Youth food practices and agency in food system transformation: insights from Hanoi, Vietnam

Youth are increasingly recognized as key actors in shaping future food systems, yet their everyday food practices remain underexplored in low- and middle-income country (LMIC) research and policy. This article examines how youth agency in food consumption is produced, constrained and redistributed within rapidly changing urban food environments. Drawing on ethnographic research in Hanoi, Vietnam (observations, interviews and photo journals) and informed by Social Practice Theory, the study analyses youth food consumption as embedded in routinized practices across home, school, street and digital spaces. It conceptualizes ‘consumption junctions’ as relational and hybrid sites where consumption and provisioning are co-produced, and where agency is distributed across youth, vendors, peers, material infrastructures and digital environments, including the blending of traditional–modern, formal–informal and onsite–online modes of consumption. Findings identify two distinct but overlapping patterns of practice: nourishment-oriented and socialization-oriented food consumption. Rather than reflecting fixed preferences, both are shaped through hybrid everyday routines organized around immediacy, affordability, accessibility and social value. Nutritional and safety considerations are often secondary to these practical and social logics. Youth agency emerges through continuous interactions within these hybrid consumption junctions, including peer influence, vendor responsiveness, mobile payment systems and food delivery platforms that jointly configure everyday choices. The article advances a relational understanding of youth agency in LMIC food systems, moving beyond individualized or deterministic accounts. It shows how consumption is embedded in distributed sociomaterial arrangements and argues for context-sensitive policies that engage youth not only as consumers, but as co-creators of evolving urban food systems.