Food Consumption in the City: Practices and Patterns in Urban Asia and the Pacific

Food consumption patterns and practices are rapidly changing in Asia and the Pacific, and nowhere are these changes more striking than in urban areas. This book brings together scholars from anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, tourism, architecture and development studies to provide a comprehensive examination of food consumption trends in the cities of Asia and the Pacific, including household food consumption, eating out and food waste.

The chapters cover different scales of analysis, from household research to national data, and combine different methodologies and approaches, from quantifiable data that show how much people consume to qualitative findings that reveal how and why consumption takes place in urban settings. Detailed case studies are included from China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam, as well as Hawai'i and Australia. The book makes a timely contribution to current debates on the challenges and opportunities for socially just and environmentally sound food consumption in urbanizing Asia and the Pacific.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

Marlyne Sahakian is a Senior Researcher in the Faculty of Geosciences and the Environment at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Czarina Saloma is Associate Professor of Sociology at Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines, and recent Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at Bielefeld University, Germany. 

Suren Erkman is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Geosciences and the Environment at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he manages the Industrial Ecology Group.