Urban gardening in Ho Chi Minh City: class, food safety concerns, and the crisis of confidence in farming

ABSTRACT In recent years, the southern Vietnamese metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City has seen a proliferation of urban gardening, ranging from the minute home-growing of herbs and vegetables to commercial urban gardens. In this article, I argue that what underlies these phenomena is urbanites’ striving to control the food they consume in light of prevalent food safety concerns in Vietnam. Based on ethnographic research, the article demonstrates that urban food growing efforts are largely related to a widespread crisis of confidence in the food system in general and in farming specifically. People are particularly concerned with agrochemical contamination of food and its long-term health effects. Meanwhile, tensions exist between negative views of “unsafe” practices of unknown farmers and the simultaneous romanticization of rural life and of food acquired through personal rural connections. In the context of growing socio-economic inequalities in the late socialist country, the research also examines how urban gardening as an individualized and middle-class activity renders visible class differences in access to locally produced, “safe” food.


Introduction
Food cultivation in the city has long been observed as a subsistence strategy among people living in urban poverty in the Global South (Pottier 2015;Zezza and Tasciotti 2010).Furthermore, urban gardening can be a form of utilizing urban commons (Eizenberg 2012;Sugimoto 2021) and more recently, is seen as contributing to climate crisis mitigation (Puigdueta et al. 2021).In the shape of community gardens, urban gardens can function as places of intercultural encounters (Müller 2018).
In urban Vietnam, a different dynamic in urban gardening can be noted in recent years, one which includes a range of premium-prized gardening services and exclusive vegetable plots and rooftop gardens for aspiring and often relatively affluent urbanites.Urban gardening is gaining popularity among Vietnam's emerging middle classes (Kurfürst 2020, 51), a trend that can similarly be found in metropoles across Asia (Frazier 2021) and that the increasing commercialization of urban gardening in HCMC is testament to.
CONTACT Nora Katharina Faltmann nora.faltmann@univie.ac.at; nora.faltmann@uibk.ac.at Based on insights from ethnographic research in the Vietnamese metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC, formerly Saigon), I argue that the heightened interest in urban gardening is largely rooted in widespread food safety concerns in the country, especially regarding agrochemical residues.In a context characterized by rampant mistrust in the safety of food, urban gardening constitutes a strategy of controlling the parameters of how one's food is grown.In order to frame these practices, I draw on conceptualizations of how consumers create a sense of knowledge of and familiarity with the food they consume, while extending the scholarship by centering the role of material control over food cultivation in creating trust in food.
The urban (home) gardening activities examined in this article range from the minute sprouting of beans, herbs and vegetables on windowsills to rooftop gardens and rented vegetable plots on urban farms.In order to tease out differences in the ways people establish trust in "safe" food, I further compare these forms of urban food production with other forms of direct food acquisition via farmers and/or social networks that forego traders, food outlets and certifications.On the one hand, I demonstrate that these practices are united in the attempt of urbanites to actively reduce the distance between food production and consumption (see Kurfürst 2020;Wertheim-Heck and Spaargaren 2016) considering widespread suspicion toward food safety generally and the food safety practices of unknown farmers specifically.On the other hand, I trace the differences between various modes of establishing direct links to food as they exist on a spectrum of proximity to (knowledge of) food production.Here, I demonstrate that urbanites' struggle for material control over food cultivation in order to make it "known" is specific to urban gardening and distinguishes it from the social proximity of food acquired via social networks.
With its emphasis on the materiality and meanings of urbanites' (more) direct engagement with food production, the article puts less focus on other food safety strategies such as sensory selection of food, food avoidances, trust in certifications or established relations to vendors that have been assessed elsewhere.
Regarding the upsurge of urban gardening in commercial forms, its success is related to growing prosperity among concerned urbanites and situated within wider trends toward increasingly commercialized, privatized, and regulated urban space (Harms 2009).As producing food through urban gardening on a significant scale is linked to access to space, economic resources, and time, I further argue that urban gardening in HCMC in its current forms is mostly an individualized and often unaffordable undertaking that renders visible class differences in access to what is considered safe food.
In what follows, I first briefly delineate the food safety situation in contemporary Vietnam, followed by an overview of how (mis)trust in food and its safety has been theorized.In the subsequent ethnographic sections I analyze prevalent narratives on farming practices in Vietnam and how these relate to people's mistrust in food safety and their desire to know how, where and by whom their food is grown.I then examine how the concern for the carcinogenic effects of (agro)chemicals manifests in the ways through which Saigonese try to control the food they consume -and produce.I then examine ways in which businesses commercialize trust through direct marketing of urban gardens.A close look at the parameters of such businesses suggests that access to their products is highly limited, particularly through pricing, creating unequal access to "safe" food from direct sources, as analyzed in the final section.

