Beating unsustainability with eating: four alternative food-consumption scenarios

摘要

This article describes the future of food consumption from the consumer’s point-of-view, emphasizing the appropriation of sustainability by everyday life. The authors use a scenario process to analyze four food-consumption alternatives for 2030 from the perspective of sustainable food consumption. The evaluative process has three aims: 1) to show some possible outcomes of the future of food consumption from the consumers’ standpoint, 2) to produce new information about the different sustainability aspects by evaluating food-consumption scenarios innovatively, and 3) to reflect on the uses and possibilities of a scenario method as a tool for organizing complex qualitative data in a multi-actor process. One of the study’s conclusions is that consumers’ ideas of sustainable futures have not gained enough attention in policy recommendations. We show how the scenarios could be used as flexible tools employing consumer insights for future policy processes and public discussions. For further implementation, the most interesting alternatives and new ideas can be found at the intersection of all four scenarios. It is this area that shows an option worth striving for, a space for dealing with different sustainability challenges simultaneously.