Eating at the Margins: Negotiating Food Safety and Food Security in Ho Chi Minh City’s Charities

Abstract

While food security in Vietnam has significantly improved in recent decades, many urbanites still rely on private food charities. Meanwhile, growing food safety concerns have been studied with a strong focus on emerging middle classes, whereas socio-economic precarity connected to food safety has attracted less attention. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in food charities in Ho Chi Minh City, this article examines how symbolic and spatial boundaries perpetuate power imbalances within charities and affect patrons’ food safety practices. It challenges the narrative that caring about food safety is limited to affluent consumers, instead highlighting the structural constraints that prevent people in urban poverty from acting upon food safety concerns, including (1) power imbalances within food charities and (2) lack of overall food security. The research shows the limitations of food charities in establishing long-term food security for socio-economically marginalised citizens and of a governmental food safety approach emphasising consumer ‘choice’.

Keywords:

• Charity
• Consumption
• Consumption Inequality
• Food Safety
• Urban Food Security
• Urban Vietnam

Introduction

Vietnam’s steady economic growth and poverty reduction following the 1986 economic reforms that opened the late socialist country to world market integration have regularly been celebrated as a development success (see Hansen 2017). Overall food security in the country has improved significantly in recent decades. Yet, despite the overall achievements in food security, many urbanites in Vietnam continue to rely on private charity initiatives for their daily sustenance. As will become apparent in the following, such food charities can be characterised by high demand, utilitarian set-up, fast pace, and clear demarcations between volunteers and staff on the one hand and patrons on the other. While Ho Chi Minh City’s (HCMC) food charities alleviate immediate food insecurity, my research shows how the underlying relationship between those who voluntarily ‘give’ and those in need who ‘receive’ charity does not constitute a structural solution to food insecurity. As in other parts of the world, privately run food charities provide sustenance to people living in so-called food insecurity while filling institutional gaps of economic and state systems in which precariousness persists (see Caplan 2020; Poppendieck 1999).

For patrons—many of whom live in urban poverty—navigating such charities is aggravated by prevailing food safety concerns in contemporary Vietnam. Based on the actualities of HCMC’s food charity patrons, the article examines structural constraints for negotiating food safety concerns: socio-economic precarity and overall food insecurity pose limits to people’s scope of action, a circumstance exacerbated by power imbalances in food charities that impede communication on food safety measures between the different parties.

Theoretically, I draw on understandings of symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002) as well as spatial boundaries to highlight the division between those who ‘give’ and those who ‘receive’, and the power imbalances perpetuated in food charities. Symbolic boundaries refer to the ‘conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices’ (Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168). The focus on boundary construction and maintenance within charity contexts of care is not to suggest boundary drawing as conscious acts of individuals but, rather, ought to emphasise how boundaries are inherent in structural circumstances and reinforced by wider economic and political conditions.

I argue that HCMC’s charities, as places hosting a configuration of often well-off ‘givers’ and poor ‘receivers’, are representative of the country’s growing inequalities. Furthermore, I contend that for people in urban poverty, navigating food safety is particularly arduous, while simultaneously I challenge the widespread notion that people in precarious situations do not care about food safety.

This paper draws on qualitative ethnographic research and around thirty interviews, conducted in HCMC between 2015 and 2017, particularly from a lunch-place charity which I refer to as Cho.

As part of wider research on food safety in urban Vietnam, I contacted Cho in 2016 to integrate the perspectives of lower-income citizens on food safety into my work. Subsequently, I volunteered at the charity—which welcomes volunteers to drop in—and interviewed patrons, volunteers, and staff in the same and following year. After 2016 I phased out the volunteering to create more distance between volunteering and my role as a researcher. Given my different roles around Cho and in line with a critical feminist research tradition (cf. England 1994), I reflect on my positionality throughout the article. Further data come from similar establishments within the city, including a charity organisation that provides hospital patients with hot meals. All participant observation was captured in field notes that I analysed subsequently. Some interviews were conducted in English, and the majority in Vietnamese with the assistance of an interpreter. With the participants’ consent, the interviews were recorded and coded in multiple cycles for analysis.

Most customers at Cho work in the informal sector, including selling lottery tickets, street vending of goods, or the self-organised collecting and recycling of waste. Others work in blue collar jobs such as security guard or mechanic. While some have permanent residency and secure income situations, others are homeless. Regarding formal education, the number of Cho patrons who have never gone to school or completed less than secondary school (nine years) was higher than the average in urban Vietnam (Thuy Ngoc Vuong, Gallegos, and Ramsey 2015). Age-wise, patrons range from small children accompanying their parents to elderly people, with the majority being between their forties and their sixties. In terms of gender, the number of patrons read as male and female are balanced.

