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The article explores recent materials, including cookbooks and a television documentary, backed by the state to promote the potato as a Chinese staple food. These materials attempt to convince would-be eaters that the tuber is a highly nutritious food, suited to modern lifestyles and health concerns, and that it is both cosmopolitan and embedded in Chinese regional food traditions. They articulate a moral economy of food in which the market is a key mechanism for achieving the greater good of national grain security and a healthy population, and in which state and citizen are jointly responsible for "nourishing the people." Consumers are encouraged to purchase potatoes and potato foods not only to cultivate their own health, but also out of a duty to the well-being of the country. In framing potato-eating as a patriotic act, potato campaigns chime with emerging practices in China of "ethical food consumption." (JCCA/GIGA)

AbstractThe 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.