Food and change in globalizing Vietnam
In the decades following the 1980s economic reforms and the capitalist world market integration of the officially communist country, Vietnam has been shaped by processes of industrialization, urbanization and market orientation (De Koninck 2004).Increasing prosperity also came with widening socio-economic inequality, e.g., in the shape of income polarization (Oxfam 2017) and class differentiation including an emerging middle-class often understood through (conspicuous) consumption (Ehlert 2016) and high-ranking or high-earning professions (Gainsborough 2010).Meanwhile, the country's food system has transformed from widespread scarcity to an increasingly diversified food supply (Ehlert and Faltmann 2019).
Along with these developments, Vietnam has undergone a major agrarian change (De Koninck 2004).Policies such as the recent agricultural restructuring plan (MARD 2017) are part of endeavors to transform the country's farming from small-scale to large-scale, commercially oriented, intensified agriculture (Gorman 2019).Consequently, the distance between food production and consumption has been widening, which has been cause for concern especially among urbanites far removed from food production (Figuié and Bricas 2010).
Since the 2010s, issues of food safety (an toàn thự c phâ ̉m) have been on the rise (Figuié et al. 2019), both in incidence and in media coverage and public perception (Wertheim-Heck, Raneri, and Oosterveer 2019).Associated with intensified food production and lengthening food chains, the (mis)use of preservatives and agrochemicals has been reported (Figuié and Bricas 2010).Vietnamese consumers are especially concerned with agrochemical residues, preservatives and hormonal residues and, according to a recent study, perceive vegetables, fruits, and meat as least safe (Thanh Mai Ha, Shakur, and Kim Hang Pham Do 2019), while China is commonly viewed as a particularly unsafe origin of food (Figuié et al. 2019).
The heightened food safety concerns in Vietnam bear many similarities to China, including the sense that food safety issues are associated with the emerging role of market principles in the food system (Klein 2014), concerns that the state might be inapt to guarantee food safety compliance (Kurfürst 2020) and an overall crisis of social trust (Yan 2012;Merrifield 2020).
The food safety landscape in Vietnam is complex and dynamic as illustrated by the case of a 2016 television report that depicted farmers using brooms in order to artificially create holes in vegetables, imitating the effect of pests that supposedly indicate the absence of pesticide application.After gaining media attention, the affected farmers complained that the footage was staged, resulting in an apology on the network's website (VnExpress, May 13, 2016).Nonetheless, the initial news story demonstrates the interrelation between material and discursive changes of food safety: the small, holey, or faulty appearance of vegetables has come to be viewed as a physical marker for pesticide-free, "safe" food, enhancing the reputation of imperfect-looking food.In a next step, the report suggests, notions of what appearance is deemed safe can lead to the exploitation of such assumptions via imitation, bearing an element of intentional deception.
In his analysis of food safety in China, Yan (2012, 717) argues that intent behind food safety issues proves particularly "socially lethal."The insinuation of intent thus portrays farmers in an ethically questionable light and fuels mistrust toward food from unfamiliar sources.Moreover, it suggests that consumers' focus on the material properties of food alone might not be sufficient to deem it safe as appearance might have been willfully manipulated, enhancing anxieties that consumers cannot (even) trust their own senses when assessing food.
Connected to the unreliability of the senses to detect unsafe food is the concern among Vietnamese consumers that (agro)chemicals are responsible for rising cancer rates (Hung Nguyen-Viet et al. 2017;Thanh Mai Ha et al. 2019).In this article I will carve out how such concern for carcinogenic substances manifests in people's urge to materially control their food and how it is situated in the historical context of Vietnam.
Overall, even though Global South countries are highly affected by burdens of foodborne disease (see Liguori et al. 2022), existing research has a strong bias toward examining consumers' food anxieties (Jackson 2015) and food safety in the Global North.Thus, further research is needed on the particularities of navigating food safety anxieties in Global South contexts.

Methodology
As part of PhD research on food safety and social inequalities in urban Vietnam (Faltmann 2022), the ethnographic data in this article draws from a total of ten months of fieldwork in HCMC between 2015 and 2017.
Prevalent ambivalence toward the safety of food from the most common food outletswet markets and supermarkets -initially led me to engage with alternative ways of urban food acquisition.Looking for formalized urban gardening projects, I was at first only able to find one socio-ecological project that had since re-located to Hoian in central Vietnam.
The initial failure to locate urban gardening in HCMC presented me with the opportunity to reflect my understandings of urban gardening as strongly shaped by a Global North context in which urban gardening tends to be framed in terms of environmental sustainability (Puigdueta et al. 2021) and urban community gardens often present as politicized projects challenging the corporate, industrialized food system (Cockrall-King 2012) and the privatization of urban space (Eizenberg 2012).Questioning these assumptions for Vietnam allowed me to diversify my understanding of alternative food production in HCMC beyond collectively organized projects.
While contemporary issues such as inequalities in the existing agricultural system or unequal access to public space and to "safe," locally produced food could be addressed by urban gardeners, my research found that urbanites predominantly seem concerned with food safety on a personal level.In these ways, engagement with urban gardens among HCMC's inhabitants -both in noncommercial and commercial cases -tends to be for individual health and lifestyle reasons and less so for reasons of activism.By widening my scope toward different forms of urban gardening I was able to find urbanites who grow food on various scales and to interview the owner of a commercial urban garden that rents out vegetable plots.
