ALTERNATIVE DIETS
Are they really sustainable ?
Step one: Definitions
Step two: The literature review
Then, we started to read academic articles related to our topic, and we presented two of t.hem in class, which dealt with organic food consumers for the first one and “fregans” for the last one. We also chose to search videos on the internet, to have different views on that topic but also to inform people in our class in a different way.
All academic references we studied were related to consumer perception of their diet or were an expertise and a scientific analysis of diets. Each one of us read articles and analyzed them in order to build our literature review. Our frequent meetings allowed us to debate about these articles and to confront them. Literature is quite rich on that topic, and we learnt a lot by reading these references. After this analysis we chose its structure and we wrote this part of our research work
« Is the sustainable consumer possible? » is such a large topic, and our team needed to start with a strong stand. Right after we chose to do our research about food and sustainability, we started by defining the key-words related to the sustainability and diets: to deal with sustainability we considered the social, economic and environmental dimensions, which are intertwined.
Then, we tried to choose which diets can be considered as alternative and we selected three main diets: the vegetarian/vegan one, locavores and organic food consumers, which are not always well-known by everybody, so the first thing to do was to define them:
-
The vegetarian diet excludes any consumption of both meat and fish, but includes animal products such as milk, eggs or honey. Some vegetarians also choose to follow a vegan diet that excludes these animal products, and that involves choices in other dimension than food, not wearing leather or silk for instance.
-
Locavores are local food consumers. They choose to eat food produced in a specific area around them, which is defined by every one of them in their own way but it goes usually from 100 to 250kms.
-
Organic food consumers choose to include a maximum of organic products in their diets. They can be occasional or regular organic food consumers.
Each consumer that follows one of these diets has to make other choices that involves food, such as the distribution system most adapted to their diet, shipping ways and transport, origin of products, packaging and waste involved by this consumption, etc…
After we considered these definitions, we chose a problematic based on them: are alternative diets really sustainable?
This part of the research was really important for us, and we didn’t want to start our interviews having preconceived ideas based on our literature review. That is the reason why we did some interviews before writing our literature review, and for the rest of them we tried as much as possible to look at these interviews with a “new and fresh eye”, without having in mind the results of our academic research. In our personal interviews, we met a large variety of individuals, and by listening to them we obtained information about their behaviors, attitudes, perceptions, the way they buy and cook their food, their link to distribution systems, their individual or collective vision of their diet. Each of us interviewed people we found with very different ways: associations, websites, local stores, etc… We transcribed all our interviews and translated them into English. We also choose to do a focus group with really different people, in order to understand the vision consumers have on their diets, and above all how their interact with people that have a different diet or that follows the same one but in a different way.
That was really interesting, and analyzing this field material allowed us to write our findings of research and to compare it to our literature review to conclude on our topic.
Step three : Field work
