ALTERNATIVE DIETS
Are they really sustainable ?
FIELD WORK.
THE INTERVIEWS
First of all, we tried to reach organic consumers. Noëlla found some organic consumers thanks to a farmer of her region. She asked the farmer to contact her customers. A couple of two people willing to answer Noëlla’s questions agreed to meet her. Those were people living and consuming products in their own way, not at all protesting against society. They were coping with consumerism just acting in their own way. Noëlla went to have tea with them and learnt lots of things about how they live, eat, behave…
We also met some locavores like Marie Esnault or Eric Coatrieux, found by Marianne. They were both about 50 years old and they had a lot of common features. Those two people have their own garden and they avoid going to supermarkets and shops of that kind. In one word, they are dealing with consumerism just by living differently.
On the other hand, we also met people who were eager to convince people to change their way of life and to become true locavores! Judite and Mathieu met Anne-Sophie Novel. A woman who wrote books about locavores. This woman has tried to be a true locavore during 6 months to get to know locavores really well.
All the people we talked to until now were above 30 so we were really happy to have found them. Moreover, there are less students who are organic consumers and locavores because it is complicated and expensive! But when it comes to vegetarian and vegans, those are more often students. Indeed, they are easier to contact and willing to speak about their experience.
Cécile interviewed a vegan. She is a student in Toulouse. She is someone really concerned about animals and she knows a lot of things. Marianne also interviewed a vegan student, but she did not like the interview very much because the girl was only concerned about animals and did not care about the environment at all! She was very different from the other people we interviewed, as she didn’t have a deep insight on her diet.
The last interesting interview was with a girl from Scotland called Caryss Williamson. Marianne met her at a party. Every place and every moment is good to find people to interview. What was interesting is that this girl was from another country. She used to be a vegetarian and she stopped because she saw that poor people had to eat meat in Africa.
The girl was very interesting because she had also been a vegan and she tended to be a locavore. She insisted on the conviviality you can find in food. She stopped being a vegetarian in part because she could not share food properly with the others. It is interesting because Caryss focuses on another aspect of sustainability: the social sustainability.
THE FOCUS GROUP
We found carrying interviews was interesting, but we wanted to do something more. This is why we decided to make a focus group. We wanted to gather sustainable consumers together to make them talk about their actions to see how they reacted and influenced one another.
We decided to gather 6 or 7 of them because more would have been too messy. We wanted all of them to talk, and with more than 7 people, they would not be able to express themselves properly.
WHO PARTICIPATED?
We gathered 6 people. It was hard. We posted some announcements in shops like La vie claire. We found one person like that called Fouad Daoud. We were happy because he was an organic consumer and locavore above 45. It is very hard for us to find such people. We contacted directly the Colibri network via Facebook. And Michaël Boutin, the man who is in charge of it directly agreed to come to our group focus. We also found a vegetarian student from EMLyon: Christelle, willing to come. There was also a german vegetarian girl. Lastly, we found a nice student from Lyon 2 called Charlotte who is an organic consumer. It is really original for a student because most of them cannot aford this so we were happy she would come with us.
HOW DID IT GO?
During the first part, we showed some images to our 5 sustainable consumers and we looked at their reactions. Fouad Daoud talked a lot. It was interesting because he criticized harshly our consumerist system. Michaël Boutin was more calm in his critics but he acted a lot to protect the environment and to act sustainably also in the social point of view.
As for the girls, they talked a bit less sometimes but all of them had interesting experiences to share. Dorothea, the german student, has been an activist in associations and she is not only a vegetarian, she is also really trying to consume sustainable products. Christelle is only a vegetarian concerned about the good of animals. As for Charlotte, she was very dicreet but active for the environment.
We studied the way they interacted with each other. Charlotte said something very interesting at the end of the focus group: “I have learnt a lot of things”. What she says shows how this was interesting for us but also for them because they influenced one another, they learnt things from each other. We were not the only ones to learn interesting things!
WHAT DID IT BRING US?
This focus group was really interesting and brought us something new the interviews hadn’t: we saw completely different people, from different backgrounds, age, sex, with different motivations interacting. It was hard to organize but we really enjoyed it.
All of our interviews and the focus group showed us that vegetarians, vegans, locavores and organic consumers are often concerned about sustainability but in completely various ways. We met lots of interesting people and they helped us in our researches: sustainability isn’t one specfic diet, but the combination of all those different approaches.
In our project, there are two important parts. Our litterature review of course, but also interviews!
We interviewed consumers to have a better knowledge of how they act, how they feel, how they are influenced by others.
We started by interviewing different consumers. Of course, it is really easy to find vegetarians. There are even 3 vegetarian people in our group, so we tried to look for locavores, vegans, organic consumers to vary the kind of people we were interviewing. We also tried to avoid interviewing students because we live in a students’ world ! It is very easy to find students willing to answer our questions, but they’re not the most interesting people for us because their behavior is really close to ours. We managed to diversify our interviews!
Anne-Sophie Novel
Caryss Williamson
Elodie Ventura