The voices featured in this article mostly belong to professionals with academic backgrounds, some of which work in international corporations, their education and profession likely classifying them as middle-class (Gainsborough 2010).Accordingly, three of the five cited interviews were conducted in English which constitutes a class marker, while two interviews were conducted in Vietnamese with the support of an interpreter.Beyond the cited interviews, the findings are underpinned by participant observation, informal conversations as well as wider research among various socioeconomic groups in HCMC, the majority of which was concerned with food safety yet did not engage with forms of urban gardening.As I will discuss, this poses a finding in itself suggesting unequal access to locally produced fresh foods.Names, and some identifiable features, have been changed for anonymity.

Theorizing (Mis) trust in food
Particularly for contexts characterized by heightened food safety skepticism, a range of scholarship has conceptualized the various ways in which urban consumers navigate trust in (safe) food amidst multiple sources of information and food outlets.
In her work on food safety in China, where food safety concerns take a similar shape to those in Vietnam, anthropologist Caroline Merrifield (2020) distinguishes between "seeing" and "knowing" safe food.While "seeing" describes a system of tracing, regulating and certifying food under governmental authority, "knowing" signifies an interpersonal familiarity between producers and eaters.In the case of acquiring food directly from farmers, "[f]amiliarity with the farmer becomes a proxy for knowledge of the food" (Merrifield 2020, 293).In a similar vein, Sandra Kurfürst (2020) describes how "social value" is ascribed to vegetables that are exchanged among family and friends in Hanoi, Vietnam, while Edelmann, Quiñones-Ruiz, and Penker (2020) refer to the role of trust via personal acquaintance in "Alternative Food Networks" as "social proximity."All scholars stress the value of an interpersonal connection that is seen as a guarantor for the safety of the food.
Other concepts are more place-based in their emphasis: anthropologist Katharina Graf's (2016) work on consumer negotiation of "proper" food in urban Morocco describes the local indices of "beldi," which can refer to food from the country, from a nearby or one's home region, or from small-scale production, and "rumi," which in contrast signifies imported and industrially produced food.Graf argues that beldi functions as a distinction between what is "knowable" and what is "unknowable," "imply[ing] the 'ability to know': where it comes from, who produced it and what it tastes like" (87).
Correspondingly, in food regime theory "food from nowhere" (Bové and Dufour 2001) describes cheap and convenient food whose origin in an industrialized and globalized food system is invisible, whereas the socially and economically localized "food from somewhere" (McMichael 2002) is sought by affluent consumers (Campbell 2009).Against this background, receiving food through familial or social networks or establishing relationships to farmers are ways of acquiring food that is "knowable" instead of "delocalized" (Figuié and Bricas 2010, 179) food from unknown origins.
What these conceptualizations share is making sense of the ways in which people make food "knowable" (Graf 2016) through social ties and/or through trust in certain places of origin.In this article I build on these understandings in order to demonstrate the importance HCMC's inhabitants put on making their food "knowable" and therefore trustworthy and safe through different forms of food acquisition in the face of rampant mistrust in food production.
However, my argument goes beyond the presented conceptualizations by carving out that urban gardening activities in HCMC constitute a form of not only making food "knowable" but known by offering urbanites first-hand material control over food growing.Controlling the parameters of food growing can be viewed as a response to ubiquitous risks of chemical contamination in food (MacKendrick and Stevens 2016).Meanwhile, there are limits to this control: even with home cultivation of food, not all parameters of urban environments such as air pollution or soil can be known and controlled.Yet, as will become apparent in the following, HCMC's urban gardeners tend to stress the factors that are "controllable" while under-emphasizing those that are not which can be understood as a coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty.
Furthermore, I contend all these strategies do not exist in a vacuum, but are shaped by people's social positionings especially regarding socio-economic status, and access to information and social ties.
The following ethnographic section examines how contemporary forms of urban gardening are intertwined with the particularities of food safety concerns among Saigonese and with wider rural-urban relations and a mistrust in farming.

Urban gardening and food safety concerns
Nga, Linh, Hang, and Phuong, female professionals in their thirties and forties not only work at the same international company in central HCMC but also have in common that they grow food at home to varying degrees, topic of our group discussion in 2015.
Linh and her husband who do not have children grow onions and chili in their garden, items that when purchased perish easily which is why they decided to grow these plants on their limited space.Phuong's space for gardening is also restricted, which for her resulted in the decision to grow vegetables solely for her son, stressing that this is her priority: "I think to be safe for my son, if we can grow ourselves, it is good for his health."Nga grows chili and sprouts soybeans in her kitchen while the only thing that Hang makes at home is yogurt for her daughter, exclaiming: "My flat is too small.I have grown some [vegetables] but my kids are already damaged so . . .." To cultivate plants at home, the women buy soil, seeds, or seedlings from one of the many nurseries in and around HCMC.The group agrees that both the popularity of and the market for goods and services for home cultivation is currently gaining momentum.When asked about the reason behind this boom, they point out two things: chemically contaminated food from China with the concomitant fear of cancer as well as the rumor that even in Vietnam, farmers treat the vegetables for sale differently than the ones they grow for their own consumption.Nga mentions that through her parents she has heard of the practice of farmers cultivating a plot for their own families separately from those plots growing food for sale, an account that the others confirm resembles what they have heard: in the so-called kitchen gardens, farmers supposedly do not apply agrochemicals, thus producing small vegetables that according to Nga look "very funny."Commercially used plots, in contrast, are subjected to high amounts of agrochemicals, the group agrees.When probed why given the high demand for "safe" food in Vietnam farmers would not grow everything the way that they grow their own food, Nga and Linh point out that it is both time-consuming and pricey, thus not economically viable.
