Urban Foods Beyond Urban Food Environments: Reflections From a Rural Village in Western Bhutan

Abstract

This ethnographic article, based on anthropological fieldwork carried out between March 2024 and March 2025, aims to challenge the concept of urban food environments by focusing on the ways in which industrially produced foods - conceptualised as "urban foods" - and associated negative health outcomes proliferate beyond urban built spaces. In particular, it looks at the ways in which these foods penetrate what is considered a remote and rural village located in the Haa valley of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, exploring the mechanisms through which local inhabitants incorporate urban foods into their long‐established rural practices, shifting them from a capitalist logic of consumption to communal ethics of care. The article illustrates (through three ethnographic vignettes) and discusses how industrially produced foods become embedded in local practices and diets through social, cultural, and affective processes, suggesting that, to capture the complexity of contemporary food systems, we need to examine such processes in our analyses. We therefore need to think beyond urban food environments: firstly, issues associated with such environments have gone well beyond urban built spaces; secondly, by perpetrating the narrative predominance of the urban over the rural, we fail to notice the mechanisms that allow unhealthy urban food systems to exist, proliferate, and cause harm. This article contributes to the literature thinking beyond urban food environments by exploring some of the ways in which food spaces are constantly transforming into a (re)combination of urban and rural elements and relations.