The (un)Sustainable foodscape: An ethnographic study of food practices in Dutch suburbia

Abstract

Addressing the role of food practices in greenhouse gas emissions requires attention to their interconnections and material foundations. This study examines four key practices in the Netherlands using Social Practice Theory, extended with a New Materialist lens to highlight material agency and entanglement. Ethnographic fieldwork shows how food practices evolve and interconnect through resource-intensive arrangements. The analysis identifies three structuring themes: spatial-material configurations, community ties, and relations to the natural environment. These themes reveal how food practice interactions are largely shaped by powerful social agents such as supermarket chains, exemplifying how the chances of a practice becoming ‘anchoring’ are grounded in arrangements beyond households’ influence. The study argues that interventions should target the interconnections between practices by fostering cooperative systems and ecological reciprocity. The research underscores the importance of addressing systemic barriers and enabling infrastructure to support sustainable foodscapes as collaborative, living ecosystems.

Introduction

Food systems significantly impact environmental sustainability globally. These systems are responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions (Ritchie et al., 2022) and are major contributors to water pollution (Mateo-Sagasta et al., 2017) and biodiversity loss (Westhoek et al., 2016). Beyond the environmental impacts of food production and transport, the way food is acquired, prepared, and consumed is embedded in ‘foodscapes’, localized places and spaces where everyday food-related activities unfold (MacKendrick, 2014). Within these foodscapes, everyday food-related activities and routines around food are carried out, and these practices ultimately shape environmental outcomes (Dietz et al., 2009).

Exploring how food practices are intertwined within the socio-material fabric of foodscapes provides key insights into how sustainable change can occur. However, empirical research remains overly focused on individual consumer behaviour (Evans, 2011), likely because this often leads to relatively straightforward policy recommendations (Hargreaves, 2011). However, many of the things we do in everyday life are not driven by individual choice but reflect wider social and material structures. Food practices involve many activities that people engage in routinely, often without conscious reflection or motivation (Shove, 2010).

Social Practice Theory (SPT) shifts the analytical focus away from individual behaviour toward practices as meso-level socio-material structures. Rather than assuming that people “mitigate climate change” in everyday life, SPT recognizes that people simply eat, shop, or cook (Lopes et al., 2015). A SPT approach allows for a deeper understanding of how sustainability unfolds in everyday life, not as isolated actions, but as part of ongoing, dynamic systems of practices embedded in socio-material contexts. This perspective directs policy and spatial interventions to the conditions that uphold unsustainable practices and opens possibilities for systemic transformation.

Practices are deeply interconnected, and it is through their interaction that wider patterns become visible (Maller, 2015; Shove et al., 2012). These interconnections span not only elements but entire food practices (Crivits and Paradis, 2013). Despite this relationality, most empirical practice research focusses on one practice, on one ‘sustainable outcome’, or mentions interactions but does not elaborate on them as foci of interventions (Spurling et al., 2013). This highlights the need for a more relational approach, to which end this paper applies a New Materialist lens.

New Materialism emphasizes that all matter is entangled and exerts agency in shaping outcomes (Barad, 2007). It rejects notions of human exceptionalism and offers a way to understand sustainability as something that emerges from the entanglements within foodscapes, parting with the idea that “environments” can ever be external to human acting (Alaimo, 2014). Through a relational approach that combines insights from SPT and New Materialism, the current paper examines four interconnected food practices: doing groceries/getting food, cooking, eating, and handling waste, offering a deeper understanding of where to situate interventions in the foodscape.

Drawing on ethnographic research in the Netherlands, this paper investigates how these food practices interconnect and how the interactions shape sustainable or unsustainable outcomes, using the notion of materiality as a vital ‘interlocking point’ (Spurling et al., 2013). The research demonstrates how a focus on interactions and entanglements between practices inspires new and alternative interventions. This leads to the central research question: How do interconnections between food practices contribute to the reproduction of (un)sustainable foodscapes?

