UNDERSTANDING SUSTAINABLE FOOD

SHOPPING: SUSTAINABLY MINDED SHOPPERS AND

THE SUPERMARKET

Adrian Friday, Mike Hazas,Adrian Clear, Kirstie O’Neil, Janine

Morley and Oliver Bateshttp://wp.lancs.ac.uk/sds/

OVERVIEW

1. Why should we care about sustainable food?

2. Quantification of food impacts from a student population

3. The status quo: food in a more general population

4. Learning from sustainably minded shoppers “walking the walk”

5. Some implications and points for discussion

The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at

least the last 800,000 years (IPCC, AR5)

Image: IPCC

Household fuel 13%

Household Vehicle fuel

10%

Household electricity

9%

Personal air travel

8%

Other Personal transport

3%

Cars 5%

Food and drink (from

shops) 12% Hotels, pubs

and catering 4%

Paper and printing

1%

Textiles and clothes

2%

Electronic / computers / appliances

4%

Construction 6%

Water and Sewage

2%

Defence, education and

health and social services

11%

Other 10%

15 TONNES CO2EFood for the “typical UK person” is around 12-16% of the

personal footprint

IS FOOD A BIG DEAL?

• GHG footprint of UK food = 160 Mt CO2e (HM Gov: Food 2030)

• That’s 2.7t CO2e per person per year, or 27% of total direct GHG emissions of the UK

• Change to vegetarian/vegan diet could save 40 Mt CO2e/ year (equivalent to a 50% reduction in current exhaust pipe emissions from the entire UK passenger car fleet)

The relative greenhouse gas impacts of realistic dietary choices. Energy Policy, Vol. 43, 2012, p. 184-190.

In the UK, 67% of men and 57% of women and over quarter of children are either overweight or obese

The Lancet, 384(9945), pp. 766-781, August 2014

Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting overweight child choosing between

a bowl of fruit and some cream cakes)

1. IMPACT OF DIETWhat is cooked, and what impact does it have?

n=22, real-time energy, motion captured images, interviews

TIME LAPSE VIDEO OF TYPICAL STUDENT FOODBEING PREPARED (LOTS OF SAUSAGES AND PASTA)

COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION

One cook, single portion

COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION

Components used

Back-right

Back-left

COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION

... and quantities

(160g)

(100g)

Foods observed

Jarred sauce

Pasta

COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION

Cooking method

Heating

Boiling

(no lid)

(no lid)

Use of lid?

COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION

Changes in control position

0.000 0.500 1.000 1.500 2.000 2.500 3.000 3.500

(2) BEER AND CIDER

Potatoes

Tomatoes

Onions, root crops, cabbages, herbs&spcices, other veg,

Green salads

Prepared Veg., fruit & salad

Exotic veg and mushrooms

Apples & Pears

Bananas

Citrus and melons

Exotic fruit and berries (including soft, stone, grapes)

(67) FLORISTRY

(84) CABINETS COOKED MEATS

Cabinets Milk

Ready meals, pizza & pasta

Sandwiches

(52) BREAD

(70) FROZEN FOODS

kgCO2e

GHG emissions per £ of product at the checkout

Source ingredients to farm / factory gate

Food processing

Total consumer packaging footprint

Transit packaging

Transport Emissions to DC

Transport emissions from all DCs to Stores

Storage and processing at DC

Overhead (exc. refrigeration)

Refrigeration

WHERE IS THE CO2?Source: Mike Berners-Lee, Small World Consulting

COOKING: QUANTIFIED

Other food

RELATIVE IMPACTS

Cooking Energy Emissions (22%)

Waste

Otherdevices

Indirect Emissions (78%)

DIET

High Impact

Low Impact

Pastasauce

A CONVENIENT DIET

“typical student food”

“all those kind of really easy things”

0

20

40

60

80

jarred sauce

chicken

pastavegetables

sausages

chipspizza

breadbaked beans

ricepotatoes

tortellini

baconfrozen veg.