Not everyone’s situation at Cho is equally precarious. Yet the popularity of places such as Cho—which do not ask for proof of people’s economic status but are open to the public—also among blue collar workers and students indicates that the appeal of food charities and the potentially concomitant underlying economic precarity concerns wider parts of the population than a narrow, quantified definition of poverty would suggest. Overall, many of the people whose voices are featured in this article live under precarious conditions that are not prominently considered in the current food safety debates and policies of Vietnam. I focus on how these people negotiate food safety and food security at the margins, examining the structural constraints of (1) power imbalances within food charities and (2) lack of overall food security.

The article begins with an overview of the relevance of food security and food safety in contemporary Vietnam, followed by the role of charities in providing food for urbanites. In the subsequent ethnographic section, I examine power dynamics in HCMC’s food charities, which are upheld by perceived clear demarcations between those who ‘give’ and those who ‘receive’ charity. I then analyse the relationship between food security and food safety from the perspectives of the patrons of a HCMC-based charity.

Food (In)Security in Vietnam

Overall, Vietnam has transformed from food scarcity to national food security in recent decades, meaning that its sufficient food production and imports can statistically feed the nation (Marzin and Michaud 2016). Food security applies ‘when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’ (FAO et al. 2019, 186) with ‘access’ having been a crucial addition to the concept in the 1980s (Tran Thi Thu Trang 2011). The food security framework has informed governmental policies that have promoted industrialised agriculture, technological solutions to increased food production, and international trade (Tran Thi Thu Trang 2011). But whereas the governmental approach to food security centres on self-sufficiency in rice on the national level, access and food quality are not addressed (Gorman 2019; Tran Thi Thu Trang 2011).

While Vietnamese diets have overall become more diverse and sufficient (Pingali 2007), concerns over food safety (an toàn thực phẩm) have become prominent (Figuié et al. 2019). Food safety issues feature in media reporting, as well as in public perception (Wertheim-Heck, Raneri, and Oosterveer 2019). For example, the last decades have seen increased (mis)use of chemical products like agro-chemicals and preservatives in the context of the country’s intensified food production (World Bank 2017). In terms of public perception, consumers’ highest concerns relate to pesticide residues, preservatives, and hormones in livestock leading to fruits, vegetables, and meat being viewed as the least safe foods (Thanh Mai Ha, Shakur, and Kim Hang Pham Do 2019, 238). Furthermore, hygiene—especially of street food (thức ăn đường phố)—is a widespread food safety concern (Faltmann 2022). The food safety strategy of the Vietnamese government strongly emphasises supermarket expansion as a guarantor for food safety (Wertheim-Heck, Raneri, and Oosterveer 2019) and consumer education to inform consumers’ food safety decisions (Faltmann 2022).

Although ‘safe’ food forms part of the definition of food security, the manifold food safety issues in contemporary Vietnam are usually not considered in pronouncements of the country’s achievement of overall food security.

Consumption-focused research on food safety in Vietnam tends to focus on the emerging urban middle classes (Bitter-Suermann 2014; Hansen 2021). Questions of precarity and social inequality in the rapidly changing market economy of Vietnam in relation to food safety issues have received less attention (notable exceptions are Figuié and Moustier 2009; Moustier et al. 2006; Wertheim-Heck, Vellema, and Spaargaren 2015, 2019).

Considering Vietnam’s achievements in national food security, the persistence of food insecurity for some citizens in less overt ways is often overlooked. Issues of undernutrition and temporary phases of insecure food access map very differently across rural and urban contexts. While undernutrition in Vietnam is predominantly a phenomenon among rural and/or ethnic minority populations, food insecurity also exists in cities (Trang Thi Huy Nhat 2008). With food security programs in Vietnam usually focusing on rural contexts and ethnic minorities, urban household food security is also vastly under-researched (Thuy Ngoc Vuong, Gallegos, and Ramsey 2015). Furthermore, rural and urban food insecurity are inherently linked as a growing number of landless peasants migrate to cities due to decreasing rural livelihood opportunities and increasing rural–urban wealth gaps (Hy V. Luong and Gunewardena 2009). Particularly those rural–urban migrants with low levels of formal education often work in the informal economy and are affected by urban poverty (Cuong Nguyen, Vu Linh, and Thang Nguyen 2013) and, at times, by food insecurity (FAO 2008).

Charity and the State in Vietnam

In the context of urban food insecurity, charities provide goods and services to people in marginalised circumstances. HCMC is home to other food charities similar to Cho that offer either free or very cheap food. The high attendance at such institutions reflects the need for places offering free or subsidised food. Besides offering meals in food charities, donation-based food institutions also provide hospital patients with food given that hospitals in Vietnam generally do not include meals, leaving patients (or their families) in charge of organising their own sustenance (see Le Hoang Anh Thu 2020).