Theoretical framework: Food practices, elements and interactions

A practice is a routinized type of action: “forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (p249. Reckwitz, 2002). Through a social practice lens, social and material factors are not perceived as external stimuli to behaviour but rather are integral components of practices (Keller et al., 2016). Shove (2007; 2012) provided a simplified model that explains practices as consisting of three elements: materials, competences, and meanings.

Practices are sustained or reshaped through repeated performance (Reckwitz, 2002). This performance continually sustains or reshapes the connections between practice elements (Reckwitz, 2002; Shove et al., 2012). Shove (2014) extends this, suggesting that we should focus on modifying the elements that enable certain practices to be repeatedly performed. For example, Sahakian and Wilhite discuss a campaign aiming to reduce obesity started having a positive impact once it integrated skill (through food camps) as well as material changes to city infrastructure to facilitate walking and biking (2014).

However, not just the elements of a practice are interconnected, practices are also connected amongst each other. This means that modifying one practice will inevitably impact the others it is linked with (Shove et al., 2012). Research on the interconnected nature of practices highlights how changes in one practice can reshape the dynamics of other practices. For instance, Braun illustrates that the decline of home-preserving practices disrupted links between food production, preparation, and consumption, leading to greater reliance on industrial food systems and higher environmental costs (2015). These interactions unfold in context-specific ways, reflecting interdependencies within practice complexes (Schatzki, 2013).

Yet, many studies isolate food practices in their analysis (Ganglbauer et al., 2013; Gojard and Véron, 2018; Halkier, 2009). The isolation of practices could limit our understanding of how interconnected practices contribute to (un)sustainable outcomes, obscuring complex interdependencies. The importance of looking at practices in relation to each other is highlighted by literature concerning food waste, since the way households deal with food during planning, shopping, preparing, and consuming activities determines ‘the (environmental) outcome’ (Quested et al., 2013; Schanes et al., 2018). However, food waste is not the only effect of concern. The environmental impact is also determined by consumption of animal-derived products (Aiking 2011; Tilman and Clark, 2014) and packaging waste (Ncube et al., 2020). A relational approach could help to understand how environmental impact is produced through practice interactions.

Practice entanglement and non-human agency

As practices and their elements interact, they determine which practices come together in what Schatzki describes as a practice network or complex (Schatzki, 2002, 2013). This in turn influences the potential future connections that practices can establish (Blue and Spurling, 2016). For example, Crivits and Paradis (2013) describe how buying from local markets was tied to planning meals, preparing food, and preserving food. They showed how this required skills and materials related to food preservation, and that these practices are intertwined with the broader foodscape, such as access to local markets. Furthermore, practices do not merely follow one another in a chain of events, but co-evolve and adapt continuously (Blue and Spurling, 2016). This complexity requires moving beyond linear conceptualizations to examine how practices co-constitute and reshape each other within their web of interconnections (Schatzki, 2013).

To this end, New Materialist ontology lends itself well, emphasizing that all matter is entangled and exerts agency in shaping (sustainability) outcomes. It emphasizes how material elements actively shape food practices by foregrounding the agency of the non-human, such as technologies, soil, infrastructures, and supply chains (Barad, 2007; Tuin and Dolphijn, 2012). “Materials” in this sense are agentive forces that co-produce, constrain, and reconfigure practices in relational and historically situated ways (Barad, 2007; Fox and Alldred, 2018). Integrating this understanding reshapes how we engage with Shove’s elements: a supermarket is not just a neutral backdrop for grocery shopping, but a material arrangement that channels trajectories of interaction and decision-making. By foregrounding matter as agentive, we can account for how food practices evolve in concert with infrastructures, technologies, and non-human actants.

Whereas current sustainability research remains heavily anthropocentric (Hirvilammi and Helne, 2014), New Materialist scholars call for a post-human perspective (Fox and Alldred, 2019). Recent work of practice scholars, namely Gherardi (2016, 2022), recognizes this need for a relational epistemology, using post-human approaches (2022). The current research is part of the latter approach, integrating a New Materialist perspective that allows for the recognition of the distributed agency of non-human entities in co-producing (un)sustainable foodscapes. This emphasis on human-non-human entanglements is needed in the context of food consumption, where infrastructures like transportation networks, refrigeration technologies, and food storage practices heavily shape the way food is consumed, wasted, or preserved (Fuentes and Fuentes, 2022; Shove and Southerton, 2000).

