5 The Food Environment

Tyson, Chicken Paws, and School Food

In the fall of 2011, the Food Services Department of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) rolled out a new menu for its school lunch program. The menu had been designed to provide healthier options for the 750,000 meals that are served each day. These included more fruits and vegetables, baked goods, and meat and poultry sourced locally. The school district, however, had yet to implement specific environmental, workplace, health, and animal welfare criteria that might have guided their selection of vendors. Such an approach to establish a “good food” purchasing template for institutions that sourced food, like LAUSD, was then at the discussion stage at the Los Angeles Food Policy Council on whose board the LA School Food Services Director served. Implementing such an approach would not be easy. Just the year before these discussions, a contentious debate at the LA School Board had resulted in a five-year contract being awarded to Tyson Foods, the huge global food company, to supply the district’s chicken products.1

Tyson had been a controversial choice due to its history of environmental, labor, and animal welfare abuses. These abuses included the treatment of its contract farmers, the poor workplace conditions at its various plants, and the treatment of its chickens housed in its concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Several of its facilities also had major environmental hazards due to water and land contamination.2 These types of problems extended to Tyson’s global operations, which had become an increasingly important component of its holdings. Tyson exported its products to 130 countries, including Hong Kong and China, with China the largest and most rapidly growing component of Tyson’s global reach.3

As part of its global expansion, Tyson had discovered a valuable marketing opportunity for its export business: chicken paws (the area below the feet), which had been a waste product in the US domestic market but were widely used in soups or stews, as snacks, and as a flavor enhancer in Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong also played an important role for Tyson in its reexport of Tyson products such as chicken paws into China. This three-way relationship became particularly noteworthy when China and the United States engaged in a trade battle in 2010, and China established a high tariff on its chicken imports from the US (including a 43.15 percent penalty for Tyson’s products). Chicken sales from the United States to China fluctuated significantly while the trade dispute was taking place, but Tyson also set records in 2011 for the quantity and value of its exports to Hong Kong. Of its chicken paw exports, 90 percent were shipped that year to Hong Kong, up 28 percent from 2010, with some of that total reexported to China.4

Aside from its growing global presence (which made up 13 percent of Tyson’s overall sales), food service sales in the United States involving customers like LAUSD were a major market for the company (31 percent of its sales).5 Despite its claims of efficiency and its ability to meet large-market demands, Tyson had experienced a major bottleneck in its supply chain at the very moment when LAUSD was set to roll out its new menu. Chicken items were an important component of the new menu, particularly with LAUSD’s desire to create a more ethnic-focused approach. But Tyson’s chicken deliveries failed to arrive the first day of the school year and for another six weeks. Forced to scramble and come up with primarily an all-vegetarian menu—a different experience for students used to fast food—LAUSD got mixed results during its rollout from some students, parents, and principals who clamored for them to bring back the pizza, hamburgers, and chicken nuggets, a Tyson core product. Conservative, right-wing commentators had a field day attacking the “Michelle Obama-inspired” LAUSD menu. LAUSD, however, was able to weather the criticism, and some of the new menu survived.6

In 2012, LAUSD signed on to the Los Angeles Food Policy Council’s Good Food Purchasing Policy. The policy provided a ranking system based on a robust evaluation of any supplier’s labor, environmental, animal welfare, and health records as well as whether it was a local or long-distance supplier. The first major request for proposals for suppliers was issued in early 2015 and included all the meat and poultry suppliers to LAUSD. Tyson, despite its labor and environmental record, wanted its contract renewed, and it plied the district with contributions, including funds it had donated earlier to promote the new menu. The language of the request for proposals indicated that Tyson might no longer qualify to be an LAUSD supplier—an “extraordinary outcome that could reorient the school food system,” according to one school board member.7

Once again, a contentious process unfolded, related to whether and how a groundbreaking policy would be implemented. A compromise was proposed, with Tyson obtaining the contract for some though not all of the chicken products (which Tyson subsequently withdrew), while a local distributor that had already worked with the district and had met some of the Good Food Purchasing criteria obtained a contract for some of the other chicken parts. As the Tyson/Good Food Purchasing debate unfolded, it raised larger questions about food systems, including where and how the food is produced, what inputs are utilized, where and how it is sold and consumed, and whether a good food framework is possible in an age of global food.

Growing Food

Los Angeles

Between 1910 and 1950, Los Angeles became “the farming capital of the nation.” From citrus to cattle, alfalfa to the production of grapes, oranges, asparagus, lettuce, lima beans, melons, cabbages, and many more crops, agriculture in Los Angeles laid the foundations for the massive citrus, wine, ranching, and dairy industries in California.8

The image of Los Angeles as a fertile and fruit-bearing land was part of the narrative of the Spanish explorers who arrived in Los Angeles in the eighteenth century. In Father Juan Crespí’s famous comments from his diary, the Los Angeles environment represented a food and garden oasis, a “very lush pleasing spot” that would be capable of producing every kind of grain and fruit imaginable.9 The agricultural activities of the Spanish colonists, who set up the San Gabriel Mission on the banks of the Los Angeles River, became the testing ground and incubator for introducing a European-style crop system in their newly colonized land. In the process, their agricultural interventions undermined the foraging system and food security of the native population (the Tongva) who consumed wild nuts and berries and wildlife. By the early nineteenth century, the Spanish colonists had established the huge ranchos that stretched 1.5 million acres from the coast to the eastern edge of the region at San Bernardino. Grazing activities caused erosion, had an impact on the groundwater, and reconfigured the Los Angeles basin’s prairie environment, altering its native grasses, clovers, and other plants.10

When the transcontinental railroads were completed in the late 1860s, a number of Chinese immigrant rail workers settled in Los Angeles and became the primary workforce for the newly planted vineyards and citrus groves. The immigrants, mostly from Guangdong Province, had a wealth of farming experience handed down for generations. They soon became the earliest vegetable farmers, growing leafy greens, cabbage, green beans, and other crops on unclaimed land, using water from the LA River and establishing a form of truck farming to sell the produce door to door. Of the 234 market gardeners in Los Angeles County, 89 percent were born in China, according to the 1880 census.11

The exploitation of labor in the fields—the citrus industry prominently relied on thousands of Native American, Chinese, Sikh, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican workers—masked the nature of development. Citrus became an iconic image of a lush Southern California while real estate speculators created “citrus towns” and other new developments throughout an expanding Los Angeles. Citrus growers were themselves more investors than farmers, as they hired managers and large crews to work the groves. Farm labor was often hazardous. Tent fumigation with cyanide to control pests was introduced in the late 1880s, anticipating the use of various poisons as essential inputs, such as metals (e.g., lead arsenate) and chemical pesticides and fertilizers. The size and scale of the citrus industry, its requirements for investment capital, its use of farm labor, its developing model of the corporate farm, and the corporate consolidation of the citrus enterprise as a whole, established Southern California as a leading region in transforming agricultural development into a form of “modern corporate capitalism,” as historians Ronald Tobey and Charles Wetherell argue. This model, which extended beyond citrus into other areas of agricultural production, also had a global component with the Pacific trade for fertilizer inputs, such as Peruvian guano, and a labor supply that extended to China in the form of Chinese coolie labor.12

This evolving industrial agriculture system changed the dynamic between the laborers in the fields and the food growers, who hired the managers who then oversaw an increasing labor pool of farmworkers. The conditions in the fields led to a series of strikes during the 1930s, from pickers in the berry fields in El Monte to the east, to Mexican vegetable workers to the west of downtown Los Angeles, to workers at dairy farms. In some cases, the land was leased by the grower/owners to Japanese tenants, with the growers fudging the law by extending to the Japanese farmers the leases allowed under the Alien Land Acts, one of several anti-immigrant laws established in the United States in the first several decades of the twentieth century. Violence was common, as the growers turned to groups like the Associated Farmers which served as a paramilitary vigilante group, and the “Red Squad” of the Los Angeles police department, which targeted the foreign immigrants as well as the Depression-era domestic workers from places like Arkansas and Oklahoma.13

By the end of World War II, Los Angeles farm production had begun its decline. This was due in part to the relentless expansion of real estate development and suburbanization that stretched the urban boundary lines by converting agricultural land to residential and commercial development. Air pollution, already a problem in the mid to late 1940s, also contributed to LA’s loss of agricultural lands.14 At the same time, with the expansion of the industrial agriculture model in the Central Valley, California was able to emerge after the war as the leading agricultural state in the US. The California industrial model came to include huge land concentrations, continuing reliance on immigrant labor, a major reliance on energy and chemical inputs, imported water, a reliance on finance capital, and a robust export, or out-of-state, market (primarily to other parts of the United States but increasingly to markets outside of the country).