Duy, a man in his 60s, has been operating such a food charity in HCMC for 25 years. The organisation cooks and delivers hot meals to hospital patients in precarious economic situations, including many patients from the countryside who have already paid a lot for transport and treatment. As Duy put it in an interview, ‘they are poor and have less money than people who live in Ho Chi Minh City’. Being very aware of rural–urban income disparities, Duy especially supports people from the countryside via food and at times monetary donations. However, a selection process precedes the food donations in which the recipients must ‘prove that they are poor’, Duy says, by presenting governmental confirmation of their economic situation. In terms of government involvement, Duy says that the charity officially belongs to the government, ‘but in reality it is private and donation based’.

‘Giving’ also has long-standing religious meanings in Vietnam. For instance, in Buddhism, material giving (dana) accounts for an important practice for Vietnamese Buddhists (Swenson 2020, 3). The free meals provided by pagodas across contemporary Vietnam are a potent example of this. Following enhanced religious freedom in the post-reform period, religiously motivated philanthropic activities have proliferated, with official motives being ‘charity’, ‘compassion’, as well as ‘saving people’ (Nguyen Anh Phuong and Doan 2015, 479). Not only in relation to Buddhist teachings, engagement in charity in Vietnamese society is viewed as a social responsibility (Huong T. Hoang, Trang T. Nguyen, and Reynolds 2019, 1079).

Beyond the faith-based domain, the post-reform period has seen a proliferation of both domestic and international non-profit organisations (NPOs) as well as private sector corporations (Nguyen Anh Phuong and Doan 2015, 473). While the aim of such initiatives might have been to complement certain shortcomings of the state, their proliferation was also approved by the government (Huong T. Hoang, Trang T. Nguyen, and Reynolds 2019).¹ Recent influences in the Vietnamese charity landscape include corporate charity, growing wealth, and increasingly professionalised NPOs and local donors (Nguyen Anh Phuong and Doan 2015, 483). Overall, charity activities in Vietnam are financed by a range of sources from domestic corporate giving and private donations to overseas Vietnamese remittances, and non-governmental and bi/multilateral sources abroad (Nguyen Anh Phuong and Doan 2015, 479, 482).

Besides corporate charity, it is religious and party-related mass organisations that feature prominently within campaigns for charitable contributions towards disadvantaged groups (Nguyen Anh Phuong and Doan 2015, 480). Especially Buddhist charities have strong capacities to raise funds and to offer accessible services to communities in need (Le Hoang Anh Thu and Swenson 2024). Overall, people seem to favour giving to unofficial (religious) channels rather than to mass organisations or government agencies (TAF & VAPEC 2011).

Based on privately organised, voluntary contributions of wealth and volunteered time, charity initiatives play a pivotal role in fighting food insecurity while providing individualised and voluntary fixes for structural issues. This phenomenon can be found across capitalist-oriented societies (Caplan 2020; Poppendieck 1999), yet in late-socialist/ capitalist Vietnam it is occurring in the context of a rather recent increasing wealth divide and the strong rule of a one-party state. As is the case across the globe, the institutionalisation of charity-based food programs runs the risk of de-politicising hunger and food insecurity by foregrounding charitable giving while overlooking structural sources of precarity (Caplan 2020; Matos 2021; Poppendieck 1999; Silvasti and Riches 2014, 192).

Generally, the voluntariness of many charities, the strong influence of prominent individuals within HCMC’s charity organisations such as Duy, as well as the clear binary demarcation between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’ entail power imbalances that impact the scope of action for those on the ‘receiving’ end, as I will discuss in the following ethnographic section.

Power Dynamics Within Food Charities

Every weekday at lunch time, a long queue forms outside of Cho, a food charity located in HCMC’s central District 1. The first patrons arrive as early as one hour before food is served from 11am–1pm. At this point, staff and volunteers have been cleaning trays, chopping ingredients, and cooking food in large pots since early morning. Come lunch time, patrons pay 2,000 VND (about 0.08 USD) in exchange for a tray of food. The meals usually follow the same formula of rice, a serving of vegetables, and meat or fish, arranged in corresponding compartments of metal trays. After getting a tray, patrons either quickly find a seat themselves or are pointed towards a free spot by one of the volunteers. The long and narrow room is lined with tables on both sides as well as in the centre of the room so that people in the middle face other diners while those sitting on the sides face the wall.

