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My talk about sustainability in food shopping to SIRACH Network Innovation in Heating and Cooling Seminar, Wed 22nd Oct 2014, i.e. about what drives the need for heating and refrigeration in the first place and why might we want to influence this to reduce our carbon footprint. Starting with the proposition that food is a surprisingly high part of the UK domestic carbon footprint, the talk first showed a fine-grained analysis of typical student diet with measured direct energy impact and estimates of its embodied carbon footprint: to illustrate how the foods chosen are the most significant contributor to diets' carbon footprint, and how typical diets might be limited and repetitive. Second, we reported on how mainstream food increasingly relies on convenience foods and how these foods, and societal conventions (e.g. what is a 'proper' meal anyway) encourage and limit what we repeatedly eat. We then talked about our sustainably minded participants, what they care about, how they evaluate what they eat, and how they develop new capabilities and knowledge for acquiring and preparing sustainable food. We finished by looking at why these choices are complex and why I believe it's important we (and specifically supermarkets) help making these choices more transparent to the consumer and in the supply chain to help promote a more sustainable diet, and why we must act now! Published work relating to this talk: A. Clear, M. Hazas, J. Morley, A. Friday, and O. Bates, “Domestic food and sustainable design: A study of university student cooking and its impacts,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2447–2456, 2013. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/sds/files/2013/05/clear_hobcam_20131.pdf More about our work: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/sds
Citation preview
UNDERSTANDING SUSTAINABLE FOOD
SHOPPING: SUSTAINABLY MINDED SHOPPERS AND
THE SUPERMARKET
Adrian Friday, Mike Hazas,Adrian Clear, Kirstie O’Neil, Janine
Morley and Oliver Bateshttp://wp.lancs.ac.uk/sds/
OVERVIEW
1. Why should we care about sustainable food?
2. Quantification of food impacts from a student population
3. The status quo: food in a more general population
4. Learning from sustainably minded shoppers “walking the walk”
5. Some implications and points for discussion
The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at
least the last 800,000 years (IPCC, AR5)
Image: IPCC
Household fuel 13%
Household Vehicle fuel
10%
Household electricity
9%
Personal air travel
8%
Other Personal transport
3%
Cars 5%
Food and drink (from
shops) 12% Hotels, pubs
and catering 4%
Paper and printing
1%
Textiles and clothes
2%
Electronic / computers / appliances
4%
Construction 6%
Water and Sewage
2%
Defence, education and
health and social services
11%
Other 10%
15 TONNES CO2EFood for the “typical UK person” is around 12-16% of the
personal footprint
IS FOOD A BIG DEAL?
• GHG footprint of UK food = 160 Mt CO2e (HM Gov: Food 2030)
• That’s 2.7t CO2e per person per year, or 27% of total direct GHG emissions of the UK
• Change to vegetarian/vegan diet could save 40 Mt CO2e/ year (equivalent to a 50% reduction in current exhaust pipe emissions from the entire UK passenger car fleet)
The relative greenhouse gas impacts of realistic dietary choices. Energy Policy, Vol. 43, 2012, p. 184-190.
In the UK, 67% of men and 57% of women and over quarter of children are either overweight or obese
The Lancet, 384(9945), pp. 766-781, August 2014
Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting overweight child choosing between
a bowl of fruit and some cream cakes)
1. IMPACT OF DIETWhat is cooked, and what impact does it have?
n=22, real-time energy, motion captured images, interviews
TIME LAPSE VIDEO OF TYPICAL STUDENT FOODBEING PREPARED (LOTS OF SAUSAGES AND PASTA)
COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION
One cook, single portion
COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION
Components used
Back-right
Back-left
COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION
... and quantities
(160g)
(100g)
Foods observed
Jarred sauce
Pasta
COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION
Cooking method
Heating
Boiling
(no lid)
(no lid)
Use of lid?
