Sustainable meat - What's the beef?
Meat consumption remains high despite known impacts. This research reframes preferences as outcomes of social practices, and explores sustainable meat consumption practices in a Swiss context of community supported agriculture (CSA).
Factsheet
- Schools involved School of Health Professions
- Institute(s) Nutrition and Dietetics
- Strategic thematic field Thematic field "Sustainable Development"
- Funding organisation BFH
- Duration 01.03.2024 - 31.07.2025
- Head of project Sonja Schönberg
- Keywords Sustainable meat consumption, Social Practice Theory, Food Preferences
Situation
The persistently high levels of meat consumption - approximately 50 kg per person per year in Switzerland - pose significant challenges to human health, environmental sustainability, small-scale farming, and animal ethics. Despite various structural and individual efforts to reduce meat intake, these have largely failed to produce meaningful change. This situation in Switzerland exemplifies a broader issue faced by many high-income countries, where meat consumption remains consistently high despite increasing awareness of its negative consequences. My cumulative dissertation, situated at the intersection of sociology, food and nutrition studies, and consumption research, addresses this issue through the overarching question: “Sustainable Meat Consumption Practices – What’s the Beef?”
Course of action
The dissertation project pursues two main lines of inquiry: 1. Theoretical Reframing of Meat Consumption: Drawing on Social Practice Theory, I critically examine the dominant assumption that individual preferences simply ‘drive’ meat consumption. Instead, I conceptualize preferences as outcomes of historically contingent and evolving social practices. This approach challenges rational choice models and offers a more nuanced understanding of how meat consumption persists despite growing awareness of its consequences. 2. Empirical Exploration of Practice Complexes of Meat Consumption: Through longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork on a Swiss community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm that includes meat production, I investigate how meat consumption and production are practiced and negotiated in everyday life. Data collected through participant observation, individual interviews, group discussions, and material artefacts from the farm, customers’ kitchens, and the partnering butcher shop reveal how meanings, materials, and competences shape emerging practices of more or less sustainable ways to produce, process and prepare meat.
Result
The dissertation aims to: • Contribute to academic debates by introducing Social Practice Theory as an approach to understand eating behavior beyond individual decision-making. • Inform food system transformation by conceptualizing meat consumption and production as negotiated processes, with implications for policymaking. • Expand the scope of nutrition and dietetics professionals by offering new trajectories for understanding (food) behavior change grounded in practice theory. The dissertation comprises at least three peer-reviewed publications. The first article was realised within this first BFH project and is almost ready for submission. It is titled: “Preferences for Prime Cuts of Meat as an Outcome of Changing Practices: A Practice-Theoretical Conceptualisation of Meat Consumption.” This paper develops a historically informed critique of the concept of individual food preferences and proposes a practice-theoretical approach for understanding meat consumption in the culinary West.
Looking ahead
The theoretical foundations laid in this first article inform the ongoing analysis of my empirical work. In particular, the recursive and dynamic interplay of production, processing, and preparation practices provides the analytical basis for explaining how sustainable meat consumption practices are enabled or constrained. Building on this understanding, my next two articles will elaborate on its implications for the empirical dimension of the dissertation project. One article will examine how meat production and consumption are negotiated within the CSA farm community, while the other will explore how everyday practices in customers’ kitchens and the partnering butcher shop shape emerging trajectories of sustainable meat use. Together, these studies aim to deepen the understanding of how practice complexes evolve and interact, and how they may foster or hinder more sustainable forms of meat consumption. The work contributes to the strategic BFH focus area ‘Sustainable Development’ by engaging in the shaping of development pathways for sustainable, resilient, and regenerative food systems that enable fair and healthy nutrition.