Today, even as California agriculture consolidates its leading position and global presence, only a very modest local farm economy can be found within the city and county limits of Los Angeles. Its leading crops include ornamentals (shrubs, trees, and flowers), alfalfa, and carrots, much of which is grown in the less developed areas of the region.15 Yet while local farm production has become more limited and reliance on food grown outside Los Angeles has become the norm for the large food retail outlets (supermarkets and big-box stores), a strong interest in local food has also emerged. The popularity of buying and eating locally produced food is now widespread in Los Angeles and across the United States, along with new strategies and initiatives seeking to draw a stronger connection to food grown as well as food consumed. This search for local food has paralleled the advocacy for the ability to access fresh, affordable, and healthy food in all communities and schools, yet it is occurring at a time when the industrial model of food growing, prevalent for nearly a century in Los Angeles and California, has become increasingly challenged.

Hong Kong

When the British took control of Hong Kong in the 1840s, agricultural activity had been primarily related to fishing and salt production. The British colonialists established two initial goals: the creation of a revenue farming system, especially including opium production, and an expansion of Hong Kong’s role as a trading center for various goods. The revenue farm was part of a franchise system designed to collect state revenue. Each farmer was granted a monopoly right for a limited time period and at a particular location, based on what was paid to the colonial government. The opium farm was the leading income generator for the British, while other revenue farms included gambling farms; farms for the sale of liquor, salt, and pork as well as for pawnbroking or fishing; and farms that imposed duties on goods or transit along roadways and seaports.16

Though agricultural production was limited by the area’s hillsides and rocky terrain, Hong Kong was able to produce much of its own food, including rice, livestock, and vegetables, until the 1960s. Peasant smallholder farmers who emigrated from South China began to farm in otherwise barren land in the New Territories in the 1940s and 1950s, helping to maintain and even to expand Hong Kong’s local farming economy. But the rapidly expanding industrial base, the huge expansion of export (and import) shipping, and subsequent urban development in the New Territories eroded local agriculture. The shift toward imported food and away from local food production finally reached a symbolic end point in 2003 when the Hong Kong government abolished all import quotas on rice.17

Today, local agricultural production represents barely 5 percent of Hong Kong’s food supply.18 Several factors have come into play in the shift toward imported food. The rapid expansion of Hong Kong’s local industries, which restarted in the 1950s and peaked by the late 1980s to early 1990s, turned government policy away from agricultural supports. In addition, policies that favored new residential construction helped foster urban developments on lands in the New Territories that had been dedicated to farming. As much as one-half to two-thirds of the arable land otherwise available for farming was instead made available for future land development and residential construction. Today, a large part of the New Territories has become “land for apartment blocks, container yards, car parks and garbage dumps … [where] land can be turned into cash [and] the local market is flooded with imported food,” writes Lingnan University Professor Chan Shun-hing.19

Changes in Hong Kong’s food environment have also been linked to changes in China after 1979, particularly in the Pearl River Delta region. Both agricultural production and industrial development expanded substantially in Guangdong, creating an even stronger synergy between Hong Kong and China. As agricultural production increased in that region, Hong Kong investors worked with local government officials to facilitate numerous land purchases that displaced the small peasant farmers from their lands in China and established new industrial operations, including the relocated industries from Hong Kong. The displaced farmers, in turn, became a source of labor for those industries. In the 1990s, industrial production in Hong Kong began its transition to a service and logistics-based economy, which further influenced where and what kinds of food was sourced.

By 2015, only about 2,400 small farms remained in Hong Kong, with 4,300 farmers and their workers. The average size of a farm was only 0.2 hectare, or less than half an acre. Six percent of the land in Hong Kong remained designated for agriculture, even as half or more of that land continued to be slated for further development. Similar to Los Angeles, ornamentals have emerged as one of the primary products, though a small volume of vegetables, fruits, pigs, poultry, field crops, cattle, fresh milk, and eggs continue to be produced. Even as late as 2015, local poultry production, particularly live poultry, accounted for the lion’s share (95 percent) of the poultry consumed in Hong Kong, whereas only 1.8 percent of fresh vegetables and 6.1 percent of live pigs came from local sources.20 However, poultry production in both Hong Kong and Guangdong have periodically experienced major setbacks due to scandals over avian influenza, the SARS epidemic, the H7N9 virus, and other poultry-related diseases. In 2004 and again in 2008, the Hong Kong government, in response to those scandals, introduced a “voluntary surrender and buyout scheme” for poultry farmers.21

The various poultry-related food safety crises have highlighted two key factors of the Hong Kong food system. On the one hand, the long-standing connections to China for access to fresh food have expanded, with the mainland representing a major source of food imports, including fresh fruits and vegetables and some animal imports. China’s fresh vegetable imports are far cheaper than what is locally produced; as a result, several Hong Kong farmers have moved their operations to China and now sell their products back to Hong Kong. Aside from China, Hong Kong food imports have come from several other countries, including the leading exporters, Brazil and the United States. The United States continues to be Hong Kong’s leading source of fresh fruit, tree nuts, and fruit imports as well as vegetable juices and organic foods, with much of that shipped from California through the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. At the same time, a significant portion (29 percent in 2015) of the food imported into Hong Kong is then reexported, including to China.22

Food safety issues have remained an important driver of the growth of the food import markets, although such issues have also been a problem for the importers as well. The United States, for example, lost its number-one ranking as a poultry exporter to Brazil when avian influenza cases were reported in the US in 2004. Brazil continues to remain the leading poultry exporter, with the most popular US chicken products including chicken paws, legs, and wings which are popular in both retail and restaurant establishments, such as cafés.23

The growth of the organic market is perhaps most notable in relation to imports. Hong Kong has recently experienced a fledgling but increasingly visible expansion of local organic growers, and more consumer interest in greater transparency and direct connections to where and how the food is grown. This is expressed as a desire to reconnect with the soil, associated with the concept of nong, as distinct from the use of the term “land,” more often associated with “property” and real estate development.24 This interest has translated into direct farmer-to-consumer programs, such as Community Supported Agriculture, as well as an emerging urban agriculture that includes community gardens and rooftop gardens. According to the Hong Kong Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department, there were 514 organic farms in Hong Kong as of August 2014, with overall estimates of the organic market (locally grown and imports) at $500 million and an annual growth rate of 10 to 15 percent. Responding to the growing interest in organic and local food, the Hong Kong government announced a new “Sustainable Agricultural Policy” in December 2014, which included the establishment of an Agricultural Park and Sustainable Development Fund and the creation of a 70-to-80-hectare AgriPark in the New Territories.25

The AgriPark proposal, however, has been criticized as a stalking horse for reducing farm land by setting aside one small “demonstration” area for farming, while the inexorable spread of urban development continues around it. This parallels previous developments in the New Territories where farmers have been displaced, such as the 2010 demolition of Choi Yuen Village and neighboring villages in Pak Heung to make way for the Hong Kong–Guangzhou High Speed Rail Project. The Choi Yuen Village displacement led to major protests and crystallized interest in a renewal of local farming and sustainable and organic agriculture advocacy. But urban land development continues to trump local farm production, thus reinforcing the role of imported food as the dominant food supply for Hong Kong.26

As in Los Angeles, a distinction—and occasional tension—between “local” food and “organic” food (much of which is also imported, including from China) remains a factor in sorting out future changes in the growing of food that is made available in Hong Kong. It suggests, among other factors, that a local Hong Kong food system (food grown within Hong Kong) will likely remain limited for the foreseeable future, despite the growing interest in sustainable agriculture. Its most significant opportunity for further development resides in what has become more of a niche market for both farmers and consumers, such as community-supported agriculture programs. The future of Hong Kong’s relationship to its neighboring Pearl River Delta foodshed may also become a factor in how and what type of food is grown. Such a foodshed approach could facilitate the further development of a regional (and potentially more sustainable) Hong Kong/South China food system while extending the notion of nong to improve the environment and rebuild community.

