Vietnam's Premium Organic Food

The search for truly organic food in Vietnam has always been a bit difficult. Under these circumstances, people's individual responsibility to choose harmless and healthy food was further emphasised, again pointing towards notions of the responsible consumer as well as the role of health concerns within organic food consumption.
Nonetheless, locals may still remain skeptical unless rental rates and shopping can be kept affordable; it is unavoidable that any ‘night market' or ‘fashion bazaar' pop-up in Vietnam would quickly be disregarded when compared with highly successful fashion and food bazaars found in downtown Bangkok—potentially leading locals into yet another self-induced bout of inferiority complex.



While there is demand for organic vegetables from increasingly health conscious customers, as well as increasing recognition of the environmental benefits of organic farming, farmers in Vietnam struggle to sell and get a decent price for ‘clean' produce.
An article in April 2018 by the Financial Times stated that the Vietnamese are one of the largest sources of digital consumers, commanding a solid 35 percent of the total online population, compared to 24 percent in Thailand and a measly 3.2 percent in Singapore.
Although it is a leading retailer in Vietnam, Pham Trung Kien admitted that Saigon has encountered numerous difficulties when investing in agricultural products due to ingrained habits of chemical use in agricultural production, unclear policies and regulations, and a lack of quality control systems.

Thus newly ‘discovered' consumers now find themselves in the position to choose from diversified markets with the corporate promotion of modern consumption (Ehlert 2016 ). The notion of consumer choice in turn also includes a moral imperative of making the ‘right' choice (Parsons 2015 ). Thus as responsible neoliberal nước ép trái cây citizen, the individual is expected to be in charge of his or her well-being and health, a discourse referred to as ‘responsible individualism' (Parsons 2015 , 1). This is of particular interest for this chapter in the field of food and questions of the responsibility of healthy and safe food choices.
This can be seen in light of the at-times inflationary usage of the term organic within HCMC's foodscape as well as a mistrust towards food labels in Vietnam more generally that in turn relate back to topics of food safety (see Figuié et al., this volume).