Abstract
Accounting for nearly one quarter of household carbon footprints in France, food concentrates major challenges of public health (increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, reducing exposure to pesticides) and environmental protection (soils, biodiversity, water quality, water footprint). In this context, public policies and civil society actors promote more plant-based, local, and organic diet models. Yet little is known about how these injunctions are received and put into practice by individuals, or about the place food occupies in daily life among other dimensions of ecological transition. This contribution analyzes these tensions across different empirical fields, focusing on the modalities of appropriation according to social groups and on the effects produced by the extension of public food policies to environmental concerns. The analysis draws on a corpus of 357 qualitative interviews (using mixed-methods approach, esp.lexical analysis), and on a recently published theoretical synthesis. Social inequalities shape the knowledge, appropriation, or rejection of official prescriptions, particularly regarding four dimensions: “eating in season,” “eating less meat and more plant-based foods,” “reducing water consumption,” and “consuming organic.” The differentiated reception of these recommendations reveals sharp social divides, which deepen as nutritional and environmental issues overlap. A central challenge for public policies is therefore to adapt recommendations to social realities, by integrating the constraints, aspirations, and lifestyles of working-class groups, and by recognizing their practices of frugality and domestic management as resources to be valued in the ecological transition. Finally, it shows that ecological transition creates a new field of tensions and social reconfigurations.
Presenters
Faustine RégnierResearcher, EcoSocio, INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment), Paris, France
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Food, Health, Ecological Transition, Social Inequalities, Public Policies