Food Retail

Los Angeles

From its more humble origins as the neighborhood general store and the “self-service” market, the rise of the supermarket in Los Angeles and throughout the United States became central to the restructuring of the food system. The first stand-alone food and general store was established in 1871 in a brick building in what is now downtown Los Angeles by three partners who became major civic and economic leaders in the city, including Jacob Heilman who founded one of the city’s first banks. A few decades later, a new form of food retail in LA, the “groceteria,” was introduced, which subsequently evolved into a supermarket-style format. During the 1920s and 1930s, supermarket chains emerged through the consolidation of some of the largest of the food retail operations. In Los Angeles, Charles Merrill (of the brokerage firm Merrill and Lynch) put together the Safeway food retail chain through a merger of a major LA operation with large store operations in Northern California and other western states. Some of the largest of these stores also sought to attract a customer base by promoting their free parking.27

As supermarkets expanded food retail market share, they increased their floor space and overall land requirements. By the 1950s and early 1960s, supermarkets in Los Angeles had grown to 20,000 to 30,000 square feet, creating an increasing need for land dedicated to parking, as the car became a more dominant mode of transport for shopping. The largest supermarkets emphasized brand products (linked to the growth of major food manufacturers such as Kraft) and increased product proliferation, as represented by the number of food items on store shelves. Supermarket chains shifted many of their operations to suburban locations while reducing the number of stores in denser low-income urban core areas such as South Central Los Angeles. Suburbs offered a larger land base and convenient access for the ubiquitous automobile (many of the supermarkets were located adjacent to freeways or high-traffic roads), enabling longer-distance shopping so that customers might come less frequently for perhaps a week’s worth of items to purchase. Given the location of the large suburban stores, shoppers had almost none of the attachment to place or community that the urban core neighborhood stores had provided. Land in suburban locations was more available and cheaper (per square foot) in contrast with the denser urban core where land was more expensive and adjacent lots were harder to come by. Parking regulations that stipulated the number of parking spots required also did not take into account communities where residents were more transit-dependent and where stores were located within walking distance of denser neighborhoods.28

Supermarkets’ shift from urban core to suburban areas created a “grocery gap” in low-income communities in Los Angeles and throughout the United States. Inner-city neighborhoods now depended on small stores that focused on cigarette, candy, and liquor sales but had only limited or no fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats. These “food deserts,” as they were called (though a more appropriate name would be “food swamps,” due to the proliferation of fast food restaurants and liquor stores), became the norm in South, Central, and East Los Angeles, the poorest and densest areas in the city.29

In 1987, a major new player entered food retail—Walmart, the largest retailer, employer, and global behemoth with its vast supply chain systems. Walmart quickly captured the largest share of the US food retail market and extended its emphasis on large store size and huge parking lots by introducing its “Supercenter” format, which combined food products with Walmart’s wide array of consumer items.30 Ideally suited for the company’s already ubiquitous presence in rural and suburban areas, these massive (200,000+ square feet) supercenters impacted the grocery business in multiple ways: they furthered supermarket chain consolidation, put downward pressure on store employee wage levels thanks to Walmart’s low-wage strategy, and further increased the trend toward supermarket influence over supply chain relationships. Brand items became even more ubiquitous on shelves, displacing products from smaller food production enterprises. The trend toward “private labels” also increased (food items that had the supermarket’s own label, even if based on a similar set of supply chain sources). Walmart’s supply-side strategies that squeezed prices from its suppliers and utilized its own vast logistics operation caused even huge food companies such as Tyson to become dependent on Walmart’s decisions about which products to source, through what locations (globally or otherwise), and at what price points. In this manner, the largest of the food retailers became the centerpiece of what UK researchers Tim Lang and Michael Heasman call “retailing industrialization,” with its “new ways of packaging, distributing, selling, trading and cooking food … all to entice the consumer to purchase.”31

Walmart also established food retail operations in other countries, including China. Unlike in the United States where it was often able to overwhelm its competition,32 Walmart faced tougher rivals at the international level with such global competitors as France-based Carrefour and UK-based Tesco. Walmart had sought to enter the UK market by taking over one of Tesco’s key competitors but ultimately failed to displace Tesco as that country’s leading food retail chain. Tesco, in turn, decided to enter the US food retail market during 2006–2007, selecting Southern California along with Las Vegas and Arizona as its entry point and initial challenge to Walmart. Tesco was aware that Walmart’s supercenter strategy had been unable to expand into the largest urban markets, including Los Angeles. In 2004, Walmart had experienced a rare defeat when local community groups in the city of Inglewood (in the southwestern part of the greater Los Angeles area) successfully defeated Walmart’s plan to build one of its trademark 200,000-square-foot supercenters. The land use requirements for its store format, along with its low-wage labor and supply chain operations, generated strong opposition while also representing a major constraint, particularly in those dense urban areas.33

Tesco, in contrast, adopted a far smaller store size format (10,000–15,000 square feet), expanded its use of private labels (up to 50 percent of all items in the store), reduced its full-time (and nonunion) workforce, and utilized an automated checkout system. It also sought to emphasize a “fresh and healthy” product selection to fit what it considered the Southern California lifestyle (its US stores were in fact called Fresh & Easy). But Tesco misjudged what consumers wanted when it came to “fresh” (not plastic-wrapped food items that included non-US imports, with markers that were required for the checkout system); it was disconnected from a changing Los Angeles and its diverse populations with multiple food cuisines; and its problematic checkout system was not perceived as convenient. By 2014, Tesco had given up and sold its Fresh & Easy stores to a US buyer, after its US affiliate declared bankruptcy to facilitate the sale.34

Walmart, meanwhile, also reconfigured its own strategies for breaking into the urban market, including Los Angeles, by deciding to go smaller, and stating that it would source more organic items and secure locations in food desert areas. But Walmart’s stated commitment was challenged as misleading, and internal Walmart communications to its employees were later revealed in which the company encouraged employees to donate to food banks that could be used by other Walmart employees to achieve their own food security. After being blocked from entering the City of Los Angeles for ten years, Walmart did succeed after a protracted struggle in locating one of its small stores (its “Neighborhood Market,” at 33,000 square feet) in the Chinatown district just north of downtown Los Angeles. But its success was short lived, as Walmart closed the Chinatown market (along with 269 other US stores) in 2016 as part of the company’s downsizing in what had turned out to be “a difficult retail climate,” as the Los Angeles Times put it.35

Walmart’s strategies, as well as those of Tesco and several other major chains, reflected an effort to capitalize on the growing interest in local and organic food. This included a new emphasis in Los Angeles and elsewhere on supporting truly local neighborhood markets, such as the ubiquitous corner store and the wide number of ethnic markets. A “Healthy Corner Store Campaign” was launched in Los Angeles, initially developed by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) and subsequently shepherded by the Los Angeles Food Policy Council after CRAs in California were eliminated.36 Many of these smaller stores also catered to the enormously diverse Southern California population and its strong orientation toward ethnic and immigrant food. Other trends included the expansion of farmers’ markets that became a favored source of local (and organic) food and, in some neighborhoods, also emphasized a wide range of products grown by immigrant farmers to serve immigrant populations. Farmers’ markets, as well as the increase in community gardens and a modest “urban agriculture,” further established the farmer-to-consumer connection that several of the Los Angeles supermarket chains began to recognize as a growing consumer interest; the chains responded by highlighting local or California-grown fruits and vegetables in their produce section. In an age of global food retailers and retail industrialization, these new interests began to influence the trends in how, where, and what food was sold, whether in Los Angeles or elsewhere.