New Materialist thinking thus provides an ontological deepening of practice theory by emphasizing non-human actors in practice formation (Turner, 2019), by emphasizing more-than-human entanglements in shaping temporal rhythms, sensory engagements, and knowledge (Rosiek et al., 2020). This allows us to trace how more-than-human agencies co-produce sustainability outcomes and how their presence (or absence) influences the (trans)formation of practices. New Materialism encourages a shift away from practices as clusters of human-centered actions supported by material tools, and toward constellations of human–nonhuman entanglements. This enables a more robust and dynamic analysis of how practices emerge and transform across space and time.

Blue and Spurling (2016) already suggested that ‘material’ as one of three practice elements does not fully capture the dynamic and agentic nature of materiality, especially when considering spatial and power-laden dimensions. Evans (2020) is similarly critical and advocates for the inclusion of ‘material semiotic’ approaches in SPT to address this gap. In recent work, Schatzki (2010, 2019) indeed considers the importance of systematically taking materiality into account, creating his own ontology to ‘open up consideration of relations between practices and material arrangements’ (2019). But, his approach does not integrate critical power structures that fundamentally shape the material configurations he describes (Welch and Yates, 2018).

New materialism builds on the notion that political decisions and social norms are embedded in material configurations. For example, Braidotti (2016) and DeLanda (2006) have focused on how material conditions, such as pollution or urban infrastructure, are shaped by and reshape power relations. These analyses highlight how the persistence of unsustainable practices cannot be fully understood without considering how socio-material configurations are shaped through power (Cherrier and Türe, 2023). This may lead, as Swidler (2005) notes, to some practices serving as ‘anchoring’ arrangements, giving shape and direction to connecting practices, more so than vice versa. This concept is helpful in describing how ‘powerful’ practices may stabilize interconnections.

SPT offers a framework to look beyond individual behaviour and points to the need for structural interventions that target the interconnected elements of practices (Schatzki, 2013; Shove et al., 2012; Crivits and Paradis, 2013). New Materialism helps us focus on the inherent relationality of food practices and grounds them in materiality, while highlighting the ways powerful commercial collectives and state actors configure daily food practices (Evans, 2020; Fox and Alldred, 2018). Combining insights from these fields, this paper aims to contribute to ongoing discussions about the ways in which interconnected food practices eventuate and persist, aiming to aid policy and research in working towards a sustainable foodscape.

Research context and methods

Since practices are (re)produced in the routines of everyday life, they are best studied in the everyday, characterized in SPT as the “dynamic site of social and material conditions, mobilized through embodied patterns of social performance” (Reckwitz, 2002, p.251). Ethnographic research methods are especially attuned to this context (O’Reilly, 2012). This study draws on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with 12 households between February and September 2022. The households ranged from families of five, to one-person household. Households’ members were of all ages (3 to 78). There was a mix of homeowners and renters, and significant differences in disposable income. The households were recruited through snowball sampling. Pre-field research took place from December 2021 to February 2022, allowing for familiarization with the community, identification of key informants, and fine-tuning of research instruments.

The focus was on doing groceries, cooking, eating, and throwing away trash or leftovers. These practices were selected because they happen sequentially, and are deeply interconnected (Spurling et al., 2013). Fieldwork methods included participatory observations, video and audio diaries, and semi-structured interviews. The researcher visited households during routine activities across a range of settings, joining for example grocery shopping trips, the eating of a meal, the planting of food, or trips to a waste facility. Observations generally covered half a day, with a total of three to five visits per household. Unstructured and structured interviews were conducted with questions designed to explore reflections on participants’ practices and the meanings attached.

Over 100 hours of fieldnotes and audio-visual recordings were collected. Site-specific observations were conducted at grocery stores, markets and food banks. Video and audio recordings were transcribed. All data was anonymized and coded using Atlas.Ti software. Coding began with broad categories related to shopping, cooking, eating, and managing waste. Subcodes emerged inductively, based on patterns observed during data analysis, such as the influence of material agency or the role of market actors. The data that supports the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data is not publicly available due to privacy and ethical restrictions.

