As I already indicated in chapter 2.2 the concept of food transition was suggested by Fourat and Lepiller (2017) to provide an amendment as well as an alternative to models of nutrition tran-sition. Unlike other authors who refer to the concept of food transition, they are deriving their approach to food transition directly from their critique towards nutrition transition. While they state that economic factors are the drivers behind changing diets, they argue that socio-cultural factors, partly connected to particular places or regions, would determine how the in-duced changes unfold (Fourat and Lepiller, 2017). Although diets would change influenced by other food cultures, they would retain some traditional features (Landy, 2009; Jesus Silva et al., 2017). For example, while American fast-food chains have gained a certain popularity in India, their use remains an exception in most people’s everyday food consumption, which mainly consists of traditional Indian dishes. Therefore, the extent to which traditional diets are pre-served or replaced depends on specific local contexts.
Another way to approach food transition is from the angle of sustainability transitions. These approaches do not refer to models of nutrition transition at all, yet they provide some remarkable
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overlaps with the literature mentioned above. In sustainability transitions the theoretical back-ground mainly draws from Socio-Technical-Systems (STS) and the Multi-Level-Perspective (MLP) model1. Furthermore, they suggest the application of practice theories for the study of food transition (El Bilali, 2019).
While authors such as Fourat and Lepiller (2017) and Jesus Silva et al. (2017) mainly take an observing role when analysing changing diets, authors working with sustainability transitions rather focus on the possibilities how to govern food transition towards the aspired outcome, namely increased sustainability (Spaargaren et al., 2012; Vivero-Pol, 2017; El Bilali, 2019).
This approach of frankly expressing the authors’ normative aspirations regarding the analysed transition is endorsed by Shove and Walker (2007). They argue that if the desired outcome is not pointed out and appropriate management approaches or strategies are not derived, studies would tend to overlook that transitions could also go in unsustainable directions. Their critique applies to the approaches of Landy (2009) and Jesus Silva et al. (2017): Although the unsus-tainability of diets is decried by both authors, their conclusions are confined to approaches how to improve the study of changing diets. Fourat and Lepiller (2017) on the contrary, go beyond that by suggesting a set of approaches how to find ways how to make diets more sustainable.
Thus, they clearly define a normative goal for food transitions.
All authors working with clear normative goals provide further suggestions how to achieve these goals, for instance, to investigate movements who work against the current conventional food system. The particular approaches of such movements can reveal how change can be in-duced in their specific socio-cultural embedding (Fourat and Lepiller, 2017; El Bilali, 2019).
According to Vivero-Pol (2017) movements have a high transformative potential when they work in niches outside the conventional food system and reject the notion of food being merely a commodity. To acknowledge the manifold meanings of food is, furthermore, argued by other authors as paramount to understand changing diets (Fourat and Lepiller, 2017; Jesus Silva et al., 2017). In condensed words, understanding the approaches of alternative food movements, who acknowledge the meaning of food beyond a commodity are regarded as purposeful to sup-port a sustainable food transition with research.
1 I will not explore this theoretical background further in this dissertation as I did not work with that theory in particular. For more information on how STS and MLP are entangled with food transition I recommend El Bilali (2019).
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The food industry and governments are actors which can have negative impacts on a sustainable food transition. However, although the food industry is usually regarded as an obstacle to sus-tainable food transition (Fourat and Lepiller, 2017; El Bilali, 2019), El Bilali (2019) argues that the role of the food industry with regard to sustainability has received too little attention in research yet. Particularly in the context of the Global South, government aid to prevent hunger and malnutrition can have ambiguous consequences for people’s diets. The provision with a limited variety of staple foods together with the fact that the consumption of foods such as white rice or meat is often considered as status symbol, can lead to increasingly monotonous diets (Finnis, 2007; Jesus Silva et al., 2017). Thus, while the food industry is responsible for many unsustainable food transitions, it is not possible to pinpoint a single responsible actor. Instead, it is of primary importance to apply system thinking when researching food transition.
To investigate food transition from a geographical viewpoint, I was particularly interested how the authors assess the importance of space for their concepts. Two main themes emerged from that question: First, the meaning of place for food transition and second, the importance of scale.
Similar to models of nutrition transition, urban areas are regarded as trendsetting places for changing diets. Both for the creation of counter movements and also the beginning of unsus-tainable developments such as the increasing consumption of processed food (Jesus Silva et al., 2017; El Bilali, 2019). However, changes do not simply pass through urban areas and finally reach rural areas and the dynamics of how changes unfold from the city are rather complex.
Furthermore, the embedding in a particular environment or place has implications on how and to what extent diets change (Fourat and Lepiller, 2017; Jesus Silva et al., 2017).
Scale is important with regard to the epistemology of changing diets as well as the investigation of the effectiveness of transformative movements. Fourat and Lepiller (2017) endorse to study food transitions on different scales in order to enhance the understanding on how changes un-fold on different scales. El Bilali (2019) stresses that the effectiveness of transformative move-ments would depend on the movement’s ability to extent vertically on the same scale as well as horizontally onto different scales.
Especially due to its spatial relevance, food transition proves to be an interesting field of re-search to geographers. While the spatial interdependences of food transition are mentioned, they do still play a minor role in most publications on food transition. The affordance of geo-graphical research could be to explore these interdependences in depth. In this thesis I will mostly focus on how place and the environment influence food practices in transition and less on the impact of different dimensions of scale. Furthermore, with regard to normativity the
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findings I generated from the manuscripts of this thesis mainly support a food transition towards increased social justice, as an important part of sustainable food systems.