Project
Transforming the Normal towards Sustainable Future Food Consumption
That which is 'normal' to eat in the Netherlands now is not sustainable and needs to be different in the future. But how? This project investigates how certain food consumption practices change over time. It focusses on two trends: cultural diversity in consumed food and transitional directions towards local and plant-based diets. Restaurants are taken as entrypoints to explore changes from past, to present, to future.
Context of Transforming the Normal towards Sustainable Future Food Consumption
Current dietary patterns are not in line with planetary boundaries, especially affluent consumption in high-consumption countries, resulting in a call for sufficiency in food consumption. What is found affluent or sufficient is context bound and transforms over time and relates to notions of what is normal food consumption. Therefore, understanding the normalisation of food consumption practices in high-consumption countries can inform the needed transformation towards sustainable consumption.
This project seeks to investigate dynamics of normal food consumption to inform a theoretical concept of normalisation and to engage with stakeholders in thinking about the future. To do so, two distinct formats of eating out in the Netherlands will be explored: ethnic restaurants and plant-based star restaurants. These two cases of eating out practices are relevant to normalisation because they relate to societal trends of 1) migration and increasing population diversity, and 2) transition direction towards local plant-based diets.
In the Netherlands, a high-consumption country, divergent practices of eating out have become a cultural norm. Out-of-home consumption of commercially prepared meals has already been problematised in terms of health and sustainability impacts, however, arguments have been made to understand it as a normalised practice embedded in socio-cultural and political-economic contexts.
Additionally, the dynamics of eating out practices have not been researched as a way to understand processes of normalisation. The novelty of this project lies in its aims to provide insights of dynamics in eating out to shed light on processes of normalisation.
