consumer survey; interviews with influential commercial, regulatory and third sector actors; interviews with middle- and upper-middle-income consumers in Guangzhou’s neighbourhoods; and ethnographic methods to engage with ordinary food consumption in the city. For each method, the chapter also describes how it contributes to situated knowledge of sustainable food consumption.

China is facing an important period of rural governance innovation and restructuring of territorial spatial patterns. This paper selects catchments as the most closely related spatial units for rural industrial development and rural settlement activities, profoundly revealing the characteristics of transformational development and spatial governance in mountainous areas. To date, extensive literature in this area has produced a broad multidisciplinary consensus on catchment water and soil conservation and rural industry development; however, the interactive mechanism of ecological, social, and economic networks, and the characteristics behind small catchments which benefit from spatial governance, have never been analyzed and are relatively new to the sphere of rural governance. Our research argues the relative importance of multi-scale catchment units compared with traditional administrative village units in enhancing the organizational benefits of rural revitalization in terms of workforce, resources, and capital, using the case study of a catchment in the Wuling mountainous area. Our study presents a framework to explore the multi-dimensional governance experience of a small catchment in the Wuling mountainous area and proposes to integrate the resource endowment advantages of small catchments into rural industries development and transform the economic and social benefits contained in the ecological environment into multi-scale spatial benefits among farmers, villages, and the regional rural area. However, not all cases provide positive evidence. The overall development of a catchment is confronted with complex constraints, which are mainly related to the development stage and local historical and geographical factors. Furthermore, affected by the top-down “project-system” in the “poverty era”, the logic of “betting on the strong” and the single-centered logic of resource allocation at the grassroots level exacerbated the fragmentation of the mountainous area. Generally speaking, the catchment perspective promotes regional linkage development and multi-center governance modes and triggers multidisciplinary theoretical thinking to some extent. The catchment’s overall development helps play to the comparative advantage of mountainous areas and promotes endogenous sustainable development to a certain degree. However, the promotion of catchment governance in poverty-stricken mountainous areas is faced with a lack of financial foundation and needs support in order to break through the national system and local social constraints.