Eat for change? Household food practices as caring practices facing climate change

By Suse Brettin, Agricultural Science PhD candidate and Dr. Meike Brückner, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

"It's always a bit exhausting when you have so many criteria. I spend a lot of time comparing, so I look at the origin. Like you said, when it's two, I prefer organic, regional, or: is it the season now? So it's not really fun, no. It's more like, it has to be done."

This is the answer Martín, who is active in an urban garden in Berlin, gave us when asked whether or not he likes grocery shopping. The notion of being overwhelmed due to a mix of felt responsibility, demands and requirements facing climate change was something that we encountered numerous times in interviews about household food practices that we conducted as part of the research project PLATEFORMS. In this project, we investigated the use of socio-technical innovations in food provisioning, such as Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), Food Assembly, Food Sharing or unpackaged stores. These innovations are often associated with great potential in terms of sustainability. Using qualitative data from interviews with 40 households in Berlin, we analysed the benefits and challenges of these channels for food practices in general as well as for care work and caring relations in particular.

With regards to household food provisioning, the work necessary is often seen as a private matter, non-negotiable at the socio-political level. At the same time, the demands on food-related care work have changed significantly. The discourse on food, climate change and sustainability seems omnipresent, and this development has recognizably influenced food practices. Thus, a shift in the necessary food-related activities can be observed (Busa/Garder 2015) and food-related (care) work can be a starting point for socio-ecological questions. However, this micro-perspective has limitations. First of all, this mostly challenges women to reinvent their activities in the kitchen since `feeding work' (DeVault 1994) – the work of provisioning, preparing and disposing of food – is still predominantly done by women. Even though food preparation and cooking are becoming increasingly trendy (Kılıç et al. 2021), and more and more men find pleasure in some of these jobs (Cairns et al. 2010) the gendered division of labour in households worldwide has not fundamentally changed in recent decades (Budlender 2010). Feminist scholars have already criticised these new challenges in numerous ways. Weller (2017), for example, warns of a feminisation of the responsibility for sustainability. Little et al. (2009) show in their study on alternative food networks that it is especially women who (have to) spend the extra time, knowledge and skills to provide themselves and their households with appropriate food.

In our sample - which consisted mainly of women, although we explicitly addressed the household as a whole when asking for an interview - these new challenges and demands shine through again and again. It quickly became clear that relationships of responsibility and care extend well beyond the private sphere of the household. For many interviewees, practices of food provisioning and preparation was an expression of socio-ecological care:

“CSA is just such a totally honest, good thing for me. I know that on Tuesday it will come from the field, it will be harvested, it's fresh, it's just a farmer who earns money from us. It's a very clear, honest structure. For me, it's simply ingenious. I can use the vegetables in a completely different way and have a completely different appreciation for them.” (Martha, member of a CSA)

"For me it's actually [...] also a lot about the ecological aspect, that I simply want to eat things that haven't travelled from far away, but that come from the region, […] and where it's also about the fact that they're not simply produced organically somewhere else in some greenhouse […] and then still fly halfway around the world and therefore bring a large footprint with them." (Emma, subscriber for a regional fruit and vegetable box scheme)

Some of the participants practiced composting as a waste prevention method, turning leftovers and food scraps into compost on their balconies or in their gardens. A sense of responsibility and care for the environment and climate change as well as for the working and living conditions of farmers were at the core of decision making around household food provisioning. Consequently, changes in practices - for example, introducing new channels of food provisioning - were also motivated by precisely these aspects. As Caroline succinctly put it when talking about her motivation for joining Food Assembly:

"Well, simply that it was explained: You want to buy from different farmers from the region, but without always wanting to go there? And then I thought: Yes, that's exactly what I want.”

Thus socio-technical innovations in food provisioning such as Food Assembly or CSA often represented the possibility to act upon a sentiment of responsibility and care. Looking more closely at caring relations in the context of food and sustainability, we found Nodding's (2010) distinction between caring for and caring about helpful as to think about the difference between everyday, concrete empirical care work and the more abstract care about fair working conditions for producers in the food system. Caring about refers to the needs of people and living beings with whom we do not have direct encounters (Noddings 2010: 22), and for whom individual and private solutions cannot suffice. It is impossible to care for somebody or something who is not part of one’s everyday life - even though we might strongly care about them. Noddings puts it as follows: “Since it is impossible for any human being to care for everyone, we must find a way to care about the problems and needs of people we cannot reach individually. I've suggested that this should be a collective enterprise, in part to achieve some stability in giving and, in part, to relieve individuals from feeling overwhelmed by the many demands on their desire to care." (Noddings 2010: 25)

Accordingly, for the food system, this means a necessity for infrastructures that enable people to act upon their caring about. Such infrastructures could provide relief from the challenges in caring for sustainable food such as financial or time constraints and ultimately make it easier to support, build and sustain a food system built on care. Thus, for our interviewees, the socio-technical innovations of food provisioning were often the basis for a positive or negative evaluation of food-related (care) work in general since it helped them to act according to their requirements and responsibilities. Developing this infrastructure of food provisioning, however, cannot be the responsibility of private households alone. Maria, who gets a regional fruit and vegetable box, shops regularly in a zero waste store and also cultivates an urban garden, reported the following:

"As time went by, it became a bit like that, so now I almost feel guilty when I buy something packaged that I would get unpackaged. But I don't feel like going to Kreuzberg [location of the store] every time, because of course it takes a lot of planning and you have to carry bags and containers and so on.”

Limited resources of time and money, as well as the additional workload involved, played a major role in our interviewees’ choices. Analysing the various reports on household food practices in relation to provisioning channels, it became clear to us: since these channels are at the interface between the private and the public, they demonstrate once again the difficulty of a sharp separation between these two spheres. When discussing socio-ecological care it is therefore important to put this separation repeatedly under scrutiny. Should it be up to individual resources whether people are able to shop as packaging-free as possible? Do households, structured by a 40-hour working week, have to make the time to pick up regionally produced fruit and vegetables, clean them and put them in the right storage, or should there be a general discussion about the distribution of time in society? Sevenhuijsen (2003) points out that a politicisation of care entails a re-thinking of the categories of private and public and the values anchored in them. She states that "even if care becomes more political, it certainly cannot be stripped of its private dimension" (Sevenhuijsen 2003: 194) and concludes with the urge to anchor care in everyday socio-political life: "In this respect, caring citizenship includes the right to have time to care, to make, on a daily basis, a place for care" (Sevenhuijsen 2003: 194).

For this reason, we argue for a care perspective when discussing (sustainable) food practices in households since care work is at the heart of these practices. However, this perspective must include a politicised understanding of care and thus a critique of the fundamental understanding of caring activities as private or individual affairs. Such a perspective otherwise runs the risk of shifting the responsibility for sustainability primarily onto women. Care work is already happening. The challenge is under what conditions it can take place. Thus, cultivating care eventually means cultivating conditions and infrastructures that enable people to care for and about each other as well as the world we live in.

This work was financially supported by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) through the Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE), grant number 2818ERA11B.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 696231.

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