Review of Sustainable Consumption and Everyday Food Practices in Europe. Edited by Virginie Amilien, Monia Saïdi, and Matthieu Duboys de Labarre. London: Routledge, 2026. Xiii + 258 pp. ISBN #978-1-032-72600-7
David Sutton (Southern Illinois University)
Food Quality Schemes and the associated place-based food certification labels form a major part of our contemporary food landscape, making claims to traceability, or claiming to giving consumers a greater sense of the origins and conditions of production of food products than the brand commodity fetishism that dominated the twentieth century food landscape in the US and Western Europe. They seem to offer up the Holy Grail of sustainability in our food consumption, though recent ethnographic work has shown much of this labelling to be untrustworthy at best, and closer to greenwashing in many cases (Archer 2025). Sustainable Consumption grows out of a research project called “Strength2Food,” which the editors describe as “a European Union-funded research initiative…running from 2016 to 2021, aiming at improving the sustainability and effectiveness of food systems in Europe and beyond by focusing on quality food products, short food supply chains, and public sector food procurement” (1). It expands into a larger consideration of theoretical and methodological approaches to researching everyday food practices, and what they might tell us about food sustainability.
As part of this research project, sustainability is not defined a priori. The authors begin with a brief discussion of sustainability by the numbers, concluding that avoiding food waste can have an impact even if the vast majority of the environmental impact has already happened by the time food reaches a consumer, and that consuming alternative products (e.g., organic) doesn’t have a major effect on this calculus. So, sustainability is treated anthropologically, exploring the relevance and meanings it takes on in specific locations (the Strength2Food project was carried out in seven European countries). The authors describe this approach using a string of odd, transmogrified Beatles lyrics, most prominently “Let Eat Be,” which suggests a more descriptive than prescriptive focus, or as they put it, “‘Let eat be’ to some extent means let food exist, as an invitation to reconnect with the act of eating as something fundamental, connecting to the concepts of sustainability and everyday food practices inherent in this book” (3).
The book is divided into three main sections. The first lays out theoretical background and approaches as well as an overview of some of the research on purchasing patterns, the middle section contains the most detailed ethnography of everyday food practices and the last section returns to theory by suggesting future directions, ways to make research more cooperative and action-oriented, and combining research with “arts-based methods” to explore possibilities for the future of sustainability. These sections are somewhat freestanding, encouraging differently oriented researchers to focus on one or another section without feeling that they must read cover-to-cover.
Part I consists of six chapters, the first four all co-written by Virginie Amilien. Chapter One lays out some of the key theoretical dimensions of the book’s approach to food, through two strands: the narrative phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur, characterized by an approach to the changing meanings of the stories we construct for ourselves, and Social Practice Theory, which “emphasises how…practices are socially embedded and shaped by the interaction of materials, skills, and meanings, and to what extent individuals embody them” (30-31). Thus, the aim is to capture both routines and their transformations, from a social, material and embodied perspective. In Chapter Two, Amilien and Gun Roos describe the methodologies of the Strength2Food project, focusing on participant observation and interviews, and the always notable disjunction in anthropological research between words and actions. Regarding sustainability they preliminarily note that some of the participants said that “sustainability was a concept they did not like because it has been used and misused by politicians. However, when we were visiting the households, we could observe sustainable food practices, such as how they saved food leftovers and used them, for example, as feed for hens. Everyday food practices were often more sustainable in families that did not speak directly about them, but where traditional know-how or constraints such as economy or time played a major role in cooking and the choice of products (44-45). This kind of insight into the practical nature of small “s” sustainability are very much in line with the subsequent chapters.