Analysis of data

We examined how the practices of grocery shopping, cooking, eating, and waste management unfolded in participants’ daily lives. A closer look at the interactions between practices revealed patterns that were grouped into three overarching themes: material/infrastructure, community, and connection to the natural environment. These themes emerged through the iterative process of ethnographic analysis, grounded in observations and reflections on the data. They represent recurring points of tension and alignment, where the dynamics of support or constraint for a practice were most evident. The following analysis is structured according to these interrelated themes to facilitate understanding of how practices converge through their interactions that arise from (shared) meanings, skills, and material contexts.

Infrastructure of the local food system

The infrastructure, the spatial-material set up of the foodscape, supports or limits certain food practices. In the case study, the neighborhood layout favored supermarket chains, as these were in central and well-connected locations, while simultaneously participants noted the disappearance of fruit and vegetable stores, butchers, and other types of specialty stores. The practice of acquiring food/shopping, as well as food practices ‘further down the line’, were shaped by the access participants had to various types of stores or markets, and the ‘space’ these stores took in their foodscape. In that sense, the supermarket as central element to the practice of grocery shopping served as anchoring practice in the local foodscape. One participant described how her food choices were shaped by the store: “I try to just get more fresh foods instead of all those packaged things and… but I do end up buying them. Even though I’m thinking I’d rather get the fresh stuff but sometimes it’s just like that. It’s right there, and that makes it easier to grab it” (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Old specialty store.

‘Alternative’ spaces to get food, such as markets or fruit and vegetable stores, provided more fresh and minimally packaged food, and a clearer connection to food’s origins. This in turn influenced how participants approached cooking and waste. One participant mentioned that the ‘ready to eat’ fruits in the supermarket were always rock hard, and that she prefers those from the market. In her suburban town there is no market (or ‘farmers market’), but because she works in the city, she is able to go to the market there once a week. Another participant stays closer to home for his groceries, biking between the two closest supermarkets for the best prices because he rarely visits the city. This lack of access to other spaces to shop for food outside of the supermarket reinforces the supermarket’s influence in the foodscape.

Access in this sense refers not just to the infrastructure being in place. For example, one household knew of an urban farm that sells fresh produce, but only went there sporadically. It did not fit into their family life, governed by the time they have to spend, and what their social network is doing. Money was less decisive, this particular household was financially very comfortable, and importantly, markets and fruit and vegetable stores in the Netherlands generally have similar pricing as supermarkets (Visser et al., 2013). Notably, the participant also mentioned feeling like their efforts to shop food locally were not ‘making a difference’: “I try to buy locally, but if I’m the only one…”.

Indeed, most participants mentioned wanting to visit specialty stores or a market, but felt they would need more time for grocery shopping. ‘Convenience’ in this sense is a generated necessity when it comes to how people can spend their time. A market seller notes: “There are so many who just have to work during the week and then it does not work out [to come to the market]. If you have to leave the house early, take the kids to school and pick them up…”. For participants working full time or several jobs, opportunities to shop outside of the supermarket were sparse. The markets on town squares in Ridderkerk, for example, stand only once or twice a week (Stichting Oud Ridderkerk, 2022). The rest of the week the space functions as a parking lot providing car access to supermarkets and the shopping mall.

When shopping practices were reliant on mainstream supermarket infrastructure, this encouraged the purchase of pre-packaged, convenience food. A participant says: “Sometimes I’m thinking, I’ll just do the easy thing [supermarket instead of fresh market], but then I’ll end up with this mountain of plastic that I have to get rid of”. Another participant reflects on the difficulty of avoiding packaging: “Of course, we also use a lot of plastic, you can hardly avoid it.” Pre-packaged foods also contributed to more food waste. As one participant noted, “You can store a whole carrot for much longer. But […] there is a demand for sliced carrots and then companies make them.” Pre-cut vegetables, sold in plastic bags, spoil faster than whole vegetables, reinforcing the material entanglements that contribute to more waste. Disposal of these spoiled foods is categorized as household food waste, even though their degradation is tied to the supermarkets’ packaging practices (Evans, 2011) (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Pre-packaged foods.

