Making food, producing sustainability

2010

Abstract The current food practices around the world raises concerns for food insecurity in the future. Urban/suburban/and peri-urban environments are particularly problematic in their segregation from rural areas where the natural food sources are grown and harvested. Soaring urban population growth only deteriorates the lack of understanding in and access to fresh produce for the people who live, work, and play in the city.

Proceedings of the 25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Augmentation, Application, Innovation, Collaboration - OzCHI '13, 2013

The sustainability of food is a significant global concern with drastic change required to mitigate complex social, environmental and economic issues like climate change and food security for an ever increasing population. In this paper, we set out to understand the place of food in people's lives, their mundane yet surprisingly complex ways of sourcing their food, and the processes of transition, past and ongoing, that shape these choices. Our goal is to understand the potential role for digital interactions in supporting the various ways that food consumption can be made more sustainable. To inform this exercise, we specifically set out to contrast the journeys of committed sustainable 'food pioneers' with more conventional mainstream consumers recruited in branches of a UK supermarket. This contrast highlights for both groups the various values, and 'meaningfulness' attached to foods and meals in people's lives; and suggests ways in which food choice and pro-sustainable practices can be supported at least in part by new digital technologies.

This paper describes Red Hen Recipes, a user generated recipe site that seeks to connect buying, cooking and eating practices with the modes of food production through the redesign of the recipe format. User research found recipes to be a reflective and creative space for imagining “what we should eat”. Through simple website technologies we redesign the recipe to afford users the opportunity of exploring “what we should eat” within the context of the wider agro-food system. The site provides a digital space for dialogic interactions between farmers, backyard growers, shoppers and foragers to “rewrite” the recipe to include information about the origins of a single ingredient. In connecting the labour of the field with the labour of the home and kitchen, this tool deliberately breaks down the false dichotomy of producer and consumer, and identifies all users as active producers within the food system, albeit within different contexts.

Research in Hospitality Management, 2020

The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Food and Gastronomy, London:Routledge, 2015

British Food Journal, 2006

Agriculture and Human Values, 2021

In recent years, new forms of high-tech controlled environment agriculture (CEA) have received increased attention and investment. These systems integrate a suite of technologies-including automation, LED lighting, vertical plant stacking, and hydroponic fertilization-to allow for greater control of temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and light in an enclosed growing environment. Proponents insist that CEA can produce sustainable, nutritious, and tasty local food, particularly for the cities of the future. At the same time, a variety of critics raise concerns about its environmental impacts and energy use, high startup costs, and consumer accessibility challenges, among other issues. At this stage, however, relatively little research has explored actual consumer knowledge and attitudes related to CEA processes and products. Guided by theories of sense-making, this article draws from structured interviews with local food consumers in New York City to examine what people know and think about high-tech CEA. From there, it explores the extent to which CEA fits into consumer conceptualizations of what makes for "good food." Key findings emphasize that significant gaps in public understanding of CEA remain, that CEA products' success will depend on the ability of the industry to deliver on its environmental promises, and that concerns about "unnatural" aspects of CEA will need to be allayed. Given the price premium at which high-tech CEA products are currently sold, the industry's expansion will depend in large part on its ability to convince value-oriented food consumers that the products meet the triple-bottom-line of economic, social, and environmental sustainability goals.

British food …, 2006

Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition, 2009