COOKING SESSION ANNOTATION
Changes in control position
0.000 0.500 1.000 1.500 2.000 2.500 3.000 3.500
(2) BEER AND CIDER
Potatoes
Tomatoes
Onions, root crops, cabbages, herbs&spcices, other veg,
Green salads
Prepared Veg., fruit & salad
Exotic veg and mushrooms
Apples & Pears
Bananas
Citrus and melons
Exotic fruit and berries (including soft, stone, grapes)
(67) FLORISTRY
(84) CABINETS COOKED MEATS
Cabinets Milk
Ready meals, pizza & pasta
Sandwiches
(52) BREAD
(70) FROZEN FOODS
kgCO2e
GHG emissions per £ of product at the checkout
Source ingredients to farm / factory gate
Food processing
Total consumer packaging footprint
Transit packaging
Transport Emissions to DC
Transport emissions from all DCs to Stores
Storage and processing at DC
Overhead (exc. refrigeration)
Refrigeration
WHERE IS THE CO2?Source: Mike Berners-Lee, Small World Consulting
COOKING: QUANTIFIED
Other food
RELATIVE IMPACTS
Cooking Energy Emissions (22%)
Waste
Otherdevices
Indirect Emissions (78%)
DIET
High Impact
Low Impact
Pastasauce
A CONVENIENT DIET
“typical student food”
“all those kind of really easy things”
0
20
40
60
80
jarred sauce
chicken
pastavegetables
sausages
chipspizza
breadbaked beans
ricepotatoes
tortellini
baconfrozen veg.
tinned tomatoes
eggnoodles
mince beef
steakreadymeal
fishsoup
61
70
87
88
41
43
21
9217
33
8
1540
22
8 29
27
109
8 107
Embo
died
Ghg
em
issio
ns (k
g CO
2e)0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
jarred sauce
chicken
pastavegetables
sausages
chipspizza
breadbaked beans
ricepotatoes
tortellini
baconfrozen veg.
tinned tomatoes
eggnoodles
mince beef
steakreadymeal
fish
61
69
87
66
41
43
20
8817
32
8
1541
21
8 29
27
109
8 10
Embo
died
GhG
em
issio
ns (k
g CO
2e)
• Repeated moderate- to high-impact foods
“WHATEVER’S IN THE CUPBOARD”
“I like vegetables and salads and stuff like that but when I buy it it just all
goes off...”
“um, risottos, stuff, pasta and sauce whatever, um
shepherds pie ...whatever ingredients we have”
•Food often takes a back seat to other activities (working, studying, socialising)
•Limited technique and cooking skills in play (diminishing in UK - Short, 2003)
•But at a point of transition in their lives when they could be acquire new skills (Meah & Watson, 2011)
Short, F., “Domestic cooking practices and cooking skills: findings from an english study,” Food Service Technology, vol. 3, no. 3-4, pp. 177–185, 2003.Meah, A., Watson, M. (2011) Saints and slackers: challenging discourses about the decline of domestic cooking, Sociological Research Online, 16 (2), 6.
2. MAINSTREAM PRACTICESSurely, this is just students, right?
n=24, recruited face to face in regional supermarkets
IN “REAL LIFE”
• children’s preferences or diets and dietary restrictions, family circumstances, as well as cost (offers), or storage, and logistics
• concerns, choices and dichotomies such as processed / unprocessed, local / imported, healthy / unhealthy, balanced / unbalanced, practical / impractical and so on
• With few exceptions, we noticed little direct interest or concern with ‘carbon footprint’, link to food not recognised
CHICKEN WITH CHEESE
George reflected that, “things have moved on a long way since my mother was alive and she made
all things fresh”
“buy a couple of chickens for £5-6, chickens with cheese
on… and you can buy other ready stuff like sautéed
potatoes…”
READY MEAL EMANCIPATION
• “…we don’t see the point of my wife being in the kitchen an hour and half tied to the stove and preparing things…"
PROPER FOOD
• “Proper food, what it used to be like. None of this, how can I put it, these ready meals.”
• “It’s how you’ve been brought up, I’ve been brought up on meat and potato pies, and shepherds pie.”
Image removed for copyright reasons
(depicting roast beef traditional Sunday roast)
FINDING THE TIME
“not a huge variety because we never seem to have the time to … look at different recipes… it’s an aspiration to spend a bit more time on food. But yes, life tends to be
pretty full with various things…"
LOCAL AND SEASONAL• Tomatoes and meat were mentioned
frequently as having to be as local as possible:
• “I would be more aware of it. I think at other supermarkets there’s...there’s less advertising of the fact that these apples are British or this is produced in [UK county].” (Bonnie)
TRUST
Catherine felt: “you’ve got to be careful there that you’ve got the English meat
because the dish being made in England and the meat being produced in England is
two different things. Sneaky!”
Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting a trusting child leaping into his father’s arms)
VEGETARIAN INCONVENIENCE
Bonnie felt that vegetarians were not well catered for : she does not “buy many ready meals
because the quality and the standard and the portion size, there’s very little available I would say
for vegetarians that is really worth buying”.
LIFE TRANSITIONS• Carol had recently lost her husband. Immediately following his
death she turned to ready meals, as she could not face cooking, whereas now she described a significant shift in what she bought, cooked and ate:
• “I don’t cook as often as I did. And we eat a lot more salads and a lot of fresh vegetables. Well we ate fresh vegetables before but they had to be cooked because it wasn’t a real meal if it hadn’t been cooked!”