Phuong adds that implications of appearance are context specific: "If we grow plants at home and don't use chemicals, the vegetables will not look well.But we're sure that they contain no chemicals and are good for health.But if you go to the market then you don't want to buy [vegetables] looking like this."Yet she is convinced that most vegetables sold at markets are not the homegrown variety from kitchen gardens in any case, which is why when food shopping she usually prefers vegetables certified with the Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) quality standard from supermarkets.Only on occasion does she buy vegetables from the wet market: "We know some small provider from the local market, sometimes they provide us the clean vegetables, like organic vegetables.But we need to go in the early morning.And they don't have very much.Everything is small, small, small, small."Adding to the discussion on appearances, Nga, whose family sometimes buys small quantities of food from the "kitchen garden" of farmers who they know, points out that they use this small and funny-looking food if they believe it is good for their health.
When Nga describes that her family in the countryside near Dalat regularly provides her and her family with homegrown vegetables, the group calls her "lucky" and concurs that this is the pinnacle of safe food and the most desirable situation to be in for busy urbanites like themselves.Others' families live too far away or not in rural areas, hence are unable to provide this kind of edible support.
Generally, urbanites' relationship to the Vietnamese countryside is often characterized by a fine balance between romanticizing and vilifying "the rural" (Kurfürst 2019), impacting how urbanites think of food.Like Nga, Linh, and Phuong, many urbanites in HCMC have familial ties to rural Vietnam while maintaining an ambiguous relationship with the countryside.It is simultaneously imagined as a place of intact social relations and healthy environments as well as a setting connoted with "backwardness" (Kurfürst 2019) and skepticism toward the "unknown" rural farmer and their practices.Exemplifying this tension, Phuong assesses that food from known farmers is seen as safe, whereas vegetables with the same appearances in a market, and without knowing the farmer who grew them, is not. 1 In this case, an established familiarity with the producer takes precedence over the apparent material qualities of the food.Indeed, urbanites wary of other food outlets at times specifically seek social ties with market vendors and/or farmers (see Klein 2014 for China), a practice linking back to making food "knowable"yet not "known" -via social familiarity.
Urbanites' desire to know the sources of their food or to even grow it themselves appears to be rooted in a skepticism toward unknown farmers.Prevalent narratives on farmers' kitchen gardens as shared in the group discussion are in many ways exemplary for this skepticism and grant insights into discourses on farmers and food safety more generally as outlined in the following.

Farmers' "kitchen gardens"-"They don't eat what they sell"
The mentioned material trajectories in Vietnam's food system including increasingly industrialized agriculture and an expanding distance between rural food production and urban food consumption are accompanied by a widespread skepticism among urbanites toward agricultural products from unknown sources and the people growing it.
The discussion with Nga, Linh, Hang, and Phuong on farmers' kitchen gardens typifies the circulation of stories about farmers cultivating "safe" food for themselves while applying potentially unsafe amounts of agrochemicals to their commercial fields.Whereas in the group there seemed to be an understanding that it would not be economically viable for farmers to fully grow food in the manner of "kitchen gardens," more frequently, the tone of such stories and of media reports paint farmers and their agricultural practices in a decidedly negative light.In a conversation about agrochemicals in Vietnamese agriculture, Mr. Duong, an HCMC-based food entrepreneur, for instance, exclaimed: "You know they know?They don't eat what they sell."He is convinced that there is a deliberate difference between what farmers subject themselves to and what they knowingly subject the consumers of their commercial products to.In this narrative, the kitchen garden has come to signify the dubious, double-standard practices of farmers (see Thi-Thanh-Hien Pham, Turner, and Pham 2020, 7), viewed favorably only when one has rare access to the fruits of such gardens.
Other sources make even more explicit moral claims about farmers: in an academic article on the current state of food safety in Vietnam, Hung Nguyen-Viet et al. (2017, 1) argue that a lack of ethics by value chain stakeholders is a key food safety issue, "lead[ing] to the production and trading of unsafe foods in order to make profits irrespective of adverse health effects on consumers."One example the authors give for such lack of ethics is that of farmers who are said to sell unsafe food while growing safer food for themselves, suggesting the existence of "kitchen gardens."Thereupon, the authors slightly defuse the accusation of poor ethics by arguing that such unethical behavior is connected to a current system that rewards unsafe food practices instead of incentivizing good practices.Nonetheless, and similar to the broomstick newspaper report, the connection between farmers' behavior and claims of lacking ethics have been established, again pointing toward the underlying assumption of intent and concomitant value judgments on farmers' practices.