Hong Kong

In contrast to Los Angeles, supermarket chains developed much more recently in Hong Kong. Due to numerous barriers, including land requirements, the largest of the global food retailers such as Walmart, Tesco, and Carrefour have not successfully entered the Hong Kong market.37 Selling food in Hong Kong has historically and traditionally been associated with the small open-air stands where fresh produce and live animals brought by local farmers are sold and then used for that day’s food preparation. This practice was particularly the case in the period prior to refrigeration, due to Hong Kong’s climate. Shopping was a daily experience, and the brick-and-mortar food stores that appeared after World War II were limited in size and product mix.38

In the 1980s, growing concerns about food safety and food spoilage led to the creation of “wet markets” housed in municipal buildings which were perceived to be more sanitary due to the hosing of the building’s floor areas (thus the name). The wet markets serve the same function as the open-air markets: a wide variety of fresh produce, rice, poultry, and meat is available to be consumed that day from the same-day purchase. Even after refrigeration became more available, the size of homes in such a high-density region often precluded large appliances and storage space. Nevertheless, as a Consumer Council report in 2003 noted, supermarket chains were able to take root in Hong Kong during the 1990s, due in part to their ability to secure prime store sites close to new residential housing estates that provided “an almost captive customer base of residents.”39

By 2016, two major chains—ParknShop and Wellcome—had secured the largest market share of supermarket revenues, upward of 75 percent. ParknShop is part of the Hutchison Whampoa conglomerate. Aside from its port holdings discussed in chapter 2, Hutchison Whampoa owns or controls real estate developments in Hong Kong and China, one of the two electric utilities in Hong Kong, a Canadian oil company involved in oil sands development, and numerous other interests. Hutchinson Whampoa, along with Cheung Kong Holdings, is part of business magnate Li Ka-shing’s empire, whose ParknShop group also operates thirty hypermarkets (the equivalent of a supercenter) in southern China. Around the time of the 2014 Occupy Central protests for more democratic elections in Hong Kong, Li Ka-shing restructured his holdings to shift away from some mainland China investments, spun off the company’s vast Hong Kong real estate businesses into a new entity, and continued to expand his global presence in more than fifty countries around the world, including in telecoms, infrastructure, energy, retail, and port-related services.40

Hutchison Whampoa’s main competitor, the Wellcome Company, is part of the Dairy Farm chain of retail outlets, which includes supermarkets based in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Dairy Farm is controlled by the Jardine Matheson group, a name that dates back to the colonial origins of Hong Kong. Dairy Farm also controls other types of outlets in Hong Kong, including ThreeSixty (organic and natural foods stores) and Oliver’s The Delicatessen (fine food and wine stores). Together, Wellcome and ParknShop represent a food retail duopoly.41

Hong Kong supermarkets are quite different from their Los Angeles counterparts. They are far smaller in store size and format due to limited land availability and reduced shopping loads, as there is far less car use in Hong Kong. They tend to carry a smaller array of products, and those are primarily processed and frozen food, some imports, and a limited selection of fresh produce. For new food products, including imports, the Hong Kong supermarkets charge listing fees to suppliers to enable those products to be put on shelves; these fees allow the stores to maintain leverage over their supply sources (similar to the “slotting fees” for new products that the Los Angeles and US supermarkets charge for products to secure shelf space). In addition to listing fees, the Hong Kong supermarkets exert considerable control over their suppliers, including the use of private labels.42

Despite the increased presence of supermarkets and the role of the duop­oly chains, Hong Kong shoppers still rely on the wet markets for a significant percentage of their purchases, particularly fresh food items. The wet markets are complemented by the very small stores not linked to the chains which employ fewer than ten people but also contribute to the concept of daily shopping by their ubiquitous presence across Hong Kong. Street vendors or hawkers are another significant, although endangered, part of the Hong Kong food scene. Overall, daily shopping and the strong preference for fresh foods that can be prepared the same day remain central to the Hong Kong experience, keeping street food and the wet markets going, and also requiring the supermarket chains to adapt their strategies accordingly.43 Thus, while change continues to occur in the Hong Kong food retail sector, the supermarket chains, even as more people come to shop in their outlets, have nevertheless remained a somewhat limited force in the food system due to the complexity of Hong Kong’s built environment and its deeply embedded food culture.

Eating Food

Los Angeles

In 1993, a UCLA report entitled “Seeds of Change” profiled food issues in Los Angeles while highlighting conditions in one low-income neighborhood in South Los Angeles. The report documented a number of changes in the food environment, including lack of access to healthy and fresh food (e.g., the abandonment of full-service food markets in low-income neighborhoods), the protracted problems of food insecurity, and the need for new programs and policies to better address a changing food system. The report found that as many as 27 percent of the residents in this neighborhood experienced hunger an average of five days each month, a phenomenon characterized as “continually dropping in and out of hunger.” Hunger was defined as an issue of community food security, identifying a community’s food environment—namely, what residents in a community eat, where they eat, and their access to food.44

Another team of UCLA researchers, following up on the “Seeds of Change” report and the media coverage about hunger in Los Angeles, undertook a study in fourteen low-income schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District of what high school students ate on a daily basis. Meals eaten in school were included in addition to what was eaten outside of school. Utilizing a daily food intake analysis, the researchers evaluated whether there was a connection between what students (and their families) ate and the “dropping in and out of hunger” phenomenon. The study confirmed that a high percentage of the students experienced hunger at particular times during the week but also found that many of those same students were overweight or obese. “We were astounded by the numbers,” one of the researchers told one of us at the time of the study, and the findings caused the researchers to rethink their research focus.45

As subsequent studies have documented, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, there continues to be a coincidence of hunger and food insecurity and a huge increase in overweight and obesity in the same population. The increase in weight gain in the last several decades has led to an “obesity crisis” that crosses all income levels, racial, ethnic, and age groups, as well as neighborhoods, rich or poor, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, although it’s most pronounced in low-income neighborhoods like South LA. As a consequence, there has been a dramatic rise in diet-related health outcomes, such as diabetes, and the diet-health connection has in turn helped elevate food environment issues into a major policy focus in Los Angeles, in California, at the national level, and globally.46

Central to the discussion of the food environment and what people eat has been the rapid penetration of a fast food culture that has influenced food choices and diets and the parallel changes in how much people eat (that is, food portions). Los Angeles in particular has long been associated with fast food; it was the home of the first McDonald’s restaurant and the early fast food drive-ins that further indicated how the car was shaping urban life. Los Angeles has been at the forefront of the shift from cooking food at home to eating out (including at fast food chains), which has come to average more than 42 percent of residents’ food dollars spent outside the home.47 The increase in highly processed foods that require limited time and few cooking skills has at the same time influenced food preparation and food choice, as has the increase in the consumption and size of sugar-sweetened beverages, snack foods, and foods high in sugar, fat, and salt content.48 These issues are particularly pronounced for those under eighteen years old. A number of studies have noted in this age group a direct correlation between high percentages of increased weight gain and eating frequently at fast food restaurants as well as consuming limited amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables. Moreover, the correlation between diet and weight gain for younger people has the potential to create a greater long-term risk of diet-related health problems.49

Aside from its homogenous fast food offerings, Los Angeles has become the home of a rich and diverse food culture, as has been noted earlier, thanks to the influx of a huge immigrant population, especially from Asia and Latin America, in the past thirty years. Building on earlier histories of immigrant street vendors, LA’s street food scene now includes a thriving food truck and sidewalk vendor presence that dot both low-income and middle-class neighborhoods. It also entails the small restaurants and small stores specializing in regional cuisine and food items as well as the restaurants in such self-characterized neighborhoods as “Oaxacalifornia,” “Little Bangladesh,” “Little Ethiopia,” or “Koreatown.” Los Angeles’s reputation as a food place of “insane diversity,” as one of its chefs put it, has been enhanced by its vast array of food options, cataloged by a new breed of food writers, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Gold, and made available by street food chefs such as Roy Choi, who made LA’s “Korean taco” famous.50 Ethnic cuisine has even extended to the lunch menu items of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

