Abstract
Emissions arising from the production and consumption of food are acknowledged as a major contributor to climate change. From a consumer’s perspective, however, the sustainability of food may have many meanings: it may result from eating less meat, becoming vegetarian, or choosing to buy local or organic food. To explore what food sustainability means to consumers, and what factors lead to changes in food practice, we adopt a sociotechnical approach to compare the food consumption practices in North West England with two differing consumer groups. The first, supermarket shoppers ‘embedded’ in the mainstream food regime; and the second, who self-identify as sustainable food practitioners, and who perform a range of sustainable food consumption practices. We examine how our two groups experience changes in food practices and identify ‘fractures’ stemming from lifecourse and public events that emerge as points where change might occur. We suggest that ‘sharing spaces’ would be one possibility for prompting and nurturing fractures that can lead to greater sustainability in food practices.
Highlights
It is widely recognised that Westernised modes of production and consumption are becoming increasingly unsustainable as more countries, globally, adopt them (Jackson 2009; Steffen et al 2011; Foresight 2011)
Food is entangled in the nexus of food-energy-water (Leck et al 2015) and widely accepted as being central for sustainability, as food production, transportation and consumption all contribute significantly to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other environmental problems including dominating land use (Westhoek et al 2014)
We explore what sustainable food means to our participants, and how changes in food consumption practices occur at the individual, micro-scale
Summary
It is widely recognised that Westernised modes of production and consumption are becoming increasingly unsustainable as more countries, globally, adopt them (Jackson 2009; Steffen et al 2011; Foresight 2011). The MLP has been critiqued for its comparative lack of attention to the role of space and agency, as well as a tendency to focus on technological change, rather than social or political change (see Affolderbach and Schulz 2016) It offers a useful perspective for investigating the transformation of sociotechnical regimes and examining the role of innovative sociotechnical niches in transitions (Rip and Kemp 1998; Smith 2003; Geels 2005; Schot and Geels 2008), offering a way to address claimed theoretical shortcomings in SPT which focuses on stability rather than innovation. 218), do not help to distinguish between sustainable and unsustainable practices, and are not able to help devise policy and governance solutions In combining both theories, we argue that both are necessary to conceptualise change in complex and dynamic systems like food consumption, which can add value in thinking about the kind of (sustainable) future we want
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