Furthermore, contemporary media coverage on agriculture and food safety is predominantly focused on issues of malpractice in agriculture or the health effects of unsafe food for the consumer.That farmers are the most likely group to be directly subjected to hazardous agrochemicals is much less part of the public food safety debate.A recent notable exception is a study on the health effects of pesticides on farmers in Hai Duong Province which found that the cancer death rates among farming communities who cultivated vegetables were four to five times higher than those in a ricegrowing commune (Vu Ngoc Huyen et al. 2020).Yet, when I raised the issue of pesticide exposure for farmers' health in a 2015 interview with a journalist, she countered with the assumption that cancer rates among farmers must be lower than in the overall population precisely because they mostly eat vegetables from their "kitchen gardens." Overall, public views on farmers and their role in the socialist state project has undergone noticeable historical transformations.Whereas previously, farmers were viewed as one of the backbones of socialist Vietnam (Dinh 2000), their role in public discourse is shifting as contemporary narratives on farmers' harmful practices have exemplified.Public attention instead seems predominantly focused on the health of consumers and much less on farmers' health, hinting at larger structural imbalances in Vietnam's current-day rural-urban divide.
Regarding perceptions of urbanites, a recent study in northern Vietnam found the wish for safe and clean vegetables for their families based on agrochemical concern to be the most central motivation for people to engage in urban gardening (Thi-Thanh-Hien Pham, Turner, and Pham 2020).Thus, the discourse on agricultural products from unknown sources as potentially chemically contaminated and unsafe features centrally in urbanites' striving toward growing food themselves.

Urban gardening as control
As demonstrated, with food acquired through social ties, the materiality of food is but one aspect that makes urbanites trust food.With urban gardening, however, the physical control of the material growing conditions often lies at the core, as is the case for Mrs. Mai, an academic in her sixties.A few years back, Mrs. Mai had suffered from breast cancer, an experience that led her to undertake major changes in her life, including her diet.Mrs. Mai tells me that there were two major factors that initially motivated her to grow her own food: high cholesterol and the cancer diagnosis.After having received treatment, she reorganized her living situation substantially by building a new house with a spacious flat roof on which she can grow vegetables and rear chickens.Skeptical of the typical water tanks in Vietnam, she had a brick pond built instead that serves to water the plants.Her worry is that through the usual metal or plastic water tanks, harmful substances such as lead would end up contaminating the food: "It is so dangerous.It is one source of cancer if vegetables get contaminated by it."Mrs. Mai keeps up a compost system, makes her own fertilizer and is weary of potential contamination from storebought soil.Instead, her siblings who live in the Mekong Delta provide her with soil "from the rice field to my house."Her cultivation activities provide her with eggs from her chickens and with vegetables that she feels are the cleanest, but since she is not selfsufficient, she also relies on other sources for certain foods.She for example gets fish through a friend who orders it from what Mrs. Mai calls a "safe source" while simultaneously voicing the reservation that ultimately, "I don't know if it's safe or not safe.But at least," she reassures, "the vegetables I grow by myself," demonstrating that food procured via social networks can be "knowable" while only food grown by oneself can be ultimately "known." Mrs. Mai's story is that of a lifestyle change following a severe illness, of connecting a disease whose causes are difficult to trace to manageable environmental factors, including diet, and of attempting to manage one's body and the influences it is exposed to.Her understanding of a safe diet is one free of various forms of contamination.By cultivating as much of her food as possible, she attempts to cut out risk factors like contaminated soil and water.Her meticulous practices and considerations on sourcing suggest she strives for control and order in the face of ubiquitous chemical contamination risks (see MacKendrick and Stevens 2016).Planting food in her own garden, in her view, constitutes the safest way of avoiding various kinds of contamination and managing what she incorporates into her body.While foods like the fish from acquaintances become "knowable" via the social networks she acquires them through, the vegetables she grows herself are the one food she feels she ultimately knows, having controlled most components of their production from water to fertilizers.
While the experience of her cancer diagnosis marked a turning point in the way Mrs. Mai engages with food, as she herself states, the concern of cancer risks through food is widespread in Vietnam.Eaters are particularly unsettled by the encroaching danger of (agro)chemicals staying in the body and having long-term effects well beyond the cycle of consuming food, concisely summarized by a teenage volunteer I met at a food charity: "Oh every Vietnamese is concerned with food safety.Not the kind of chemical that you eat and then throw up.But it stays within you and later on gives you cancer." Related to concern for cancer, Hung Nguyen-Viet et al. (2017, 2) in an overview of food safety in Vietnam point out that "there is far more concern about the carcinogenic impact of food than the evidence to support this," as the causality between dietary exposure to pesticides and cancer is widely unsolved.The authors point toward the finding of an expert committee that, examining the major pesticides diazinon, malathion and glyphosate, concludes that dietary exposure to these pesticides is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic threat to humans (FAO and WHO 2016).Referring to the psychology of risk perception, Hung Nguyen-Viet et al. ( 2017) suspect the reason behind disproportionally high concern for chemical hazards in people's tendency to be more concerned with risks that are unfamiliar and out of their control than with those connected to their behavior.