With all of these changes taking place, Los Angeles has emerged as a central battleground for the future of food and food environments, including whether and how these could be changed. A campaign in 2001–2002 to ban the sale of sodas in vending machines in Los Angeles schools was successful despite opposition from the soda companies like Pepsico. As the second school district to ban the sodas (Oakland, California, was the first), the Los Angeles school district inspired campaigns at schools around the United States. As early as 1997, one of the Los Angeles area schools was the first to embrace “farm to school” programs, in which school districts source from local farmers for their school lunch program, encourage school gardens, and shift toward a healthier menu. These initiatives have been part of a larger focus on changing the Los Angeles food environment to emphasize greater access to healthier and fresher food choices and a food system that reinforces rather than undermines such choices. Once considered the headquarters of a fast food culture, Los Angeles has emerged as a place central to the debates in the United States about what to eat.51

Hong Kong

In April 2010, the Centre for Food Safety at the Chinese University of Hong Kong released a comprehensive food consumption survey that had been commissioned by the Hong Kong government’s Food and Environmental Hygiene Department. The government was interested in the food consumption patterns of the Hong Kong population to assess concerns about food safety, including but not limited to food imported from China. The study documented that food safety was considered very important for more than half of those surveyed (57.7 percent among males, and 68.7 percent among females), far more than other factors such as nutrition, taste, price, or ease of preparation. Dietary considerations (for example, fruit and vegetable consumption) were also considered significant, particularly as they revealed what the study identified as “health-driven behaviors.” At the same time, the survey reported that a high percentage of the population (47.1 percent) was overweight or obese.52

The concern about food safety and the rise in obesity and overweight is occurring at the same time that hunger and food insecurity have been prominent concerns, exacerbated by the huge income divide among the poorest and richest in Hong Kong.53 A 2011 Oxfam Hong Kong study on how the escalating costs of food prices and housing have impacted Hong Kong’s low-income population identified widespread problems with food insecurity and hunger, and how much low-income residents need to spend on food compared to wealthier individuals and households. Nearly half of the low-income residents surveyed by Oxfam (45.9 percent) experienced food insecurity, and nearly one-sixth experienced “high food insecurity.” As in Los Angeles, high food insecurity meant that a significant number of Hong Kong residents did not have enough food to meet their needs at all times—the “dropping in and out of hunger” phenomenon. The report also indicated that 40 percent of low-income residents’ total household budget went to food purchases, whereas the highest-income groups spent 21 percent of their budget on food purchases. In order to cope with these issues of food insecurity, the Oxfam study noted that households purchased the lowest-cost foods and eliminated at least one meal a day when unable to purchase enough food. These numbers underline the income and poverty gap that other studies have documented for Hong Kong, including the statistics that 20 percent of the population is living in poverty, the homeless population is growing, and as many as one in three seniors is unable to meet basic nutritional needs. Hong Kong’s income inequality has been called its “badge of shame” because it is the highest income gap between the rich and the poor of any developed economy.54

What Hong Kong residents eat and where they eat has become a factor in diet and food choices, particularly among youth. Although a fast food culture has not penetrated as deeply as it has in Los Angeles, there is a greater trend toward eating out in Hong Kong. One study indicated that as many as 30 percent of the population ate out for breakfast five or more times a week, with more than 50 percent eating out for lunch and more than 10 percent for dinner. Foods high in fat, sugar, and salt, as well as sugar-sweetened beverages, have become more prevalent, including sugary drinks, deep-fried food, burgers and fries, ice cream, and hot dogs.55

Yet, like that in Los Angeles, the food culture in Hong Kong is diverse, combining traditional foods with the multicultural environment that characterizes both cities. Street vendors with traditional offerings vie with cafés, restaurants, bakeries, and other places that provide a variety of cuisine and ways in which the food is prepared. At the same time, food safety scares have led to an increased interest in healthy and organic foods. Moreover, a renewed emphasis on growing food that one consumes as well as having a direct connection to where and how the food is grown and produced have become part of the Hong Kong food environment.

Hong Kong still remains dependent on food imports, both fresh and manufactured food. The city’s residents continue to be sensitive to fluctuations in food prices that are often globally dictated, further exacerbating the income (and food) divide. Changing diets and limited access to and participation in physical activity have further contributed to the increased trends toward weight gain and related health diseases, even as food insecurity continues to be a concern. Hong Kong remains a complex food environment, as different food choices vie with each other, even as food remains a central part of residents’ lives and culture.

The Connection to China

For millennia, China relied on a food economy based on rural, small peasant farms with a goal of food self-sufficiency. In recent years, Chinese academic researchers and sustainable agriculture advocates have characterized those six thousand years of agricultural practice as “always ecological” with their emphasis on resource conservation and recycling.56 In the last half century, such rural farming traditions have undergone a series of cataclysmic changes, influenced by shifts in political regimes, the invasion of the Japanese, and the huge changes in rural and urban policies after 1949. During the Maoist period (1949–1976), the supply and marketing of food for urban areas remained a state responsibility, with the goal of minimizing imports or long-distance supply sources. Urban areas were able to obtain more than 85 percent of their vegetable supply from adjacent rural or periurban districts. The food supply for rural areas, on the other hand, remained the responsibility of the communes which contributed to a national goal of self-sufficiency in food. In 1978 the household responsibility system began to shift land use rights to rural households and allowed individual farmers to select crops and to sell whatever they produced beyond their quota of grain sold to the state.57

During the 1980s, while economic conditions in the rural farm communities improved with the development of village and township enterprises and private household-based food production, the uncertainties about land tenure placed limits on rural development strategies. The contracting of land holdings created incentives for short-term profit maximization but not longer-term sustainability. Local governments facilitated the conversion of agricultural land to rural industrial development, increased urbanization, road construction, and house building. The process of rapid urbanization and the continuing distinction between an urban and a rural residency permit (the hukou), combined with the push for development of export-oriented industrial production, led to an enormous expansion of a rural-to-urban migrant labor force of either displaced or migrating peasant farm members. This “floating population” of internal migrants who “float and move” without permanent registration become highly vulnerable and exploited, not dissimilar to undocumented migrant labor in the United States and around the world. In the nearly forty years since the introduction of market reforms in 1978, almost two-thirds of this Chinese rural labor force has ended up working in off-farm employment.58

As earning a sustainable livelihood from farm activities grew more difficult, the number of people directly engaged in farming, which had peaked at 340 million in the 1980s, began to decline at a rate of about 6 million each year. Moreover, the conversion of agricultural land to industrial or residential development transformed rural farming villages into new urban agglomerations, sometimes at a phenomenal rate. When agricultural land is seized, rural smallholder farmers are often not adequately compensated, and options for younger people working the land become even more limited. This lack of work, in turn, has led to a demographic crisis, similar to that in parts of the United States, with young people increasingly leaving rural areas to find employment in urban places.59

In Guangdong, the rural migrant labor force includes workers from distant provinces, speaking different languages from their Cantonese-speaking bosses, and experiencing the kind of migrant worker abuses found in California. This has created a type of semiproletarianized peasantry, with peasant family households still trying to cling to their small landholdings while family members join the rural migrant labor force with its indeterminate status, neither urban nor rural.60

The changes in the rural population and related loss of farmland have been exacerbated by farmland lost to pollution, due to both the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers and industrial discharges of heavy metals such as cadmium that pollute the soil. A shift to higher-value products has further contributed to soil decline. China has become the largest user—and producer—of pesticides in the world, and its loss of farmland due to contamination has reached as high as 19.4 percent, according to a 2014 report by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Land Resources. Even more dramatically, eight million acres of land had become so polluted “that farming should not be allowed on it,” its vice minister warned in a December 2013 news conference.61

