Food, Health and Sustainability: Choice, Care, Alternatives

In contemporary Western societies food and diet are strongly linked with health, in part due to the increasing medicalisation of nutrition. More recently, sustainability is also entering eaters’ kitchens, via their awareness that food production and consumption contributes to environmental and climate crises. An increasingly shared rhetoric suggests that the pursuit of health and sustainability might go together, so that promoting healthy eating might also encourage people to adopt more ecological diets. Yet, this nexus is little studied for how it is manifested in everyday life practices. This chapter considers three ways in which the health–sustainability nexus is manifested in people’s relations with food. The pursuit of health might promote less impactful ways of consuming food, but with caveats. If deployed individually, the rhetoric of responsibility and choice puts the burden of sustainability on single subjects, depoliticising these matters. If articulated within kin relations, concerns around health go hand in hand with caring for humans and nonhumans; yet, there is the risk that these practices will remain depoliticised and reinforce unequal gender relations. The most transformative articulation of this nexus emerges in the context of experiences of collective consumption, where concerns of bodily health are understood as directly related to the health of the community and territory.