Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

By studying how young adults talk about food and sustainability at home, this thesis aims to explain how discourses on sustainable food behaviour are constructed, how they can be furthered and mechanisms for their culturalisation, drawing on the positions of the parental home, the school subject Home Economics (HE), and the young adults’ home.
Inspired by Laclau and Mouffe's Post Structuralist Discourse Theory, ten semi-structured interviews revealed five key discourses, a health hegemony and the floating signifier "support”. The relational discourse is the largest and suggests that sustainable food behaviour is relationally driven. The knowledge discourse is characterised by uncertainty about how knowledge can be applied, while the awareness discourse highlights insecurities about what constitutes sustainable food behaviour. The Swedish preference discourse admits internalised trust in Swedish produce and food recommendations, while the economic discourse displays established resource- and cost-awareness.
All but the economic discourse is seen in the parental home. The knowledge, awareness, and Swedish preference discourses are recognised across all studied contexts and are reinforced by the HE subject before being established in the young adult’s home. The health hegemony significantly shapes all but the relational discourse, merging health with sustainability and creating generalisations that obscure understanding of both concepts and of how to practically apply sustainable food behaviour. The findings indicate that sustainable food behaviour is culturally passed down from parents and older relatives, where related role models play an important role in shaping awareness and images of the future, while teachers fill gaps left by the family home.
To further sustainable food behaviour, it is essential to build awareness of the distinction between food sustainability and health, otherwise risking misdirecting effort and hence slowing down progress towards sustainable food behaviour. The relationally driven sustainable food behaviour may thus be a natural motor for change, for example, within the HE subject, involving parents and/or kin, allowing the offspring to become both the sender of know-how and the receiver.
To achieve unified, directed, and effective development, governmental guidance and support are needed and expected and may help foster effective changes in sustainable food practices in everyday decision-making on how to fine-tune and expand sustainable food behaviours for the young Swedish adult.