Our social, material and institutional environments have a large impact on what food we can access, how we buy and consume food, how we get rid of (food)waste and how we socialize around food. This project intends to use social practice theory to create a culture and environment where it is easy, safe and inviting to make sustainable choices.
Through ethnographic work we create a detailed understanding of the local food environment and how people experience and respond to this environment. This grounded understanding is the first step towards co-creating practice interventions that help build a more sustainable community.
Human food practices account for a large portion of greenhouse gas emission annually and consequently reinforce climate change effects. However, the resulting (food) waste and Co2 emissions are not driven by individuals’ conscious intentions, instead, everyday interlaced routines such as grocery shopping, cooking, eating and waste/food disposal are entangled with social, ecological and institutional systems that are largely dependent on the unsustainable extraction of resources. This project characterizes a chain of interlinking food practices in three suburban regions of The Netherlands, exploring which indications can be taken from Social Practice Theory to ,create a more sustainable foodscape. We conducted an ethnographic study with 12 Dutch households and 5 local food related organizations, over an 8-month period in 2022. The fieldwork consisted of video and audio recording, in-depth interviews, and participatory observations. The visual ethnographic fieldwork draws upon audio-visual media’s distinct ability to explore the multiple registers of experience that can go unnoticed in interview heavy research, such as affective and sensory experiences. Using a New Materialist lens, the fieldwork focused on non-representational elements of food practices in both humans and non-humans.
