Paper short abstract:

Europe-based transition initiatives has been adapted and adopted in Hong Kong's postcolonial situation. Local-food movement emerged amid contestations over locality, seeking alternative life forms and calling for adjustments in cultural and political-economic norms underlying current food systems.

Paper long abstract:

In facing energy and environmental crisis, 'Transition Movement' in the Global North advocates community-centred actions to increase resilience and establish sustainable human settlements relying on localisation of food production and consumption. This Europe-based environmental campaign has traveled across continents and arrived in the Greater China. In the recent decade, Hong Kong witnesses a changing foodscape encompasses proliferation of farming practices, farmers' markets, and young urban farmers. Built upon fieldwork conducted in 2016-2017, this paper aims to unpack the creation and popularisation of 'local-food' and facilitate understandings of the imbrications of local-food movement, which is summarised as seeking alternatives to urban lifestyle perceived as 'injustice' and 'damaging' to humans and the more-than-human world.

Resonating with globally circulating food and environmental ethics, local-food movement reacts to neoliberal and industrial regimes that dominate food systems and politics of urban space. Meanwhile, against a backdrop that food supply of Hong Kong is mainly imported from mainland China where is widely noted as haunted by pervasive concern of food safety, the local-food movement is often associated to localist agenda and postcolonial political struggles. However, at this historical moment of 'in transition' from a British colony to a part of the PRC, monolithic localism is complicated by unresting contestations over locality and stratified into multiple layers occupied by conflicting factions of 'local people' who hold diverse interpretations ranging from nationalist views to inclusive perspectives. 'Local-food' thus serves as a rhetoric which mobilises as well as embodies cultural critique, political resistance, subjectivity building and system transformation.