Strategies to achieve agricultural modernization have included the development of vertically integrated organizations that link the production, processing, and marketing of food. These include “dragon-head enterprises” as well as various brokerage organizations and new types of cooperatives that focus on specialty markets. The dragon-head enterprises, a mixed public-private type of Chinese agribusiness, have become a critical component of the development in China of a capitalist framework for agricultural modernization, at the level of both the central government and (especially) the local government. Large-scale dragon-head enterprises have been subsidized by the central government, while provincial, municipal, and county governments have aggressively sought to subsidize them at the local level through tax and credit benefits, advantageous loans, and the availability of land and electricity.62

Agricultural modernization has further led to a major influx of foreign direct investment, increased food imports, and an increasing number of global food players involved in integrated global food operations. This is particularly significant in the area of pork, beef, and poultry production, where changing diets and new consumer demand has had ripple effects throughout the Chinese food system. China became a net importer of soy and grain for use as feed, undercutting its long-standing desire to be self-sufficient in grain. The transformation in the pig industry from backyard and small household farms to an industrial model led to a quantum jump in global company investments and imports for feed, especially from Brazil. With this change, as Emelie Peine has written, there emerged a “Brazil-China-soy-pork commodity complex” that provided “a lens on global agro-food restructuring.” In this case, four primary global soybean brokers and processors (including the US-headquartered Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland) have played a central role in controlling the supply chain and how this new global commodity complex is governed.63

The poultry industry provides another illustration of how large global companies, including Tyson and its subsidiaries, have entered the Chinese market. Tyson had originally depended on small farm suppliers for its various integrated operations, which included breeder production, hatcheries, broilers, and feed production. However, the company decided to reorient toward greater control of its China supply chain by beginning to establish its own farms and related infrastructure. By utilizing its own “brand” in China, Tyson hoped to gain market advantage by asserting that, as a global, US-headquartered food company, it would have a better track record on food safety.64

A number of other global players have carved out a place in the poultry business in China, such as Cargill and even Goldman Sachs. At the same time, China has coveted the US market for its own exports of poultry by its China-based producers, which, until 2013, had been restricted. Then, in a convoluted ruling in July 2013, the United States Department of Agriculture determined that four China-based processors met equivalent US food safety standards for exporting processed chicken parts to the United States as long as the chickens were sourced from the United States and a couple of other countries. While the USDA decision generated strong opposition in the United States concerning China’s food safety history, the irony of sending the whole chicken from the United States to China for processing and then exporting that processed product back to the United States was not lost on some observers.65

China’s own integrated global food companies have also been active in entering other markets, whether through exports or through investment and in some cases by purchasing major foreign food companies or farmland. One such notable acquisition occurred in October 2013 when the Chinese food producer Shuanghui International (now the WH Group) purchased the largest US pork producer, Smithfield Foods (itself a major conglomerate which had consolidated its position through purchases of other US operations).66

These changes in China’s food system have also been reflected in the rise of its supermarkets. A relatively new phenomenon for China, supermarkets have rapidly increased in the number and size of their outlets since the 1990s, particularly in the larger cities, gaining upward of 30 percent of all food retail sales. China’s still vast rural and periurban populations, however, continue to shop at small single-store outlets and buy fresh meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables from traditional street markets on a daily basis.67

After the introduction of market economy changes, the food retail sector was one of the first sectors to be privatized. The shift toward greater consolidation and larger stores became more pronounced after 2001 when China entered the WTO and several of the major global food retailers, such as Walmart, Carrefour, and Tesco, began to enter the China retail market.68 These global food retailers contributed to major changes in China’s food retail environment, such as the rise of the hypermarkets. Hypermarkets combined the features of large supermarkets with some department-store-type features, and offered a variety of prepared foods, fresh and frozen meat and seafood, food service counters, imported foods, and highly processed food products.69

Despite their increased presence, the global food retailers have had their challenges. Growth rates have been slower than anticipated, and they have faced competition from domestic or Asia-based food retailers, including local ones that have played a greater role outside the largest cities and most developed regions. Global retailers have also experienced difficulties in managing a more complex supply chain and varied customer preferences. Walmart, for example, which opened its first store in China in 1996, waited until China joined the WTO before making a big push to expand its number of stores. Seeking to use its long-standing supply chain management strategies along with a high-volume business based on multiple large stores located throughout the country (432 stores in 174 cities in 2016), Walmart found that it had overreached and began to close some stores, even as it also pursued new store openings in lower-tier cities and a focus on its “safe foods” and online shopping platform.70

Tesco, which entered China in 2004, had perhaps the most difficulty of the global retailers. With ambitious plans to expand to as many as 200 stores by 2016 and a reliance on its well-developed hypermarket format, Tesco experienced multiple challenges in its China operations. As a result, in 2013, Tesco accepted the offer from China’s largest retailer, China Resources Enterprises (CRE), to establish a joint venture, with Tesco the minority partner at 20 percent. The joint venture linked the 134 hypermarkets and 19 shopping malls that Tesco still managed (although not under the Tesco brand name). Similar to its Los Angeles experience, though, Tesco in China was unable to fully adapt to specific Chinese consumer interests and preferences.71

The changing pattern of food consumption in China, linked to rapid urbanization and China’s growing middle class, has also been a factor in the expansion of the food retail sector and where food is consumed. These changes in diet have occurred in just a few decades. After the market economy reforms were introduced, small food stores, kiosks, and restaurants sprang up, and, as soon as the late 1980s, department stores were offering large food sections, anticipating the rise of the hypermarkets. Food processing expanded, creating more manufactured and processed product selections, while away-from-home food spending, almost nonexistent in the early 1980s, increased to 22.8 percent by 2010. While percentages for Chinese cities are smaller than those for Los Angeles and Hong Kong, they represent a more dramatic shift in where food is consumed.72

The changes in food consumed include the trend toward a diet heavier in meat, poultry, and other protein sources and a reduction in the consumption of the traditional sources of grains and starchy roots. One study estimated that in the space of a few decades, the ratio of consumption of grains, vegetables, and meat items shifted from an 8-1-1 to a 4-3-3 ratio, with rapidly growing consumption of meat, pork, and poultry creating a more protein-heavy diet.73 The shift toward more meat and poultry improved important dietary needs, but also became part of a food consumption pattern that favored more processed foods as well as snack foods higher in sugar, salt, and fat content. Global fast food chains such as KFC and McDonald’s have played a role in this transition since they entered the Chinese market in the late 1980s. KFC, which with its 4,600 outlets has the largest market share among the global fast food companies, became increasingly dependent on sales in China (upward of 50 percent) for its overall corporate performance. An unexpected drop in KFC sales in 2015 led to the decision to pursue a sale of its China franchise, making it a separate business, but without initial success due to disagreements with bidders over price.74

China’s nutrition transition, fueled by increases in fast food and processed foods and combined with other factors such as decreased physical activity, has led to increases in overweight and obesity. A study in The Lancet identified 62 million obese people in China in 2013, which represented nearly 10 percent of the world’s obese population (the United States had the highest numbers, at 86.9 million). Books and articles with such titles as “Fat China” or “Obesity Rate on the Increase” have identified another outcome of China’s modernization strategies.75

The changes in diet and reduced physical activity in urban areas have further led to a sharp increase in the prevalence of diabetes, similar to those in Los Angeles and Hong Kong. According to national surveys, diabetes prevalence increased from less than 1 percent of China’s population in 1980 to 11.6 percent (or fourteen million adults eighteen or older) in 2010, with more than half the population having possible risk factors for the development of diabetes or cardiovascular disease. With China’s marketization in mind, some of the global drug companies have perceived advantages in these numbers, with their promise of “double-digit pharmaceutical sales growth and significant opportunity for multinational pharmaceutical companies,” as one research report for such companies characterized the opportunity.76

Because both diet and the food system have changed, fears about food safety have been heightened. The term “food safety” first became prominent during the 1990s as concerns shifted from historical problems with “poisoned foods,” due to unsanitary conditions, spoiled foods, and unsafe storage, to contemporary concerns about hazardous food additives, toxic food preservatives, fake foods, chemical inputs, and cost-cutting abuses along the supply chain up to and including markets and restaurants. Such products as adulterated baby formula and powdered milk, fake soy sauce, cooking oil adulterated with sewage oil, and adulterated meats have led to nationwide scandals and heightened food safety scares.77

Those scares have stimulated a search not just for “safe” food but for a connection to where and how food is grown and prepared, especially for urban consumers. As in Hong Kong, new “farm to table”-type initiatives such as rooftop gardens, CSAs, agricultural ecotourism, and a revival of urban farmers’ markets have sprung up in the past five to ten years. China’s growing urban population, especially its emerging middle class and upper class, has developed an almost nostalgic desire to “get closer to the food” that has also generated a rise in ecotourism at periurban farm sites.78 Similarly, the desire to relearn the process of “growing food” (or, in the case of the rural migrant workers, to maintain some food-growing opportunities in their villages in the city) has generated interest in urban agriculture. An organics market, originally conceived as a form of export production, has also mushroomed among China’s urban food consumers.

