ALTERNATIVE DIETS
Are they really sustainable ?
WHO ARE WE ?
To begin this blog, let’s us present our team and our work. We are a group of 7 people from EMLYON Business School, located in Ecully (69). For a research project in Social Science, we decided to choose the subject “Is the sustainable consumer possible” supervised by Handan Vicdan. We were really interested by this subject because in our daily lives we are concerned about questions and issues like global warming, sustainability, recycling and the spread of a sustainable culture globally. It was for us really important to understand the motivations, the values and the lifestyles of sustainable consumer, and evaluate if this sustainability is really achievable or not in a society that have become really consumerist. True it is that many scientists and journalists have raised doubts regarding the viability in the long run of the current consumer society. Is it conceivable to keep on living and thus consuming without damaging the environment or caring about the political and social consequences? This is the question that caught our attention at the very beginning, for curiosity or for personal reasons and believes.
The interest in sustainable food became after. First of all, three members of the team are vegetarians and really care about the impact of what they eat on the environment. But more than that, it was really important for all of us to know more about the possibility (or not) of achieving a sustainable way of eating since it concerns everyone every day and it is a key issue when analyzing the sustainable consumer.
OUR RESEARCH QUESTIONS
While reading the first scientific articles about sustainable food behaviors, we found several questions that led us to our problematic and research question:
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Who are the real actors of this shift regarding food customs? How do they define themselves? What about their motivations? How can they be distinguished? What are the difference between the stance they hold about themselves, others’ perception about them and above all the sociological facts which are actually characteristic of them?
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What is sustainability in their eyes? Beyond the environmental and the health sustainability they currently bring to the fore, do they consider the financial and economic, but also the social one? In other words, about what are we talking about when it is about sustainability?
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Do these movements represent a real alternative to the current consumerist society? Are their spreading diets bringing forth a more efficient and responsible pattern for food consumption? Are they sustainable in every sense of the word?
We also noticed that many already existing movements are getting more and more successful by gathering new members, and new ones are emerging, finding in this new way of consuming a viable alternative to the food consumer society and all the harmful excesses which come with it. An obvious yearning to consume and to be sustainable at the same time is observable, which can be translated into a common rejection of the global trend. By the way, the articles we read and the first interviews we did gave us the impression that people who have adopted an “alternative diet” do not speak in the same voice. Many differences, concerning the reasons and the consumption habits led us to the idea of questioning these diets and their efficiency concerning sustainability.
That’s why we decided to wonder whether the alternative diets we chose to focus on are really sustainable or not. This means we will analyze what the word “sustainable” really means when you focus on eating habits and see how consumers try to achieve sustainability in their diets.
