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Seeing and Knowing: Sourcing Safe Food in Zhejiang

At a farm-to-table restaurant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, high-quality food is sourced through direct relationships between restaurant staff and trusted rural suppliers. The restaurant is part of China’s growing food movement, and it shares this core principle of direct purchasing with other movement projects nationwide. At the same time, as the state responds to public anxieties over food safety, it has taken a “transparency” approach, emphasising “traceability” from field to tongue. Although such an approach may seem to follow similar logic to direct purchasing in the food movement, these two ways of pursuing safety are radically distinct. Drawing on evidence from the Hangzhou restaurant’s procurement system and Zhejiang’s “Sunshine Kitchen” food safety policies, I find that state responses to the food safety crisis misrecognise underlying moral-economic problems. By contrast, the restaurant’s farm-to-table purchasing system holds out a compelling model for (re)fashioning forms of moral consensus between growers and eaters of food.