Whereas the side dishes are portioned, there is always an abundance of rice bowls on the tables from which patrons refill their trays. One of my tasks as a volunteer at Cho was to go around the room and refill the bowls from a large pot. After being too slow at this task using a ladle, I was handed a plastic glove to transfer the steaming rice via large handfuls instead. Many patrons are dressed warmly—those who work outdoors tend to wear long clothes and hats against the scorching sun. Others wear security uniforms, boiler suits, the orange uniforms of waste collectors, or casual wear. A young man in a crisp shirt stands out between people in ragged or worn-out clothes and shoes that look either too small or too large for their wearers. Some patrons have visible impairments and many of the older patrons have stooped body postures. Limited operating hours of the lunch charity and high demand mean fast turnaround times; once they finish eating, patrons are expected to bring their tray to the kitchen at the rear of the room and make space for others in line.

On a morning in September 2016, the volunteers prepared the lunch at Cho while Vietnamese folk music quietly purred from the speaker boxes. Come lunchtime operation, heads turn towards a scene that is unfolding at the meal counter. A volunteer and an older female customer shout at each other after the patron receives the standard tray with fish when she wanted meat instead. The volunteer ends up roughly handing over the preferred tray to the patron but not without signalling that this kind of behaviour is unwelcome. Immediately after, the music changes abruptly to the hard beats of the Korean electro house song ‘Gangnam style’ with the volume all the way up, making conversation impossible. For the duration of one song, the discomfort in the room is palpable.

The scene exemplifies the subtle power dynamics at play within the setting of Cho, raising the question of how, or to what degree, communication as equals is possible between the patrons on the one hand and the volunteers and staff on the other, both in general and regarding customers’ food safety concerns.

Besides rare and subtle forms of micro-aggression, there are also more mundane ways through which hierarchical, spatial, and temporal divisions between patrons and volunteers/ staff are continuously reproduced. As has been discussed for other food charities, there exists a range of invisible rules and both spatial and symbolic boundaries between volunteers and patrons, including the avoidance of physical proximity and social familiarity that, although not made explicit, tend to be enacted and might become apparent only through their accidental transgression (Cohen, Krumer-Nevo, and Avieli 2017). Such boundaries, in turn, are underpinned by notions of who ‘gives’ and who ‘receives’.

At Cho, the division between staff and volunteers, and patrons—while not explicitly voiced—was clear-cut to the degree that any deviation stood out. One day, a patron crossed this division by taking part as a volunteer as well: after finishing his meal, a young mechanic in a blue boiler suit began giving out rice upon his own initiative. This was such a rare sight that the divergence was immediately noticeable. With time being the only requirement, volunteering was rather low stakes as it did not ask for any training, health certificates, or the likes. Yet, despite volunteering being available to anyone who can invest some time, including the diners, fluidity in relation to the symbolic boundary between customers and volunteers was not explicitly encouraged (cf. Cohen, Krumer-Nevo, and Avieli 2017).

Following the practice of similar establishments, staff and volunteers at Cho eat before the place opens. This arrangement led to the interesting tension that volunteers eat (first and) for free while the patrons (eat later and) pay for their meals. On some days, the order of meals at Cho meant that the food was exhausted with a line of patrons remaining, meaning that the usually well-off volunteers had been fed whereas the at times food-insecure patrons at the end of the line had to turn to other options, often beyond their financial means. Moreover, sitting at the big table in the middle of the venue and facing each other, the volunteers eat the same food as the customers yet with the option to select preferred foods and amounts and without the time pressure faced by patrons. As the earlier vignette described, the diners, in contrast, are given a meal tray without decision power beyond choosing vegetarian or non-vegetarian, are assigned a seat, and expected to eat fast. After finishing their meals, patrons drop off their trays at the kitchen and then leave the establishment without lingering. Socially produced spatial, temporal, and symbolic divides exist between staff/ volunteers and diners as well as the expectation to maintain these boundaries, including who eats what with whom (Cohen, Krumer-Nevo, and Avieli 2017). As Yael Cohen et al. put it, ‘[t]he boundary between soup kitchen diners and the rest of society was not born in the soup kitchen; however, soup kitchens may be partners in its constitution and sanctioning’ (2017, 7).

These boundaries are underpinned by societal, global, and at times racialised inequalities. Moreover, they lead to essentialised notions of who ‘gives’ and who ‘receives’. Regarding the former, both intra-societal as well as global inequalities materialised at Cho. Many of the diners had spent only a few years at school and lived under precarious socio-economic circumstances (cf. Cohen, Krumer-Nevo, and Avieli 2017; McNaughton et al. 2021), while many of the volunteers were well-off economically and often highly educated. During the time of research, the volunteers consisted of a very regular group of predominantly female retirees, and a steady flow of occasional as well as one-off volunteers comprising pupils and university students, and groups of mothers coming together with their children.