When shopping at a supermarket, several participants described their discomfort with the overwhelming variety of products, demonstrating how material elements - such as product quantity and presentation - impact the meanings and images surrounding food and grocery shopping. The prevalent image among participants was that grocery shopping is a chore, a non-social activity that should be done quickly and efficiently. This reflects not only the supermarket’s spatial logic, but also culturally embedded meanings around self-sufficiency and efficiency, characteristics associated with Dutch culture in participants’ reflections. The overwhelming variety impacts the practice, with the meaning of grocery shopping being reduced to a task of dull necessity. This focus on efficiency is emblematic of how supermarket layouts enforce certain temporalities and habits in food practices that align with the capitalist logic of profit and convenience.

Participants also described tactics they use to resist the influence of supermarkets. Several mentioned using grocery lists to avoid impulse purchases, with one participant explaining that they stuck strictly to their list unless “something was on sale.” This illustrates how agency in shopping practices is constrained by material and spatial arrangements but can sometimes be partially reclaimed through everyday strategies.

Packaging and labeling mediated how participants understood food products. Although many initially expressed confidence in their ability to understand labels, the sheer number of different certifications and labels often became overwhelming. As one participant stated, “I’m often guided by them and colors and things. Green is good, for example.” This demonstrates the competencies required to navigate the complexity and ambiguity of these material markers, shaped by food packaging producers. Food labels also restricted creativity in food preparation. Staff at a local food bank (handing out surplus from the supermarket) observed that shoppers often felt constrained by food labels, explaining: “People come for macaroni vegetables, and when they see the package says ‘nasi vegetables’, they say they can’t cook macaroni with it. But if you look closely, it’s the same thing.” This illustrates how packaging and labeling limit the flexibility of cooking and eating practices.

Waste practices are similarly shaped by spatial-material arrangements. Recent changes in the waste management system in the municipalities of the case study, moving towards machine-based recycling and a pay-per-trash-bag policy, have altered waste practices. While these changes theoretically support better recycling outcomes, they also perpetuated an image among participants that “making an effort for the environment is pointless” and that individual actions have limited impact. This further illustrates the power of material and spatial elements in shaping the meanings and emotional responses embedded in food and waste practices.

Community around food

This chapter discusses community influences and the way they forge practice interactions and shape the (un)sustainability of the foodscape. Firstly, it discusses the influence of household members on each other’s food practices, and secondly, wider collective and communal food practices.

Family rhythms

Though arguments for eating less meat to reduce carbon emissions might come from various sources, such as the media or the government, family members have a different impact as they change the image and meaning associated with their parents’ eating practices by discussing and talking about the impact of certain products. Two households where the children wanted to eat a vegetarian diet described how this influenced all elements of their household’s food practices. A member of one household discusses how they changed their product choices: “We used to eat meat every day. But anyway, since you [their daughter] are vegetarian, we eat along with you. […] I think well yeah, I did want to accommodate [our daughter]. So, let’s see what is out there, and one [meat substitute] was gross, tasted like cardboard, and then the next one was tasty!”

These transformations are not purely meaning- related but are equally mediated by material elements, for example through the introduction of new ingredients. One participant explained how the availability of meat substitutes facilitated her shift: “But back then there were no good meat substitutes, that’s really something of the last few years. At some point you see ‘that’s available and that’s available, we’ll give those a try,’ and yeah that’s how it kind of grew.” The emergence of plant-based substitutes in supermarkets can be seen as an enabler of this transition to a more plant-based diet. It was not just the availability of plant-based meats, but also the material properties (taste, texture, and nutritional value) that contributed to the formation of a new eating practice.

