Food Futures: Co‐designing Sustainable Eating Practices for 2050

Abstract

Summary Food Futures: Co‐designing Sustainable Eating Practices for 2050 The unsustainability of food and agriculture has long generated debate, policy initiatives and technological innovation, with proposed solutions predominantly focused on producing more food using fewer resources. Such supply‐side actions are important, but creating more sustainable eating practices also requires attention to demand‐side dimensions of the food equation. Even given the challenges faced by establishing precise levels of overconsumption (i.e. through levels of obesity) and food loss and wastage, it is clear that a ‘predict and provide’ approach to eating will not address current patterns of unsustainable consumption. This article documents an experiment in practice‐oriented participatory backcasting which explores the possibilities of engaging stakeholders and citizens in the design of more sustainable eating practices. This involved a phased process of multi‐stakeholder (including citizen‐consumer) collaboration to generate alternative scenarios for eating more sustainably and assess their desirability. This was followed by identification of promising practices and, finally, the development of a Transition Framework detailing pathways for more sustainable eating to 2050.The results suggest that mutually supportive technological, organisational and societal innovations are needed, to predict accurately which foods are required globally, prevent overconsumption, food loss and wastage, and ultimately to provide sustainable eating solutions.

Disrupting household food consumption through experimental HomeLabs: Outcomes, connections, contexts

“…Changes in consumer practice are thus necessary to address these wasteful realities and achieve the global food security agenda such that ‘ people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life ’ (Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 2009: 1). While supply-side debates dominate policy discussions of feeding growing populations under the conditions of climatic change, there is also a pressing need to address demand-side issues if the current unsustainabilities across the food chain are to be addressed (Davies, 2013, 2014).…”

“…Recognising that food consumption is shaped by a combination of cultural norms and habits, rules and regulations, modes of provision and infrastructures that together script the ways in which people eat has led to the emergence of a social practice lens for examining the performance and impact of eating (see Davies, 2013, 2014; Sahakian and Wilhite, 2014; Warde, 2013). A social practice approach provides a means through which the socialised performance, but ultimately individual act, of eating can be linked to wider architectures of provisioning and provenance.…”

Analyzing organic agriculture’s potential to nourish, preserve, and outperform conventional farming in Switzerland

“…As for sustainable eating practices barriers, a study identified the primary causes of overconsumption and food waste to be the lack of nutritional education and poor access to appropriate food resources or reduced availability of fresh produced food [31]. To create change towards sustainable eating practices, findings indicate that a combination of technological advancements, organizational changes, and societal innovations are necessary [32].…”

SHARE IT: Co-designing a sustainability impact assessment framework for urban food sharing initiatives

“…Co-design approaches have received explicit attention and utilization within the food arena, particularly in relation to food production and through collaborative research with farmers (Berthet et al, 2018; Chambers et al, 1989; Lesur-Dumoulin et al, 2018). Co-design involving wider groups of actors and other phases of the food chain is a more novel endeavour but one exemplified by the CONSENSUS project, which utilised co-design with respect to developing scenarios for sustainable eating in 2050 within households (Davies, 2013a, Davies, 2014) and in terms of testing and evaluating interventions to support sustainable eating in the home (Davies et al, 2014; Davies and Doyle, 2015; Devaney and Davies, 2017). Co-design approaches have also been used to develop alternative pathways to more sustainable food systems at the city, regional and national scale (Baek et al, 2014; Marin et al, 2016).…”