tinned tomatoes

eggnoodles

mince beef

steakreadymeal

fishsoup

61

70

87

88

41

43

21

9217

33

8

1540

22

8 29

27

109

8 107

Embo

died

Ghg

em

issio

ns (k

g CO

2e)0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

jarred sauce

chicken

pastavegetables

sausages

chipspizza

breadbaked beans

ricepotatoes

tortellini

baconfrozen veg.

tinned tomatoes

eggnoodles

mince beef

steakreadymeal

fish

61

69

87

66

41

43

20

8817

32

8

1541

21

8 29

27

109

8 10

Embo

died

GhG

em

issio

ns (k

g CO

2e)

• Repeated moderate- to high-impact foods

“WHATEVER’S IN THE CUPBOARD”

“I like vegetables and salads and stuff like that but when I buy it it just all

goes off...”

“um, risottos, stuff, pasta and sauce whatever, um

shepherds pie ...whatever ingredients we have”

•Food often takes a back seat to other activities (working, studying, socialising)

•Limited technique and cooking skills in play (diminishing in UK - Short, 2003)

•But at a point of transition in their lives when they could be acquire new skills (Meah & Watson, 2011)

Short, F., “Domestic cooking practices and cooking skills: findings from an english study,” Food Service Technology, vol. 3, no. 3-4, pp. 177–185, 2003.Meah, A., Watson, M. (2011) Saints and slackers: challenging discourses about the decline of domestic cooking, Sociological Research Online, 16 (2), 6.

2. MAINSTREAM PRACTICESSurely, this is just students, right?

n=24, recruited face to face in regional supermarkets

IN “REAL LIFE”

• children’s preferences or diets and dietary restrictions, family circumstances, as well as cost (offers), or storage, and logistics

• concerns, choices and dichotomies such as processed / unprocessed, local / imported, healthy / unhealthy, balanced / unbalanced, practical / impractical and so on

• With few exceptions, we noticed little direct interest or concern with ‘carbon footprint’, link to food not recognised

CHICKEN WITH CHEESE

George reflected that, “things have moved on a long way since my mother was alive and she made

all things fresh”

“buy a couple of chickens for £5-6, chickens with cheese

on… and you can buy other ready stuff like sautéed

potatoes…”

READY MEAL EMANCIPATION

• “…we don’t see the point of my wife being in the kitchen an hour and half tied to the stove and preparing things…"

PROPER FOOD

• “Proper food, what it used to be like. None of this, how can I put it, these ready meals.”

• “It’s how you’ve been brought up, I’ve been brought up on meat and potato pies, and shepherds pie.”

Image removed for copyright reasons

(depicting roast beef traditional Sunday roast)

FINDING THE TIME

“not a huge variety because we never seem to have the time to … look at different recipes… it’s an aspiration to spend a bit more time on food. But yes, life tends to be

pretty full with various things…"

LOCAL AND SEASONAL• Tomatoes and meat were mentioned

frequently as having to be as local as possible:

• “I would be more aware of it. I think at other supermarkets there’s...there’s less advertising of the fact that these apples are British or this is produced in [UK county].” (Bonnie)

TRUST

Catherine felt: “you’ve got to be careful there that you’ve got the English meat

because the dish being made in England and the meat being produced in England is

two different things. Sneaky!”

Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting a trusting child leaping into his father’s arms)

VEGETARIAN INCONVENIENCE

Bonnie felt that vegetarians were not well catered for : she does not “buy many ready meals

because the quality and the standard and the portion size, there’s very little available I would say

for vegetarians that is really worth buying”.

LIFE TRANSITIONS• Carol had recently lost her husband. Immediately following his

death she turned to ready meals, as she could not face cooking, whereas now she described a significant shift in what she bought, cooked and ate:

• “I don’t cook as often as I did. And we eat a lot more salads and a lot of fresh vegetables. Well we ate fresh vegetables before but they had to be cooked because it wasn’t a real meal if it hadn’t been cooked!”