However, an important caveat is that the carcinogenicity of glyphosate -worldwide the most-used herbicide -is highly controversial (Tarazona et al. 2017) which appears to have a particular relevance in Vietnam.Following international debates on the potential health-effects of glyphosate products, the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) banned the production as well as import of glyphosate products in 2019 (although not in effect until 2021) (GAIN Report 2020).Dien Luong (2021) argues that the public suspicion in Vietnam toward glyphosate-based herbicides by Monsanto is historically rooted in the company's involvement in the production of Agent Orange, the defoliant chemical used by US military during the US-Vietnam War with devastating and long-term health effects for the Vietnamese people.Thus, even though personal perceptions of the carcinogenic risks of agrochemicals might not always match the material actualities, agrochemicals constitute a major concern among Vietnamese citizens, potentially in part rooted in the material history of the country.
Growing food at home and without pesticides, then, for concerned people like Mrs. Mai can constitute an attempt to control a process that in the current food system predominantly lies outside of the control of urban eaters.At times, homegrown vegetables can even function as a benchmark for food from other sources, such as for Nhung and Xuan, an affluent middle-aged couple living in central HCMC who summarize their food safety concerns in the one-word reply "cancer."Since the economic success of Nhung's business, Xuan stays at home to support his wife and to cultivate vegetables in their garden while they have also become regular customers at one of the city's small organic shops.While trial and error of the products' quality and safety is common among consumers of Vietnam's emerging organic sector (Faltmann 2019), Nhung and Xuan go further and specifically compare the material qualities of the store-bought vegetables to those from their garden: when they look and taste the same, they believe the purchased vegetables to be safe as they have become "controllable." Meanwhile, in response to my open-ended question on what factors people paid attention to in growing food, potentially negative material factors in urban environments such as air pollution or heavy metal contamination in soils (Antisari et al. 2015) were mentioned much less frequently.Instead, vegetables from urban gardening in Vietnam are often viewed as safe, despite potential (air-)pollution (Kurfürst 2020, 49), indicating that urban gardeners might decide to focus on what is "controllable" rather than on what is not in order to have a sense of control considering ubiquitous food safety concerns.
Commercial urban gardens -"I sell not only the vegetables, I sell the feeling.I sell the trust." The widespread desire for self-cultivated vegetables has also led to a growing market for urban gardening and attempts to commercialize trust by offering close-knit gardening services, often for a premium price.On a small scale this includes services that facilitate vegetable growing at home as mentioned by Nga, Linh, Hang and Phuong, while on a larger scale it entails the rental of vegetable patches on urban farms as described in the following ethnography.
Located on a large patch of land, in the wealthy part of District 2 that is particularly popular amongst HCMC's privileged migrants, is People's Farm, a business offering the farming experience to urbanites.The area harbors a range of plots growing all sorts of vegetables, a path through the premises, an open-air café, and a venue that can be booked for events.In view of the high-rise buildings nearby, People's Farm offers a green oasis of space, lushness, and fresh air amidst an otherwise busy, noisy, and traffic-filled city.The owner Mr. Duong presents himself as a businessman with a vision.He started People's Farm after he realized that his children thoroughly enjoyed their visits to Dalat in Vietnam's Central Highlands where he also owns a farm.His vision, he claims, is to one day have People's Farm being run by everyone.Yet as of now, it is a business model.For around 30USD per month, one can rent a plot of land on which to cultivate vegetables by oneself.For an additional 10USD, one can book farm services so that the staff of People's Farm take care of the plot's maintenance such as watering and weeding, leaving only the task of harvesting to the customers.Moreover, the staff plant a small number of vegetables for sale.Just like on Mr. Duong's farm in Dalat, the vegetables are grown according to organic standards yet without being certified as such, meaning that the plot renters may use "natural" fertilizers but no chemical-based ones.Planting their own food on their plots gives customers the chance to directly compare their plants to those grown by the staff.This serves as a basis for trust, Mr. Duong explains, because the direct comparison would immediately reveal if the staff used fertilizers and methods that differ from those applied by the plot renters.Mr. Duong is convinced that customers' first-hand experience of the complicated and hard work of farming leads to an increased willingness to pay a premium price -"If people trust you, they agree for you to get that profit."However, the format goes further than that: as advertised on the homepage of People's Farm, the city farm not only provides space for gardening and the opportunity to buy "safe" food.It also sells the feeling of being a "one day farmer."Or, as Mr. Duong put it: "I plant the vegetables.And I sell the vegetables.And I told you already, I sell not only the vegetables, I sell the feeling.I sell the trust." With these words, Mr. Duong accurately describes a growing phenomenon in HCMC and urban Vietnam more broadly: the (direct-)marketing of not only "safe" food but its overall embeddedness in the promotion of a lifestyle and the commercialization of trust.
