Gert Spaargaren

Mobile applications (apps) have become popular among consumers to facilitate their existing food practices like cooking, shopping, and dining out. However, the feasibility of using mobile apps to facilitate sustainability transitions in food consumption is not well researched. In this study, we, therefore, propose a conceptual framework to illustrate how mobile apps can be developed in linking everyday food practices with sustainability transitions. Through the case study of dining out and with the help of focus group discussions, we seek to illustrate that practice theory might serve as a useful starting point for understanding the dynamics of food practices, their relevant sustainability dimensions, and the ways in which mobile apps can be used for changing current food practices into more sustainable ones. Among our main results are the findings that consumers prefer the sustainability food app to be integrated with dominant or mainstream apps, which are already used by consumers in the context of dining out. Besides being simple, functional, flexible, and rewarding, the information provided by the app should be reliable and trustworthy. Moreover, both science-based and practice-based information is necessary to provide sufficient guidance to consumers on how changes in food practice can be operationalized and implemented.

The potential role of households as ‘co-managers’ of energy in smart grids is widely discussed in the social science literature. Much remains uncertain about the social relations and practices emerging around novel smart grid technologies and their contribution to sustainability. Drawing on 14 ‘show-and-tell’ home tours with householders in a smart grid trial, an analysis is presented of how home energy management (HEM) is performed in everyday life. The focus is on three technologies: monitoring technologies, smart heat pumps and home batteries. How and why householders do (not) engage with energy management during the pilot project is described. When householders participate in HEM practices, they gain energy management understandings and an awareness of smart grid objectives. Since HEM practices are shared between householders and actors from the energy provision system, they display particular ways of distributing responsibilities, power and agency over technologies, experts and householders. The time and space granted to these three smart grid technologies are shown to depend on the trust relationships between householders and the more or less absent providers of technologies and services. These insights emphasize the need to develop smart grid solutions reflexively with respect to the different spaces and practices in households in which they operate.

Our daily meal differs in many respects from the daily meals of our grandparents or even of our own parents when they were young. At that time, their meals were generally less diverse from one day to the other but more diverse throughout the year as they followed the seasons. In those days, it was often for many still a struggle to put sufficient food on the family table, especially during wars and economic crises. Nowadays, securing the daily family meal is no longer a big challenge for most people in Western countries, but for many others this struggle remains. However, ...

Within debates on globalization and sustainable development, food has become a prominent, visible and increasingly contested topic. To feed an expanding and ever more demanding world population, food has to be produced, stored, processed, cooled and transported in ever larger quantities and improved qualities, using major parts of the surface of our planet. Food production not only claims a considerable share of world space but crucial resources – minerals, energy and water – as well. As expressed by the American environmental sociologist Alan Schnaiberg (1980), the modern food system ...

This chapter explains the stock of social scientific research on consumption that involves the utilization of what we call infrastructures of consumption. It also focuses on research that uses Social Practice Theory as a lens to study the dynamic relationships between conduct, meaning and systems of water and energy provision. The chapter then illustrates the dynamics in practices of toilet use and medicine use in an experimental case study involving 1,224 patients receiving a CT scan at a hospital in the Netherlands. It discusses the energy practices that emerge while major changes in electricity infrastructures towards 'smart' energy configurations are taking place. The chapter outlines how structural conditions should actually be understood to make them work for the greening of water and energy consumption practices. The admittedly wide-ranging empirical studies on water, toilet and energy practices reflect the dynamics that can be studied in the interrelations between consumption and provisioning systems.