Abstract
It is widely accepted that overcoming the social-ecological crises we face requires major changes to the food system. However, opinions diverge on the question whether those ‘great efforts’ towards sustainability require systemic changes or merely systematic ones. Drawing upon Brand and Wissen’s concept of “imperial modes of living” (Rev Int Polit Econ 20:687–711, 2013; The imperial mode of living: everyday life and the ecological crisis of capitalism, Verso, London/New York, 2021), we ask whether the lively debates about sustainability and ‘ethical’ consumption among producers and consumers in Germany are far reaching enough to sufficiently reduce the imperial weight on the environment and other human and nonhuman animals. By combining discourse analysis of agri-food businesses’ sustainability reports with narrative consumer interviews, we examine understandings of sustainability in discourses concerning responsible food provision and shed light on how those discourses are inscribed in consumers’ everyday food practices. We adopt Ehgartner’s discursive frames of ‘consumer sovereignty’, ‘economic rationality’, and ‘stewardship’ to illustrate our findings, and add a fourth one of ‘legitimacy’. Constituting the conditions under which food-related themes become sustainability issues, these frames help businesses to (1) individualise the responsibility to enact changes, (2) tie efforts towards sustainability to financial profits, (3) subject people and nature to the combination of care and control, and (4) convey legitimacy through scientific authority. We discuss how these frames, mirrored in some consumer narratives, work to sideline deeper engagement with ecological sustainability and social justice, and how they brush aside the desires of some ostensibly ‘sovereign’ consumers to overcome imperial modes of food provision through much more far reaching, systemic changes. Finally, we reflect on possible paths towards a de-imperialised food system.
Highlights
Food sustainability discourses have gained impetus from the goals of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG Knowledge Platform 2015) and it is widely accepted that overcoming socialecological crises such as climate change and mass extinction (Ceballos et al 2015) requires major changes to the food system
Opinions seem to diverge on the question whether those ‘great efforts’ towards sustainability require systemic changes or merely systematic ones
Individual, corporate or personal level, whereas systemic changes would address structural factors of the political economy and society to lessen the burden of lifestyles on others and the environment by avoiding resource and energy use
Summary
Food sustainability discourses have gained impetus from the goals of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG Knowledge Platform 2015) and it is widely accepted that overcoming socialecological crises such as climate change and mass extinction (Ceballos et al 2015) requires major changes to the food system. We point out some alternative frames, practices, and movements that would need to be brought up from the margins of food sustainability discourse in order to de-imperialise food provision and, thereby, take seriously the desire for systemic change some of our interviewees expressed.
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