While urban vegetable gardening in Vietnam can be de-commoditized through cultivation on wasteland and practices of communing (Kurfürst 2020), it is also increasingly subject to commercialization.
Mr. Duong is very aware of the appeal of People's Farm for urbanites as a green haven in a busy city and as a place of growing "safe" food.In contrast to acquiring food through friends or family, where food becomes "knowable" through familiar and trusted people, in commercial contexts trust needs to be established differently.At People's Farm, being able to grow vegetables themselves already means that the plot renters have a high degree of control over what their food is exposed to.Plot renters being able to compare their own yields with the crops maintained by staff constitutes a further mechanism of control over the vegetables' agrochemical-free cultivation.
People's Farm is structured around familiarity and small scale.When vegetables or the occasional poultry are for sale, it gets posted on the company's Facebook page and sold on a first-come basis among their customers.Mr. Duong stresses that the city farm does not yield high amounts, making their products a rare good.Among the garden members there is also a system of sharing foods like fruits, mushrooms, or fish that members acquire through their own social networks.While Mr. Duong's vision might be one of a community-led gardening initiative, in its current format People's Garden and similar ventures are clearly business models that operate at a premium price.For "selling trust," it is specifically the small scale and familial atmosphere of the venture that attracts concerned urbanites, similar to the country's small-scale local organic sector (Faltmann 2019).Given the importance of social interactions as a way of "knowing" the food (Merrifield 2020), I contend that on a larger scale, such social proximity as well as mechanisms of control would be hard to maintain, posing issues for meaningfully providing such options to a wider population.
Elaborating further on the customer base of People's Farm, Mr. Duong explains that his clientele is made up of around one-third foreigners and two-thirds Vietnamese people, of whom he claims: "Vietnamese people, they love this.Usually they have a good life, their children have more opportunities and they would like their children to have the nature feeling."Affluent urbanites seeking the experience of being a "one day farmer" and of offering their children ways of connecting with nature in an otherwise highly urbanized environment is in line with Thompson, Bunnell, and Parathasarathy (2013, 9) describing how particularly urban middle-classes across Southeast Asia, with increasing urbanization, tend to cultivate a nostalgia for an imagined agrarian past.Through their plot schemes as well as events for children, People's Farm caters to this longing for re-connecting with nature and food growing albeit decidedly without the hardships of farming life.Urbanites' desire to experience being "one day farmer[s]" and to counteract urban alienation from food sources and nature (Frazier 2021) points to the aforementioned tension in ruralurban relations: while negative perspectives on anonymous farmers prevail, urbanites at times romanticize farming (in small dosages) as a lifestyle activity.Thus, commercial urban gardens like People's Farm capitalize on a certain lifestyle connected to personal desiresfor "safe" food and for a gardening experience in an otherwise urbanized environment.

"Good food" for whom?
In socio-economic terms, such commercial urban gardens are not attainable to everyone.
Mr. Duong characterizes his customers as follows: "And they have money, so they think about the food, they think about safe food.Before they think about food only.But now they have more money, so they think about quality, the health."His description of the increased income of his customers allowing them to be concerned with food quality and health evokes the Vietnamese proverb "Enough food and warm clothing, delicious food and beautiful clothing" ("co'm no, áo â ́m; co'm ngon, áo đẹp") (Ehlert 2016, 71, 87) describing the changing focus of an increasingly wealthy post-reform society.
Simultaneously, Mr. Duong acknowledges that the unequal wealth divide in the country by speaking of those who are not part of the People's Farm experience: Workers cannot think anything else.Because the worker, when they wake up, they just need to feed their stomach and they eat a lot to have energy.But that is not good.But now we cannot because the natural product is three times, four times higher [in price] than normal chemical.So how?We cannot reduce the price for all people.Because now there is not enough food for our members, for people here, for my friends.So we cannot reduce the price.
That access to his urban garden is limited is something Mr. Duong is aware of and that he handles with the economic logic of a businessman by way of supply and demand.A comparison to average Vietnamese incomes -with 1.5 million VND (65 USD) considered a low and 15 million VND (650 USD) a high income (GFAR (The Centre for Global Food and Resources) 2018) -puts the monthly plot costs of 30 to 40 USD (approx.900,000 VND) at People's Farm in perspective.According to a household study in HCMC, the average monthly vegetable expenditures per adult male equivalent across income groups are around 250,000 to 260,000 VND (around 11 USD) (GFAR 2018).Thus, the plot fee at People's Farm would cover the vegetable expenditures for three to four adults, while the yield from a plot, according to Mr. Duong, covers only a third of a family's vegetable consumption, thus requiring additional food shopping.Consequently, renting a vegetable plot here, possibly even with maintenance costs, is an expenditure only accessible to those with (very) high incomes, meaning that food from People's Farm is not accessible for those outside the middle or upper class.The information that about one-third of Mr. Duong's customers are foreigners -and given the garden's location likely privileged migrants -speaks further to inequalities in access.As Mr. Duong puts it, "The worker now cannot think about the pricing of the food.And they will be more poor, because they get disease, they get cancer," referring to health disparities connected to a cycle of poverty and lack of access to "safe" and high-quality food.The inequalities in food access, in turn, evoke the differences between "food from nowhere" vs. "food from somewhere": with its limited availability and often higher prices, the small-scale, "safe," localized "food from somewhere" such as from People's Farm is only accessible for an affluent minority, whereas low-cost, anonymous "food from nowhere" constitutes a cheap food source for most of the population.
