KACHARAGADLA

When Mai Gautier ( née  Pham) was growing up in Hanoi, in post-war Vietnam, there was never any talk of food safety or the concept of transparency. It wasn’t until she met veterinarian and future husband Patrice Gautier that she grew deeply concerned for how the couple would raise their first child in a place where food sources and certifications were mostly suspect. “When we had our first child, my husband and I started to really worry because we had the same problem with our food every week in Vietnam. It wasn’t fresh and we weren’t so sure about the source — so we wondered what was safe to give to our child,” she said. That was back in 2005, but after this year’s water pollution crisis in central Vietnam where steel factory  Formosa Plastics   admitted to spilling toxic waste and causing the mass death of over a hundred tonnes of fish, food safety and transparency is now ever the hot topic in the country. A vendor sells vegetables on the streets of Hanoi. Credit: AFP