In Chapter Three Amilien and Jean-Loup Lecoeur further develop the theoretical approach of the volume through the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot on regimes of justification. This is meant to explore the diverse ways that people engage with practices, through a framework that suggests different possible approaches including “regimes of familiarity,” or doing something because you have long done it that way, and “regimes of exploration,” deployed for confronting or embracing novelty. The authors note that with any practice multiple regimes “are often engaged simultaneously” (60) and thus see these regimes as enriching the base of Social Practice Theory, “by highlighting the plurality of ways we act and the diversity of worlds in which we are involved” (62). Chapter Four, authored by Amilien, Roos and Vilde Haugrønning, provides an overview of some of the research results and how Food Quality Schemes and other alternative food practices are experienced and discussed in the process of “planning, purchasing, using and discarding” (67), once again highlighting some of the contradictory pushes among environmental, economic and cultural sustainability.
Chapters Five and Six focus on economics and geography respectively. Chapter Five, by Galjina Ognjanov, Jelena Filipović, and Saša Veljković, concludes that despite claims for concerns about food quality, across the different countries studied, “ultimately, price remains a cornerstone of food practices. It plays a pivotal role in shaping both food purchasing decisions and the pursuit of sustainable consumption” (98). Whereas in Chapter Six, authors Áron Török and Zalán Márk Maró find that “foreign or EU-level certifications are less well-known and accepted than national labels, despite often representing stricter sustainability criteria. For example, in Norway, trust in local organic labels was much higher than in EU labels, which were perceived as foreign and less trustworthy” (111).
Part II, inclusive of Chapters Seven to Nine, moves the focus to consumption practices within households and mealtime activities. Chapter Seven, by Fairley Le Moal and John Coveney, draws from research in Lyon, France, and Adelaide, Australia, to ask “how families incorporate care for the environment into care for the family?” (120). Not surprisingly, given other studies of this kind (e.g., Kaufmann 2010), the authors found that negotiating family well-being took priority over more abstract notions of environmental sustainability. Time crunches and affordability issues took priority in daily planning, though the authors did find that cooking skills were key in terms of how willing parents were to improvise based on what was available at farmers’ markets rather than planning meals through grocery shopping. Ironically, they suggest that family is perhaps the wrong level to look for sustainable practices, and that instead transforming societal structural factors “making buying and cooking more sustainable food less time-consuming, expensive, and divulging knowledge and skills on how to do so, would facilitate the task for families” (134), though this made me wonder about whether the authors had considered the literature challenging the thesis of skills deficiencies in relation to cooking (e.g., Short 2006).
Chapter Eight, by Gunnar Vittersø, Sabina Kuraj, and Hanne Torjusen, is a specific study of a heritage potato in Norway, the Ringerike potato, focusing again on the competing factors of quality and price in consumer decisions. Chapter Nine, by Matilda Marshall, looks at domestic food storage and its implications for food waste. I found this chapter particularly interesting, as Marshall deploys Social Practice Theory to trace the meanings, materialities and skills associated with food storage. Through detailed ethnography, Marshall traces the disputes over food storage between couples, storage as “hiding” special food that is revealing of power relations within households, and the circulation of food storage among multiple households representing extended family relations and the care involved in these processes. The implications for sustainability are mostly suggestive here, implicit in Marshall’s argument that food provisioning goes well beyond the supermarket to the capabilities (embodied and material) at play in different storage practices.
The final section consists of four chapters that expand out from the more focused ethnography discussed above to reconnect individual consumption with larger systems and structures through an exploration of experimental methods in imagining alternative food futures. Chapter Ten, by Roberta Discetti, doesn’t engage directly with the previous ethnography, but rather sets out a brief for embodied, relational and situated understandings of food practices, grounded in Donna Haraway’s concept of “becoming with” (175). In Chapter Eleven, Amilien, Ove D. Jakobsen, and Vivi M.L. Storsletten suggest ways to envision alternatives to the current food system using utopian dialogues. “Utopia Workshops serve as dynamic arenas for co-creation, where individuals from diverse backgrounds engage in structured dialogue to articulate shared values and explore new possibilities” (193). One such workshop was organized in Lofoten, Norway, with the aim to explore the current food sustainability landscape. As the authors describe:
Through stories about local food culture (including stockfish, Lofoten lamb, seaweed, school gardens, and traditional dishes), values such as localsourcing, economy, cooperation, nature, and provocation were highlighted. Basedon these values, the participants developed ideas for concrete projects, which were carried over into the second part of the workshop. These projects emerged from a dialogue process in which the participants’ own stories formed the basis for new visions. The aim was not to find ‘right answers’ but to explore future possibilities together (200).