Wealth-based as well as racialised divisions were exacerbated through noticeable changes between 2016 and 2017 when Cho began to host international volunteers who came through organised volunteering programs, a booming sector in Vietnam in recent years (Nguyen Anh Phuong and Doan 2015, 481). Most of them in their early twenties, they were from Japan, the USA, and Europe. One such program that cooperates with a HCMC ‘soup kitchen’ advertises the experience of working in ‘food relief’ for a weekly program cost of 245 USD paid by the volunteers (Humanitarian Web n.d.). Two months’ worth of such program fees are the equivalent of Vietnam’s annual per capita GDP and well exceed the incomes of most patrons of HCMC’s food charities. This financial aspect alone illustrates the gaping socio-economic inequalities that come together at charities like Cho. Through such ties, locally run food charities also end up being embedded in larger structures of international development ‘aid’ including the often racialised underpinnings between a predominantly white Global North and an ‘othered’ Global South (Bian 2022). The fact that a white US-American citizen coming to one of HCMC’s food charities once a year to volunteer for some weeks has attracted local media attention (Thanh Nien News 2013), to the degree that the volunteering by individual Vietnamese people has not, is a reminder that this racialised and essentialising understanding of who is there to ‘give’ is also perpetuated in the media.

The symbolic boundaries between those ‘giving’ by providing donations or their time and those ‘receiving’ the fruits of this charity is intrinsically tied to ways of self-understanding. Through the division of people into groups, symbolic boundaries generate a sense of group membership (Lamont and Molnár 2002, 168). The motivation of many of the volunteers is to ‘do good’, often with religious underpinnings. For instance, Duy’s hospital food charity is explicitly grounded in Buddhist beliefs of ‘giving’ and operates through Buddhist networks. Likewise, some volunteers at Cho stress their Christian or Buddhist backgrounds, and mothers take their children to volunteer to ‘give back’ and raise their children’s awareness of their privileged lives.

While the wish to have a positive impact is a central motivation of people engaging in charity, so is the feeling of having a better conscience. The theme of the clear conscience corresponds with the findings of The Asia Foundation and the Vietnam Asia Pacific Economic Center (TAF & VAPEC 2011) that besides the wish to ease others’ difficulties, personal satisfaction is among the main reasons why people in Vietnam contribute to charity. Among Buddhist volunteers in HCMC, the idea of gaining merit to improve their life circumstances through charitable acts also plays a role (Swenson 2020, 3). This sense of personal accomplishment, in turn, complicates the conceptualisation of who benefits from charity.

The role of the ‘receiver’, in turn, can be connoted with notions of neediness, gratitude, and often shame (McNaughton et al. 2021; Parsell and Clarke 2022; van der Horst, Pascucci, and Bol 2014). At Cho, there appeared to be both patrons moving comfortably in the space and others deeply uncomfortable. Light-hearted chats between strangers co-existed with the apparent discomfort of others who appeared shy or uneasy, their sun or conical hats pulled down over their faces even during the meal which they ate in silence. Whereas gratitude towards Cho was directly voiced by many patrons, a sense of shame was not explicitly stated yet seemed tangible at times. Even though mostly implicit, such discursive differences between volunteers/ staff and patrons, both in terms of morale and power, cannot be dismissed (McNaughton et al. 2021, 6; Parsell and Clarke 2022) and are relevant for people’s self-understanding in charity settings. Therefore, while potentially crossing such boundaries might mean empowerment for the patrons of charity institutions, it would also disrupt the equilibrium of unambiguous moral divides. Instead, the symbolic boundary between groups tends to be upheld even though some of the examples above show that such roles are not static, and the divide can be porous.

Meanwhile, even attempts to smooth over existing power imbalances can be brittle. There is for instance the fee of 2,000 VND per meal that all patrons must pay. The manager explained that the price is more symbolic than to cover the charity’s running costs: the patrons supposedly want to make a financial contribution to feel more like customers than like receivers of charity. Similarly, charity-run food distribution centres at times copy set-ups of regular supermarkets including layout and checkout to purvey a more ‘dignified’ shopping experience (McNaughton et al. 2021). However, such attempts to ‘normalise’ people’s experience of receiving food donations by imitating a consumer setting only thinly veil the existing disciplinary mechanisms and the absence of choice (see McNaughton et al. 2021). The difference is revealed in situations where patrons asserting a preference are considered unreasonably demanding whereas in other settings such an expression of preference would be considered as a customer right—the diner at Cho wanting meat instead of fish demonstrates as much. Underlying this scene seems to be the expectation that receivers of charity ought to be grateful. Thus, despite the attempt to approximate a setting of exchange through a small fee, Cho is not simply a very cheap restaurant, as demonstrated in the divide between patrons and volunteers, the food donations, the self-conception of volunteers as ‘giving back’ and of diners as grateful, and the overall operating mode of a food charity.

All these dynamics in food charities are tied to questions of agency, dependence, and power imbalances. Relying on food charities means a reliance on variables outside of one’s control; primarily, other people’s willingness to contribute their time or financial resources. As such contributions are inherently voluntary, they can also be revoked or redirected and the ‘recipients’ of charity cannot make any claims to them.

