Background
There is a general consensus that households are substantial producers of food waste. Both the European Commission’s and United Nations’ sustainable goals call for a substantial reduction of food wasting in the near future. Recent research by multiple teams in Czechia has suggested that the degree of wasting is significantly below the European Union’s average of 92 kg per person per year. The findings show a range from 2 to 37 kg and some preliminary ideas about the values, relations, and practices concerning the management of food. While the Czech households reached the EU sustainable goal of halving the amount of food waste a decade earlier and could be thought of as a source of inspiration, the official international documents do not seem to recognize it.
Societies outside of the Western ‘core’ are rather equated with developmental inadequacy, lack of required knowledge and efficiency needed for the reduction of food waste. Research in the Netherlands shows similarly low values for food waste, from 27 to 67 kg. In addition to long-term practices preventing the wasting of food, the topic has been a subject of attention and public campaigns for more than a decade. In the Netherlands, there is a possibility to trace a contribution of frugal practices as well as educational and policy interventions that aim at food waste reduction. The country has been at the forefront of environmental policies and sustainability-related innovations within the EU, which sets different contexts for consumption in households.
Water is another critical resource in times of climate change. The latest available data show that Czech households consume 89 l per person per day, which is one of the lowest in the EU. Since 1993, Czech households have become significantly richer, but the growing affluence has not translated into higher consumption of water. For most of the period, water consumption kept decreasing.
Interestingly, the decrease is not a simple response to the increasing price of water. Very little is known about the practices of water saving themselves. The situation in the Netherlands is different. The latest available data show that Dutch households consume 129 l per person per day. This level of consumption was relatively stable over the last three decades.
Objectives
The first objective: The project aims to produce important insights into households’ frugal resource use. Various practices of saving water and preventing food waste have a long tradition, others have been emerging recently under the influence of policies and public campaigns to promote sustainability. We highlight the importance of already existing and socially embedded, yet inadequately researched sustainability-compliant practices. These have already proved to be resilient and although they have their roots in the past, they are not static but constantly evolving. By selecting the Czech and Dutch households, we strive to understand different circumstances and trajectories that lead to the frugal use of resources. The project examines the role of informal and widespread sustainable practices based on sharing, storing, preserving, composting, and feeding animals as well as the formal and market-based approaches driven by education and information campaigns.
The second objective: The second key objective is to uncover how academic framings of Central European societies as lacking in sustainability know-how, skills and infrastructure take hold, reproduce and become adopted both in the Western ‘centres’ of knowledge production and in the Central European ‘epistemic periphery’. In this second research agenda, using the findings obtained by activities related to the first key objective, the project team will explore the circuits of international scholarly communication and its underlying material and discursive power structures. Ultimately, the Project will seek to propose ways of altering this hierarchy of knowledge.
Approach
We deploy surveys, focus groups and ethnographic approaches.
Athena’s role
Athena acts as project associate. In this capacity, we supervise internships and literature review students who contribute towards the project; co-author papers with others on the project team; and bring this project in conversation with European-funded action-oriented food system transformation projects within and beyond Athena.