Such experiments made me think of the Citizen Assemblies which have been used throughout Western Europe to build consensus around problem solving on diverse topics, including climate change.[1]
In Chapter Twelve Nina Heidenstrøm and Marie Cathrine Hebrok continue this exploration of radical alternatives through their research into imaginaries of food futures. Reconnecting with the ideas of narrative from Ricoeur discussed in the first chapters, the authors describe a questionnaire designed to open up the topic of generating and analyzing narratives of possible food futures, both of societal collapse and of resilience. One part of the project involved a story-generating questionnaire, which included some of the following questions:
1. Think about the world 30 years from now. What are your first thoughts?
What images do you see?
2. What developments do you fear? What future worlds do we need to avoid?
3. What developments would you like to see? How would you like to live in
the future? Feel free to start with daily life: How would you like to travel, eat,
dress, live, and work? Or think of other things that are important to you: How
will they be organised in the best possible future?
4. How do we influence the future? Which of our actions and choices today do
you think have the most impact on the future? What do you think is needed for
the future to become the way you want it to be? (210).
I could see incorporating many of these questions into research on food futures in many different contexts, whether connected to the larger project described here or not, as a way to approach questions of sustainability from the ground up, without, as the authors note, specifically asking about sustainability. As part of this project, collaborations with artists allow for a more immersive imagining of the possibilities of collapse and resilience meant to stimulate shifts in worldviews of possible alternative futures. This theme is followed up in Chapter Thirteen, by Amilien and Roos, in exploring further art-based collaborations meant to “inspire critical engagement and foster meaningful change in consumption practices” (223). These art-based methods—such as a collage of food biographies—combined with the narrative perspective discussed earlier, are meant to make visible some of the dysfunctions as well as possibilities of our commodified food system. A final brief chapter, authored by the coordinators of the Strength2Food project Matthew Gorton and Barbara Tocco, serves as more of an afterword summarizing the key points of what came before.
“Sustainability” derives from the word “sustenance” (Ali 2025: 1), arguing for the ongoing relevance of the concerns of this volume in how we provision, preserve, store, consume and dispose of food. Sustainable Consumptionprovides much food for thought for food scholars approaching these questions, from ethnographic, comparative and theoretical perspectives. Its limitations are geographical, in its European, and mostly Western and Northern European focus. But it provides an up-to-date summary of some of the most interesting theoretical approaches, ethnographic insights and methodological innovations that might continue to inspire food studies to imagine how to understand and change our contemporary food system. With the caveats above, and further warning about bad Beatles’ puns, I recommend it to anyone interested in interpretive, theoretically informed approaches to the contemporary food scene and visions for possible alternate futures. It is usefully available online open access at https://www.routledge.com/Sustainable-Consumption-and-Everyday-Food-Practices-in-Europe/Amilien-Saidi-Duboys-De-Labarre/p/book/9781032725994, making it all the more possible to pick and choose among the diverse offerings that suit readers’ purposes.
REFERENCES CITED
Ali, Saleem. 2025. Sustainability: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kaufmann, Jean-Claude. 2010. The Meaning of Cooking. Trans. David Macey. London: Polity.
[1] See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_assembly. See also the film: “The People Vs. Climate Change” https://vimeo.com/578471867 For a short story based around this idea, see D. A. Baden “The Assassin” (https://www.greenstories.org.uk/anthology-for-cop27/stories/the-assassin/).