The differences in the operating modes of Cho, and Duy’s hospital charity—one being open to everyone for a small fee, the other demanding that recipients present documentation of their indigence—hint at such power imbalance. Despite certain efforts to create scenarios in which stark imbalances become less noticeable for patrons, as individual charitable initiatives, the parameters of operation and who is seen as ‘deserving’ of charity are decided upon by influential individuals. Meanwhile, the users of such services find themselves at the mercy of people with more agency, adding a further layer of precarity to their often unstable socio-economic situations (cf. Parsell and Clarke 2022). Through these configurations, food charities are effectively based on asymmetric power relations, perpetuated through symbolic boundaries between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’.

While never voiced explicitly but, rather, surfacing in the form of norms and potential micro-aggressions, there seems to be an assumption that patrons ought to take what they are given, implicit in many of the ways in which food charities operate, like the absence of a menu and of information on food composition and source (cf. Cohen, Krumer-Nevo, and Avieli 2017). The sheer pace of the interactions during lunchtime at Cho also barely allows for inquiries whereas volunteers have all morning to chat about and inspect the ingredients and their origins. This narrow situational agency on the side of the diners was summed up by one of the patrons who told me that in terms of food safety precautions, ‘I am a little scared about chemicals when I eat in there, but I cannot go to the kitchen which is why I just eat’. Thus, common food safety practices cannot be actualised in such settings of constraints. In contrast to restaurants, the general openness of volunteering at Cho would technically make it possible for this patron to go to the kitchen and get a first-hand impression of the food safety practices; however, given the mentioned divisions in place this is often not seen as an option.

Overall, food charities are settings in which a range of symbolic boundaries and power dynamics are at play that, in turn, shape the leeway of their patrons to negotiate their desires and concerns, including about food safety. Despite attempts to resemble a consumer setting at Cho, such as through the fee paid by patrons, underlying mechanisms assign a certain ‘place’ of gratefulness and modesty to diners. The limited room for manoeuvre faced by some of the more vulnerable charity diners is exacerbated further by having to navigate a tension between food safety and overall food security in the context of socio-economic precarity.

Navigating Food Safety vis-à-vis Food Security

The abundance of rice at Cho was one of the first non-verbal cues through which I learned to understand the importance of the meal for many of the patrons. To some of them, this would at times be the only reliable meal of the day, something which was reflected in the kind of filling they required from the meal. At its busiest, I could barely keep up with the demand in refilling the rice bowls; the size of some second helpings requested by patrons were much larger than I found intuitive. In a visceral sense, these moments expressed difference and led to a realisation of my own privilege through learning about patrons’ actualities: those among them who struggled to afford enough food have a very different notion of what amounts to a portion of rice compared to someone like me who has never had to experience uncertainty over the next meal.

Generally, rice in Vietnam is a highly important staple in people’s diets. With an annual national average of over 120 kg of rice per capita (Hoang Khanh Thi Hoa and Meyers 2015) compared to a global per capita consumption of around 53 kg (FAO 2017), cereals play an integral part in the nutrition and diet of Vietnamese people (Nguyen Minh Cong and Winters 2011), albeit a distinction must be made between higher rural than urban consumption and decreasing consumption levels in higher income groups (Hoang Khanh Thi Hoa and Meyers 2015). The role of rice as a central component of meals in Vietnam also emerges through language. Linguistically, the term cơm conveys both the meaning of ‘cooked rice’ and ‘a meal’ (Avieli 2012, 22), reflecting the expectation that a satisfying meal includes rice.

Yet, the significance of rice quantities at Cho appeared to surpass the food’s generally central role in Vietnamese diets. Given that some of the patrons come to Cho very hungry, the set-up of the place serves the very immediate purpose to fill people. Whereas some students, young workers, or families come in small groups, most patrons come alone. This, coupled with the spatial configuration of many seats at Cho facing the wall, contrasts both other meal scenarios and the significance placed on eating together in Vietnam. Shared family meals usually take place around a round tray or table with shared food at its centre, reflecting family relations, social hierarchies, and communality, and family members eating alone is rather an exception (Avieli 2012, 58–60). Also, outside of the home, eating in social settings conveys commensality, hospitality, and abundance (Ehlert 2016). Both the spatial and temporal set-up at Cho of patrons eating while facing a wall, and in view of the queue, create a scenario that is stripped of some of the trappings of more socially oriented meals. The spatial boundaries between the patrons and volunteers/staff ties in with the mentioned power imbalances in charity settings that leave patrons with limited agency. The scarce and fast-paced arrangement also points to the place’s functional orientation of feeding as many people as possible in as little time as possible, relating to the immediate needs that bring people to Cho.

