Co-creating sustainable eating futures: Technology, ICT and citizen–consumer ambivalence

Abstract

The early 21st century has seen a plethora of future-oriented roadmaps and foresight exercises focused on increasing food supply, often with the aid of advances in technology, in order to feed a growing global population under conditions of uncertain climate change. As such, they provide important, but only partial, pictures of how we might eat more sustainably. The complex politics underlying food production and distribution as well as factors that shape the highly uneven practices of food consumption are often obscured. Equally, and in the face of ongoing conflicts that suggest otherwise, supply-side analyses frequently assume that technological advances will play a relatively uncontested role in food futures. Drawing on insights from a participatory backcasting process that adopted a practice orientation within an overarching transitions framework, this paper adds two related dimensions to the productivist paradigm in urban food futures research. First, it places eating practices at the heart of food futures debates and second, it provides a critical reflection on consumer–citizen perceptions of the role for technology, and in particular ICT, in shaping those eating practices. Ultimately, it is argued that technological advances in production alone are unlikely to generate the significant transformations required to construct more sustainable urban future food landscapes.