The central government, recognizing the impact of food safety concerns, diet and nutrition changes linked to greater meat consumption, the urban focus on healthier food, and declining arable land and increased water pollution, among other factors, established in February 2014 new guidelines on food and nutrition development. These included such goals as “inheriting a healthy dietary tradition of consuming mainly vegetable food and less animal food” and “protecting food with local characteristics.” Yet abuses have continued, and mistrust has been even further exacerbated by the development of organic and alternative farming-based “special supply farms” that serve only a selected constituency, including government officials.79

All of these trends further emphasize that China’s food system is in flux, with an ongoing debate about the impacts of modernization and marketization on the food system, on the urban environment, and on the people who prepare and consume the food.

Strategies for Change

In October 2011, New York State organic farmer and food justice advocate Elizabeth Henderson visited Taiwan and mainland China to talk about the CSA movement in the United States and to learn about CSAs and other farm-to-table initiatives in Taiwan and China. In Beijing, she was hosted by Shi Yan, a young CSA advocate who was completing her PhD at Renmin University under Dr. Wen Tiejun, a leading academic in China who has written extensively about a rural reconstruction approach to income disparities, food system change, and rural economic and community development. Shi Yan, who had previously spent time on a CSA farm in the United States, brought Henderson to Little Donkey Farm, one of China’s first CSA farms, located just outside Beijing. A year after Henderson’s trip, a conference in Hong Kong brought together CSA advocates, rural reconstruction researchers, and other environmental and food justice participants to explore opportunities for changing the food system. Similarly, other global food system critics and alternative food advocates in Hong Kong and China have begun to explore establishing a food sovereignty network that would parallel food sovereignty movements throughout the world.80

These gatherings symbolize a growing body of research, project-based initiatives, and related policy and community-based efforts that has emerged in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and mainland China to change the culture and practices of the dominant food system, including how food is grown, where it is sold, and what is consumed. This effort is embedded in the concepts of food justice and food sovereignty which extend to changes for the entire population, including those most vulnerable, such as the urban poor or farm laborers. The movement includes establishing farm-to-consumer connections (such as CSAs or community gardens and urban agriculture), expanding new kinds of rural-to-urban relationships, and celebrating and sustaining local and long-standing ethnic and place-based food cultures. It further identifies the need to reduce or eliminate the wide range of environmental, health, and land use food-system hazards and impacts (such as efforts to scale up local and organic food production and the challenges associated with identifying what constitutes “organic” food).

In Los Angeles, a relatively robust and innovative food justice and farm-to-consumer approach began to take root in the 1990s and has significantly expanded in the last decade. This has included the development in Los Angeles of the farm-to-school program mentioned earlier (and its sister program, farm to preschool), both of which were among the first to be established in the United States. Farm to school is a derivative of the farm-to-table concept but with a direct food justice orientation. Instead of a set of individual subscribers purchasing food from a single farmer most often located in the same region, as in the CSA model, farm to school involves an institution such as a school district purchasing directly from several local farmers, with the goal of providing healthier items for the school lunch and breakfast programs. The program also benefits local farmers, many of whom rely on direct farm sales, either through farmers’ markets, farm stands, or CSAs. Farm to school also increases school-aged children’s awareness of where food comes from, which is reflected in parallel efforts to establish school gardens and their related learning opportunities. The food justice dimension directly comes into play since many public school students who have benefitted from the program are low income (for example, over 80 percent of the 640,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District) and otherwise do not have access to “farm direct” or organic food, given its expense. The Urban & Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI), which helped initiate one of the first farm-to-school programs, also established the first “farm-to-preschool” program in Los Angeles (involving children under five and focused on growing and learning about foods), and that program has now also spread throughout the United States.81

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Figure 5.1 Farm to preschool program: preschoolers from Taylor Family Childcare in South Los Angeles. Source: Emily Hart.

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Figure 5.2 Growth of Farm to School in the United States (1997–2014). Source: National Farm to School Network.

Los Angeles, with its twelve-month growing season due to a favorable climate and its history of a once flourishing agriculture, has witnessed a modest revival in new forms of growing food in the city and the surrounding region. Community gardens have been established on vacant or underutilized land, or where private developers have allowed temporary use of their land for food growing until they are ready to develop the land. More innovative uses of land have been pursued, such as planting in the median strip on roadways, growing food in alleyways, or harvesting food from fruit trees or backyard gardens that are made available to low-income residents.82

These urban agriculture initiatives face several challenges, including land use barriers. Available land for an urban farm or even a smaller community garden is very limited, and the land title/private land ownership constraints are a constant factor. An effective policy mechanism is needed to overcome or at least address these and other types of barriers as well as to help facilitate or implement the variety of new food initiatives that have mushroomed in the region.83

In 2009, several community-based food organizations, researchers, and food policy experts teamed up with officials in the City of Los Angeles mayor’s office to help develop such a new policy-related entity. This group, initially organized as a task force and subsequently as the Los Angeles Food Policy Council (LAFPC), is essentially a hybrid of civil society groups and government officials. It has secured an unofficial or advisory relationship with the mayor’s office while maintaining its own independent status. The council has focused on program development, community advocacy, and policy development, and has established several working groups on such issues as urban agriculture, street food, food access and food retail, school food, sustainable sea food, food waste and resource recovery, hunger and food security, and procurement. Its detailed and groundbreaking Good Food Procurement Policy program identified five key criteria for procurement that it uses to assess supplier practices; these criteria, which have become the heart of its orientation toward food justice, include local sourcing, environmental impacts, animal welfare, health and nutrition, and fair labor practices. Seeking to identify where and how to pursue changes within the food system while also influencing the discourse about food in the urban environment, the Food Policy Council has become a unifying force in Los Angeles to help stimulate and convene ideas and constituencies dealing with such food system change. It has also helped formulate important food justice policy innovation and helped frame a new relationship between community groups and government, where much of the policy development has been driven by the nongovernment players.84

In Hong Kong, the momentum toward food system change has focused less on policy than on innovation and new food alternatives. The biggest influence on the interest in change and the opportunities for innovation has been the concern about food safety, particularly as Hong Kong has become more intertwined with China’s (and especially Guangdong’s) food-growing and production systems. Survey after survey has pointed to food safety as the most prominent issue for Hong Kong’s consumers. This concern has been intensified by heightened media coverage of each new food scandal, including ongoing daily coverage in the South China Morning Post under the heading “China Food Scandals.”85 Whether related to the trade in live poultry or contaminated ingredients in products, such as melamine in baby formula which led to serious illnesses and even deaths, each scandal has only magnified such fears and begun to shift certain government policies, food product selections, and individual choices of what to eat. For example, after the baby formula scandal in China led to a huge increase in purchases of baby milk formula by mainland visitors and by black market traders, the Hong Kong government imposed a limit of two cans of formula that could be carried across the border. As a result of the food safety scares, food imports from countries other than China have been increased, and consumers have been purchasing larger amounts of processed foods. In addition, organic food products have experienced double-digit growth rates for the past several years.86