One of the people for whom Cho is essential is Xuan, a man in his late sixties with worn-out clothes and a long beard who has no family or permanent home and who makes occasional money by selling nylon that he collects on the streets. His sense is that food at Cho is safer than street food,² which he thinks tends not to be washed properly. He also tries to avoid sausages out of fear that the meat is old. Yet agrochemicals are not something he states as a food safety concern. If not eating at Cho, he says he asks rich people at temples for a meal or tries other ways to get food. If this does not work out, ‘sometimes I just drink water’. The circumstances wherein his daily sustenance is not always secured suggests that Xuan is at times food insecure.

Xuan’s food situation is similar to Hien’s, a man in his late fifties who comes to Cho daily and sells lottery tickets on the street for a living. The spatial set-up of Cho does not accommodate Hien’s three-wheeled wheelchair, thus a member of staff always brings a tray of food outside to him on the street. Because he has no formal accommodation, his wheelchair also functions as his sleeping place. Given that he has no permanent home—let alone a kitchen—and a precarious income situation, the food options available to him are limited. Hien either eats at Cho, or he eats street food, although he adds that street food is expensive compared to lunch at Cho. Like many of Cho’s customers, his primary food safety concern lies with hygiene, and he claims to ‘not care about chemicals, just if the food is good or not’. Instead, he looks out for practices such as street vendors using food covers to avoid contamination. When asked how safe he feels regarding his food, Hien admits that neither street food nor food at Cho feel particularly safe to him. Yet his primary concern is getting enough food, thus long-term safety—in Vietnam often connected to agrochemical contamination—is a less prominent worry of his.

Hien’s emphasis on the hygiene of food outlets can be understood in the context of him lacking access to a kitchen, making home cooking impossible: common food safety practices like choosing ingredients as well as treating ingredients before and during cooking (Thanh Mai Ha, Shakur, and Kim Hang Pham Do 2019) are beyond the control of Hien and Xuan. Their situations appear exemplary for overall food security concerns overpowering long-term food safety concerns leading to a predominant focus on the more short-term safety concern of hygiene.

This is not to say that people preoccupied with securing access to sufficient food do not care about food safety—although this is a common narrative both among the patrons of Cho themselves and in other socio-economically better off circles. A reply I often heard when broadly inquiring about food concerns among Cho’s diners was that people were too poor to be able to care about food safety. This not only speaks to the overpowering concern with food security but is also in line with widespread notions of distinction about food safety concerns. It is often people from the emerging middle classes with the respective means—economic and other—who tend to be concerned and outspoken about ‘safe’ food practices and ‘healthy’ eating (Faltmann 2023; Hansen 2017). This at times goes hand in hand with the drawing of symbolic boundaries; for example, through the notion that many Vietnamese would not care about ‘safe’ food. In this way, ‘safe’ food consumption can come to mark people’s social position (see Klein 2013 for China).

At Cho, this idea of poor people not caring about safe food was regularly articulated by the patrons themselves. However, explicit claims to not be able to care about food safety due to more urgent concerns over food security stood at times in contrast to people’s actions. There is, for instance, Dung, a patron at Cho who migrated to HCMC from Binh Dinh province a mere twenty days before our interview in 2016. In her fifties, Dung has no formal education, and collects and sells waste to support her family in the countryside. Dung comes to Cho precisely because it is very cheap. When probed about what she pays attention to when food shopping, she emphasises that price is her only concern—‘I just focus on the money. I don’t care about food safety, if it’s safe or not. I just go to the market and buy food’. Later in the conversation Dung ends up describing how she prefers vegetables with holes from insects as a sign of the absence of agrochemicals and at home she treats vegetables by washing them with water and salt to reduce agrochemicals. After overhearing friends mentioning high agrochemical residues in certain green leafy vegetables, she has started to avoid those vegetables altogether.

Attention to imperfect appearance, extensive washing, as well as avoidance of certain foods all constitute common food safety practices among urban consumers (Faltmann 2022). Thus, while Dung proclaims to not care about food safety, she has a range of ways in which she does negotiate food safety in her handling of food. Yet caring about food safety is not something she articulates as important to her. If the articulation of food safety concerns is associated with the socio-economically well-off who do not have more urgent concerns, then claiming to not care can function as symbolic boundary work that distinguishes one from other social groups (Lamont and Molnár 2002).

Other diners articulated that they indeed cared yet were often confined by structural limitations. One of them is Tuyen, a female lottery ticket seller who lives alone, attended primary school only, and estimates her age to be around fifty years. When asked about food safety, she says ‘I care about the food safety. I care but I cannot … I eat [at Cho, street food] because I do not have enough money to buy the good food’. For daily sustenance she mostly relies on food from food charities or pagodas. Here, the tension between her thoughts on food safety (and ‘good’ food more broadly) and the structural actualities of her life become obvious. Her precarious economic situation hinders her desired food practices; her food security trumps her food safety concerns.