• Loss of skills, living on one’s own (predicted 41% by 2033†)†Household Projections, 2008 to 2013, England

3. SUSTAINABLY MINDEDWhat does food mean and what can we learn from it?

3 focus groups, n=20+

WHEN I SAY SUSTAINABLE…• All ethically guided, but their

interpretations of, and commitment to sustainability differed:

• animal welfare, organicity, localness, food miles, seasonality, social injustice, and affordability.

Image: http://www.globalanimalpartnership.org/

Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting free range hens in a grassy field)

ACQUIRING FOOD

• Almost all of them regularly shopped or acquired food from places other than supermarkets

• Their everyday shopping practices scarcely consisted of making decisions to buy this or that, rather where they shopped (trust)

• When supermarkets were used, for reasons of convenience, cost, or poor availability of alternatives, care was taken based on its environmental policy

AN ON-GOING PROJECT

Acquiring the skills to produce tasty and sustainable meals takes time, effort and engagement…

“and I suppose all of us are describing, do a little change and embedding it, do a little change and embedding it, and it’s growing and

growing…”

Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting a tasty looking vegan mushroom curry)

CLOSER TO THE EARTH

A number of participants’ experiences of growing food provided a reference point for notions of, for example, naturalness, freshness,

seasonality, and taste, from which they could critically evaluate supermarket produce.

“the expiry date of fruits and vegetables in the supermarket I find very surprising… with the carrots, the expiry date is within two weeks… my family always had a farm you can store them all Winter… what sort of

carrots am I buying if it goes off within two weeks?!” (Joyce)

PROVENANCE & VALUE

“we’ve planted fruit trees, I’ve got potatoes now, I’ve got courgettes...it’s really important to me and I think some of that is the fact that I’m vegetarian and actually when you’ve grown it and there’s that whole

time thing and it costs a lot more to have one of my courgettes but at least I know I’ve grown it and I know what’s gone onto it and actually when you come to eat it not only does it taste really good but...it’s just

kind of a nice cycle I think” (Liz)

Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting wild blackberries emphasising hand picked food)

DISCUSSION

Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience, p. 198

HOW DOES CONSUMPTION COME ABOUT?

"[R]elevant patterns of consumption follow from efforts to provide and sustain what people take to be normal services like those of comfort and cleanliness"

SUSTAINABLE CHOICE IS (TOO?) COMPLEX

• Seasonality in the country of origin

• Hot housing (e.g. tomatoes)

• Reduced GHG, e.g. methane from ruminating animals

• Transport and refrigeration (air, ship, land)

• Locavorism

• and other issues: competing land use, biodiversity, fairtrade

LESS INSULATION, MORE TRANSPARENCY?

Asparagus (250g pack): 2kg

Low 125 g

Air freighted from Peru

Average 2 kg

Local In-season

High 3.5 kg

ACTING NOW(Anderson & Bows. 2008 Philosophical Transactions A of the

Royal Society. 366. pp. 3863-3882)

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DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY• Technologies can make recommendations, support choice and

reflection on food consumed (caveat: information deficit, especially on supply chains, LCA and product composition)

• But, supermarkets are implicated reproducing food norms (defaults, incentives) - is it corporate social responsibility? can sustainability be good business? Exploit transitions in industry?

• What is a sustainable diet? It is inherently more varied and responsive to what’s available, so can we insulate less from this variation and save energy on transport and refrigeration?

QUESTIONS?

• Also happy to talk about:• Energy use and ICT in the

home• Alternative (domestic) heating

control based on adaptive thermal comfort

Contact:a.friday@lancaster.ac.ukhttp://wp.lancs.ac.uk/sds

This work was part funded by the UK Research Councils (EPSRC grants EP/G008523/1, EP/I00033X/1 and EP/K012738/1), and the Facilities Division and

Faculty of Science and Technology at Lancaster University.

• Want more? See:• A. Clear, M. Hazas, J. Morley, A. Friday, and

O. Bates, “Domestic food and sustainable design: A study of university student cooking and its impacts,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2447–2456, 2013.