As in Los Angeles and the rest of the United States, debates have begun to take place in Hong Kong over what constitutes “organic” food and whether organic represents a different food system ethic or simply a new economic market opportunity. In Los Angeles and the United States, the debate has centered on the rise of what has been called “industrial organic”—corporate takeovers by large firms of smaller organics producers, or the expansion and consolidation of individual producers who capture an increasing share of the growth and production of particular food products, such as leafy vegetables or dairy. Some global behemoths, such as Walmart, Coca Cola, and Con Agra, have entered the organics business and have had a huge impact on organics consolidation through their supply chain and purchasing arrangements. Industrial organics has become the symbol of how a market-driven approach can undermine or simply ignore key organic growing and producing practices. Workplace conditions and detrimental environmental practices have been substantial among industrial organic companies, causing many Los Angeles and US food justice groups to link “local” with “organic” as well as environmental and labor conditions in evaluating “good food” criteria.87

In Hong Kong, the development of an organics sector is relatively recent. The first organic farm was established in 1988 by Produce Green (later Produce Green Foundation), an environmental education group of self-styled “local enthusiasts concerned about modern farming and the environment.” Several other educational and research groups have been formed to promote organic farming methods to help conventional Hong Kong farmers make a transition to organic growing methods. New organic farms were also established, and by December 2002 the Hong Kong Organic Resource Center was created to develop organic production and processing certification standards in response to this budding sector.88

In some cases, the concept of “organic farm” has been extended to the development of new community gardens and demonstration farm initiatives that have come to represent Hong Kong’s emerging urban agriculture. Given Hong Kong’s vertical development (as opposed to Los Angeles’s horizontal sprawl), rooftop gardens have emerged as an additional type of urban agriculture. By December 2013, according to government figures, there were 480 organic farms in Hong Kong, including traditional family-operated farms, enterprise-operated farms, educational hobby farms, and noncertified farms that identified themselves as organic.89

Some groups also operated their own farmers’ market and served as training and demonstration sites. The most notable of these is the Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden (KFBG), originally established in 1956 as a support service for Hong Kong farmers and for refugee farmers from mainland China. Support for KFBG was provided by two brothers, Sir Horace and Lord Lawrence Kadoorie (Lawrence was the first Hong Kong person to be named a British Lord and serve in the UK House of Lords). The Kadoorie brothers owned China Light and Power, the utility that played a leading role in Hong Kong’s postwar industrial boom.90

Through the Kadoorie holdings, land for KFBG was donated and resources were provided to establish a new education and training center on 148 hectares on the northern slopes and foothills of Hong Kong’s highest mountain—Tai Mo Shan. The KFBG land is an impressive landscape, with its streams, woodlands, and vegetable terraces that have enabled the group to establish its conservation-based and environmental education programs. Its mission was expanded further in 1995 when the Hong Kong Legislative Council formally established KFBG as a corporation, helping to consolidate its transition as a center for promoting sustainable and organic farming. In recent years, KFBG staff members have become linked to a loose-knit set of advocates promoting new initiatives such as CSAs and organic and sustainable agriculture in Hong Kong as well as China.91

Although groups like KFBG and Green Produce have emphasized the environmental side of organic farming, the rapid growth of the organic market has been seen as a major business opportunity by food producers, retailers, and farming enterprises in both Hong Kong and China. The debate over what constitutes “organic” food has emerged as a consequence, as seen in the complex and at times misleading certification process that has arisen, especially in China where marketization has become so pronounced.

In China, the transition to a market economy in agriculture improved crop yields and expanded food choices, but it also led to soil erosion and other harmful environmental practices that could undermine China’s strategic goal of self-sufficiency, particularly in grain production. Those concerns led the Chinese government, already by the early 1980s, to support the development of a Chinese Ecological Agriculture (CEA) initiative. CEA highlighted such practices as traditional crop rotation, organic fertilizers, and a “virtuous cycle of production” involving the recycling and utilization of organic wastes. But CEA didn’t succeed in attracting the newly privatized small farmers, who focused primarily on where they could create demand for their products. While the CEA began to fade as a government-supported approach by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the growing fears about food safety, already evident during that period, caused the government to introduce a “green food” concept, complete with a certification strategy and a Green Food Logo to help stimulate demand and reduce the food safety fears.92

Eventually, three labels emerged: hazard-free (the weakest), Green Food (still essentially transitional), and an organic standard, which is also the most expensive. With higher costs of production and certification, the organic standard helped establish a niche market for wealthier consumers.93 Yet, even as the demand for “hazard-free,” “green,” or “organic” products and the amount of land dedicated to them has increased substantially, concerns about safety as well as abuses related to the certification process have remained widespread. The problem of trust continues to be an issue for green and even organic food. In a 2009 interview with Tony Guo, the sales director of Shanghai’s largest grocery chain, City Shop, which specializes in imports and also sells many organic items from its own affiliated organic farm, Guo stated that “not many people, including myself, believe the organic label.” Guo estimated that only 30 percent of the organic labels were authentic.94

The continuing food safety scandals in China and high degree of mistrust regarding such products as baby formula have led the mainland government to extend its regulatory approach, including the most recent 2015 Food Safety Law which updated and expanded the previous 2009 food safety regulations. Specific targets (“special food regulations”) included infant formula milk powder, health food labels and menus, food for special medical use, small food manufacturers and processing mills, and online shopping (itself an increasing trend in food retail).95

The issue of trust has also become a rallying cry for the emerging CSA and alternative food groups that constitute the beginnings of a civil-society-led food movement. One key figure in this emerging movement has been Shi Yan, who has placed the issue of trust between farmers and consumers/eaters as central to the mission of a CSA-type initiative. However, as the Little Donkey Farm and some other CSAs began to grow, Shi Yan felt some of the farms were turning into more of a market-driven model where plots of land are rented and local farm labor is employed. Food safety scares have tended to influence the motivation of those consumer/subscribers who are less concerned about environmental issues or support for local farmers than about obtaining food that would have zero food safety risk, and would be willing to pay a premium price in order to obtain it. Shi Yan and her allies have sought to create a farm-to-consumer model that identifies a new type of food and environmental ethic that also emphasizes the importance of elevating the role and value of rural farmers and some of the traditional environmental-oriented growing strategies. The program that Shi Yan established in 2012, Sharing the Harvest farm, recast the CSA as a “value-based” approach in which consumers and farmers share risks and environmental farming practices are renewed and elaborated, but where consumers, instead of just seeking hazard-free food, could also become “ethical eaters,” as one California CSA leader characterized the approach.96

One example of this new type of ethical arrangement is a small CSA operation founded in 2004 in the Tai Po section of the New Territories in Hong Kong by Li Kai Kuen, a local housewife. Gathering other women residents in the area to serve as volunteers and linking up with Kadoorie Farm staff, the indefatigable Kuen has worked closely with small farmers from the area to create a highly motivated group of farmers and consumers strongly committed to the support of the farmers and the local community. Emblematic of those relationships, one of the farmers, an eighty-year-old woman, insists that she teach the CSA participants and volunteers how to cook and prepare her special crop of noodles.97

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Figure 5.3 Tai Po CSA volunteers; Li Kai Kuen is in front. Source: Marjorie Pearson.

Whether a new ecological-based farming strategy or an ethical farmer-eater relationship can be part of a larger sustainable development approach impacting both rural agriculture and urban consumption has also preoccupied Shi Yan’s academic mentor Wen Tiejun and other academics and researchers who have sought to identify a renewed rural development or rural reconstruction framework for China as a whole. This includes, as Wen Tiejun wrote in 2003, “the reduction of the enormous disparity in the levels of development between urban and rural China, as well as between Western and Eastern China.” As Wen Tiejun subsequently wrote in 2007, China’s focus on wealth creation (Deng Xiaoping’s famous comment “to get rich is glorious”) based on a market-based export-oriented production and a fast rate of urbanization has failed to address what he calls “the three big disparities”—between incomes (China’s huge gap between the wealthiest and the poorest), between urban and rural areas, and between regions. What is it that we really want, Wen Tiejun asks—a continuing fast rate of GDP growth or “the sustainable development of human beings, resources, and society”? Issues related to food reside at the center of that debate about sustainability, justice, and livability, as do the multiple issues of the urban environment in the global city, whether in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, or in China.98

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