The shifting practices which enable consumption at this level within the country did not appear solely as an outcome of the much-discussed rise of the Chinese middle class, but rather in conjunction between aggressive marketing by salmon-producing countries, changing expectations towards food safety and healthiness, established customs of displaying social capital (“face” or mianzi), and compulsions to “eat the modern” in Chinese urban environments.
In this talk, PhD student Tarjei Brekke presents some of his findings from his doctoral research to shed light on how Atlantic salmon in China came to be and what this food is doing to urban eating practices.
Throughout the talk, he will aim to show how the dense network of actors which enable salmon consumption in China are not necessarily completely new nor unprecedented neither within nor without China, but are nonetheless highly consolidated and, in spite of the salmon’s proposed important role in the transition to low-impact diets, thoroughly unsustainable.
Tarjei Brekke is a PhD student in STS at Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture (KULT) at NTNU. He is one of two PhDs working on the ERC project “A Middle Way? Probing Sufficiency Through Meat and Milk in China” led by associate professor Marius Korsnes, NTNU-KULT.
Brekke’s research concerns how demand for Atlantic salmon is co-produced in a Chinese urban context and how the integration of Atlantic salmon into Chinese urban middle class diets enacts new infrastructures, standards and practices. Together this scaffolding of actors serve to perform Atlantic salmon production and consumption as “good” and “modern”. Brekke has a bachelor’s and master’s in China studies from the University of Oslo.
Arve Hansen, leader of GLOBE's research group on sustainable consumption and energy equity and the research project REPLACE (Meat replacement and systems of edibility in Asia and beyond), will chair the seminar.