Fittingly, then, the people featured in this article who engage in forms of urban gardening can be considered middle-class, with material and social resources beyond what most Vietnamese have access to.Simultaneously, research in Hanoi found the percentage of homegrown foods and those acquired through alternative sources among low-income households to be infinitesimal (Wertheim-Heck, Raneri, and Oosterveer 2019, 405).Thus, there appears to be a connection between people's socio-economic positions and their potential access to engaging with urban gardening, not least in terms of scale.
Such inequalities go beyond the commercialized urban gardens of HCMC as the home-growing of food also requires a range of unequally accessible resources.Taking the example of Mrs. Mai's rooftop garden, she explains that the maintenance of the garden is time consuming, including online research on gardening, watering during the dry season, killing pests during the rainy season, making compost and fertilizer, installing nets against birds and mice, and tending to the chickens.Provided with resources such as soil and organic matter from her vast social networks, taking up the entirety of her rooftop, and requiring a lot of time, the rooftop garden constitutes a highly resourceintensive endeavor.Mrs. Mai herself acknowledges the constraints of such gardening practices: "It depends on some factors.They have a flat roof?They have enough space for this?The first reason is space, or land, having land.And the second one, they have the time or not." With time and space, Mrs. Mai points out some of the intersecting resource requirements for urbanites to grow food in HCMC.As someone in her sixties without young children, Mrs. Mai's time resources look different than those of especially female parents of young kids who tend to be expected to engage in wage labor as well as in domestic caring duties.Similarly, Nhung and Xuan, the middle-aged couple, have a garden for vegetable cultivation, an income that allows one of them to not engage in wage labor and grow vegetables instead, as well as the means to shop for organic food.The range of resources at their disposal exemplify how "safe" food can be managed with the right amount of economic, social, temporal, and spatial resources at hand, and how such resources determine people's access to partaking in urban gardening on a substantial scale (Frazier 2021).Similarly, Kurfürst (2020) describes how spacious rooftop gardens in Hanoi have become signs of socio-economic distinction.
By referring to space, Mrs. Mai mentions another relevant factor determining the scale of potential food cultivation that urbanites can engage in.Common small-scale practices of urban food production beyond the home include cultivating herbs and vegetables in plastic bottles or polystyrene fruit boxes in public spaces (Kurfürst 2020).In HCMC, I have particularly observed such public vegetable growing in boxes in the city's suburbs where space is ampler than in the city center.Spatial inequality inherent in increasingly commodified urban gardening among affluent groups has been similarly found for other contexts (Matamanda, Mandebvu-Chaora, and Rammile 2022).While people like Mrs. Mai as well as Nhung and Xuan with access to entire gardens can produce higher quantities of "controlled" food, urban gardening on a smaller scale produces smaller yields of food that is considered safe.For instance, Nga, Phuong, and Hang stressed that they can only grow small amounts of vegetables given the limited available space in the city.The small yields, then, most of them give to the youngest children of their households as they are seen as most vulnerable (see Faltmann 2019;MacKendrick and Stevens 2016).Feeding only the youngest with what is considered safest again points toward the practice of focusing on what is "controllable" in contexts in which homegrown food for all household members is not attainable.At the same time, the uneven access to (increasingly privatized) space has implications for people's engagement with urban gardening and access to perceived safe food.

Conclusion
In this article I have interpreted the growing popularity of various forms of urban gardening in HCMC as responses to the widespread mistrust toward unknown agricultural products, and the underlying crisis of confidence in agriculture in Vietnam.As the featured voices have shown, tensions exist between negative views on the "unsafe" practices of unknown farmers and the simultaneous romanticization of rural life and of food acquired through personal rural connections.
Responding to widespread mistrust toward agriculture among urbanites, urban gardening often constitutes an attempt to directly control the material conditions of food for a sense of safety, with an emphasis on those aspects that are controllable and make food "known." I also demonstrated that urbanites' ability to control their food via urban gardening is unequal across class divides as participation both in home-cultivation and in commercialized urban gardens is tied to access to intersecting resources such as income, social networks, time and space.
Overall, there appears to be a discrepancy between the described demand of urbanites for direct links to small-scale, pesticide-free food production and the country's overall agricultural policy focused on large-scale, intensified agriculture.Under the current circumstances, the short links of homegrown or direct-marketed "food from somewhere" is neither available nor accessible to the wider population given its production cost, the complexity of scaling up, and the party-state's overall agricultural development plan.This in turn renders socio-economic positioning highly relevant for accessing "safe" food, with self-cultivated vegetables being reserved for a privileged minority, whereas the majority of HCMC's inhabitants navigate food safety among "food from nowhere."