The actualities of people like Tuyen, whose economic situations constrain their access to high-quality and safe food, exist in tension with the governmental food safety approach of supermarket expansion and consumer education. Such an approach overlooks the limitations of consumer ‘choice’ for people in economic precarity which is reflected in low-income groups having very limited access to certified-safe food (Wertheim-Heck, Raneri, and Oosterveer 2019, 416).

The situations of Xuan, Hien, Duong, and Tuyen are emblematic of urban poverty in HCMC. Particularly, rural–urban migrants with low formal education often earn volatile incomes in informal sectors (Hy V. Luong and Gunewardena 2009) and the (late-)socialist rural household registration system limits their access to social services (Nguyen Tuan Anh et al. 2012, 1111), while (older) people without functioning family networks rely on charities for housing and board (Global Sisters Report 2020), and people with disabilities experience economic hardship due to additional costs of disability as well as unstable incomes (Palmer et al. 2015, 14). Under these circumstances, navigating food safety concerns poses particular challenges for people in urban precarity who at times experience food insecurity.

Conclusion

In this article, I have explored what it means for socio-economically marginalised people to handle their food security and food safety concerns with particular attention to two structural and intertwined dynamics. On a micro-level, it is the power imbalances within food charities, and on a societal level, it is precarity, poverty, and socio-economic inequality that build the parameters within which these people navigate their food preferences and concerns over enough and ‘safe’ food.

I have drawn on conceptions of boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002) to carve out how, in the examined charities, divisions between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’ are constructed and maintained both through symbolic and spatial boundaries. Through boundaries, those marked differences maintain power imbalances and inhibit communication between patrons and volunteers/staff, including on potential food safety concerns.

Food charities in HCMC integrally contribute to food security by providing people in socio-economic precarity with accessible food. Yet, while sorely needed in the short term, food charities risk stabilising the structural shortcomings they aim to counteract. Meanwhile, ‘recipients’ of such charitable giving depend on others’ voluntary, and potentially fluctuating, willingness to share their wealth (Silvasti and Riches 2014) and time. Thus, food charities can reduce immediate food insecurity, yet do not prevent potential power abuse or constitute long-term solutions to people’s precarious food access, and by design stand in contrast to charity receivers’ self-determination.

That the voices featured in this article belong to people without permanent residence, with often low levels of education, histories of rural–urban migration, impairments, and informal and unreliable income situations indicate structural patterns of urban vulnerability. Such vulnerabilities include living and working conditions in general, and food vulnerabilities specifically, ranging from concerns over enough food to restricted ways of reacting to food safety concerns.

On an immediate level, regular meals at Cho contribute to patrons’ individual food security. Yet, isolating individual food security from other aspects of life risks individualising structures of marginalisation. Comprehending food insecurity as a structural issue instead enables a more systemic understanding of the contexts of insufficient access to adequate food beyond the individual. Moreover, it allows for the disentanglement of the power dynamics at play in settings of food charities as described in this article by way of recognising structural inequalities. Thus, looking at the wider contexts of (urban) precarity instead of examining food insecurity and food safety on an individual level allows for an understanding of the structural issues that exacerbate food insecurity (cf. Power 2019) and unequal access to safe food. The existence of (under-examined) urban food insecurity is tied to structural policy issues surrounding limited access to social services for rural–urban migrants and inadequate social support networks for elderly and/or disabled people which produce a reliance on charities. Regarding the relationship between food safety and food security, food insecurity ought to be considered when assessing how people (can) deal with food safety in contemporary Vietnam. A governmental approach that prioritises consumer ‘choice’ whilst neglecting the actualities of people in (urban) precarity cannot serve all citizens alike. Furthermore, rampant food safety issues and a widespread lack of trust in the country’s food provisioning constitute setbacks to the celebration of Vietnam’s overall food security. If food safety as one aspect of food security is taken seriously, then these issues need to be addressed for a more safe, sustainable, and just food system.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to everyone who generously shared their experiences with me and who agreed to be part of this research. I’d like to thank Nguyễn Thị Bảo Hà for her invaluable research assistance. I also thank my colleagues from Nkumi and the food crit group for great discussions and valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful input.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in whole by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [Grant-DOI 10.55776/P27438]. For open access purposes, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.

Notes

1 The participation of the private sector in the social welfare system was explicitly encouraged by the Vietnamese government due to its constrained financial means in the 1980s, prior to which medical and educational services were strictly public (Huong T. Hoang, Trang T. Nguyen and Reynolds 2019).

2 Street food in Vietnam entails a plethora of food options of various qualities and price points.