• Loss of skills, living on one’s own (predicted 41% by 2033†)†Household Projections, 2008 to 2013, England
3. SUSTAINABLY MINDEDWhat does food mean and what can we learn from it?
3 focus groups, n=20+
WHEN I SAY SUSTAINABLE…• All ethically guided, but their
interpretations of, and commitment to sustainability differed:
• animal welfare, organicity, localness, food miles, seasonality, social injustice, and affordability.
Image: http://www.globalanimalpartnership.org/
Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting free range hens in a grassy field)
ACQUIRING FOOD
• Almost all of them regularly shopped or acquired food from places other than supermarkets
• Their everyday shopping practices scarcely consisted of making decisions to buy this or that, rather where they shopped (trust)
• When supermarkets were used, for reasons of convenience, cost, or poor availability of alternatives, care was taken based on its environmental policy
AN ON-GOING PROJECT
Acquiring the skills to produce tasty and sustainable meals takes time, effort and engagement…
“and I suppose all of us are describing, do a little change and embedding it, do a little change and embedding it, and it’s growing and
growing…”
Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting a tasty looking vegan mushroom curry)
CLOSER TO THE EARTH
A number of participants’ experiences of growing food provided a reference point for notions of, for example, naturalness, freshness,
seasonality, and taste, from which they could critically evaluate supermarket produce.
“the expiry date of fruits and vegetables in the supermarket I find very surprising… with the carrots, the expiry date is within two weeks… my family always had a farm you can store them all Winter… what sort of
carrots am I buying if it goes off within two weeks?!” (Joyce)
PROVENANCE & VALUE
“we’ve planted fruit trees, I’ve got potatoes now, I’ve got courgettes...it’s really important to me and I think some of that is the fact that I’m vegetarian and actually when you’ve grown it and there’s that whole
time thing and it costs a lot more to have one of my courgettes but at least I know I’ve grown it and I know what’s gone onto it and actually when you come to eat it not only does it taste really good but...it’s just
kind of a nice cycle I think” (Liz)
Image removed for copyright reasons(depicting wild blackberries emphasising hand picked food)
DISCUSSION
Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience, p. 198
HOW DOES CONSUMPTION COME ABOUT?
"[R]elevant patterns of consumption follow from efforts to provide and sustain what people take to be normal services like those of comfort and cleanliness"
SUSTAINABLE CHOICE IS (TOO?) COMPLEX
• Seasonality in the country of origin
• Hot housing (e.g. tomatoes)
• Reduced GHG, e.g. methane from ruminating animals
• Transport and refrigeration (air, ship, land)
• Locavorism
• and other issues: competing land use, biodiversity, fairtrade
LESS INSULATION, MORE TRANSPARENCY?
Asparagus (250g pack): 2kg
Low 125 g
Air freighted from Peru
Average 2 kg
Local In-season
High 3.5 kg
ACTING NOW(Anderson & Bows. 2008 Philosophical Transactions A of the
Royal Society. 366. pp. 3863-3882)
Year
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Em
issi
ons
of g
reen
hous
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ses
(GtC
O2e
)
0
20
40
60
80
2015 peak
Year
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Em
issi
ons
of g
reen
hous
e ga
ses
(GtC
O2e
)
0
20
40
60
80
2020 peak
Year
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Em
issi
ons
of g
reen
hous
e ga
ses
(GtC
O2e
)
0
20
40
60
80
2025 peak
DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY• Technologies can make recommendations, support choice and
reflection on food consumed (caveat: information deficit, especially on supply chains, LCA and product composition)
• But, supermarkets are implicated reproducing food norms (defaults, incentives) - is it corporate social responsibility? can sustainability be good business? Exploit transitions in industry?
• What is a sustainable diet? It is inherently more varied and responsive to what’s available, so can we insulate less from this variation and save energy on transport and refrigeration?
QUESTIONS?
• Also happy to talk about:• Energy use and ICT in the
home• Alternative (domestic) heating
control based on adaptive thermal comfort
Contact:[email protected]://wp.lancs.ac.uk/sds
This work was part funded by the UK Research Councils (EPSRC grants EP/G008523/1, EP/I00033X/1 and EP/K012738/1), and the Facilities Division and
Faculty of Science and Technology at Lancaster University.
• Want more? See:• A. Clear, M. Hazas, J. Morley, A. Friday, and
O. Bates, “Domestic food and sustainable design: A study of university student cooking and its impacts,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2447–2456, 2013.