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Paper short abstract:

Household food practices reinforce climate change effects. Examining their entanglements and impact, this research characterizes a chain of interlinking food practices in light of their systematic socio-material entanglements using visual ethnographic methods.

Paper long abstract:

Food practices account for a large portion of greenhouse gas emission and reinforce climate change effects. However, the resulting (food) waste and Co2 emissions are not driven by conscious intentions. Instead, everyday routines are entangled with social, ecological, and institutional systems that largely depend on the extraction of natural resources. This paper characterizes a chain of food practices, exploring which indications can be taken from Social Practice Theory to decrease the use of packaging, food waste, consumption of Co2 heavy products, and the use of fossil fuels for preparing food. Over an 8-month period, ethnographic fieldwork was conducted with 12 Dutch households and 5 food-related organizations, consisting of in-depth interviews, participatory observations and audio-visual work. Using a New Materialist lens, the study focuses on non-representational elements of food practices in both humans and non-humans. Food practices were coded and grouped from transcriptions for characterization, addressing simultaneously the systematic entanglement with institutional, ecological, and social systems. A primary finding was that resource intensive food practices relied heavily on (larger) spatial-material entanglements, for example the municipal waste system, as much as on specific ‘patterns’ of practices. Nonetheless, being resourceful or creative with food resulted in a less resource intensive pattern overall. Analysis of the household’s view on local interventions revealed that municipalities often don’t regard the affective component of interventions, possibly due to policies framework’s tendency to depersonalize ‘the consumer’. The article discusses the impact of these findings on socio-material and ecological aspects of the food chain, and on sustainable intervention design.