Another participant reflects on how they adopted a more plant-based eating practice, mentioning how her daughter regularly tries out different ways of eating. For example, they joined in on ‘vegan weeks’ or tried to eat without refined sugars for a month. About a vegan week challenge, she said: “Vegetarian? That’s fine. But vegan, little did I know that means you can’t have cheese…. No cheese is allowed. “No,” she [her daughter] says, “we’re not allowed cheese this week. I said, I didn’t know that. Then I thought of course, that also comes from the cows.” Together and with the new ingredients, these household members learn how to cook differently, shifting to a new complex of practices through the changes in how various food practices interacted with each other.

Conversely, the influence of (younger) household members could also lead to less sustainable food practices. A participant noted: “I was away with girlfriends for a weekend, 2 weeks ago. If you see how many little packs of drinks are used there. Oh, it’s not normal. They have three small children and that is really… They only want to drink from packets. “ Notably, food marketed for children is often pre-packaged, mostly in plastics (Mehta et al., 2012). The family unit can be seen here as a micro-community (Epp and Price, 2008) where the transmission of knowledge, tangible changes in food choices, and the development of new cooking skills can contribute to a transformative shift in the household’s food practices (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Fridge contents.

The wider community

Within a broader social context, strong community ties could serve as a catalyst for disseminating and anchoring sustainable food practices (Morgan and Sonnino 2010). When participants shared strong social bonds with their neighbors, there were opportunities for the exchange of knowledge, joint exploration of alternative food choices, and collaborative efforts in adopting new cooking practices. For example, one of the households often helps their elderly neighbors with their weekly groceries. This participant mentioned how one neighbor would often have ‘forgotten vegetables’ (vegetables that used to be staple foods) on their grocery list and would teach them new ways to cook with these vegetables. This exemplifies how community bonds can shape the way food is treated and valued.

Another household tends to a community garden. Here, they share recipes, learn how to cook with vegetables they have not used before, prepare food together and chat over communal meals with the group that works in the garden, which rotates and changes. Community gardens and other initiatives that bring people together over food create spaces where sustainable food practices can become normalized through collective engagement. These gardens thus emerged as alternative, communal anchoring practices interacting with sustainable cooking, sharing, and waste practices. Indeed, shared practices around food can lead to various more sustainable practices expressions, where communal reinforcement aids in spreading the materials, skills and meanings connected to these expressions (Morgan and Sonnino, 2010). This can also foster a sense of belonging and strengthen social ties within the community outside of food (2010) (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Community food garden.

Engaging in food production, instead of just shopping for food, fosters not only a social bond but also a deeper recognition of the labor and processes involved in food production (Ulug et al., 2021). In this case study, this went beyond production of fruit and vegetables. A participant remarked: “It’s just such a distant issue. You’ve got this piece of meat, and it’s hard to see a direct link to the idea that something’s been slaughtered for it”. One participant’s daughter started working in a slaughterhouse, causing her to reduce meat consumption. In a less direct fashion, the participant working at the community garden mentioned that everybody that comes to tend to the garden in time reduces their meat consumption as well.

Spaces where food is acquired are an important part of many people’s social life. However, the chain supermarkets present in this case study did not invite any social engagement. When grocery shopping at the supermarket, participants did not stop and talk to people, nor make conversation with the cashier. The conscious design of the supermarket space (Dijksterhuis et al., 2005) negatively influences the possibilities for community engagement to be included in shopping practices. Instead, the spatial set up and material markers in the supermarket are focused on individual convenience and maximum consumption, a reflection of how societal structures prioritize efficiency over community engagement (Fieuw et al., 2022) (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Supermarket with self scanners.

Less sustainable practices gain traction precisely because of how seamlessly they align with the demands of modern life. One participant noted that because she did not have time to cook, she is “eating a pre-packaged salad… they are always bursting with plastic, but yes, sometimes it is what it is.” Participants often cited the convenience of supermarkets as a driving force behind their reliance on quick and easy meals. From a New Materialist perspective, supermarkets reinforce a more individualistic, detached approach to food, making it harder for sustainable practices to take root by reducing opportunities for meaningful social interactions and shared food practices. Without these interactions, sustainable practices remain isolated as they rely on individual efforts. The disembodied consumer that is reflected in supermarket design inadvertently disrupts the relational and collective dynamics that can help sustainable food practices gain foothold and spread.

Individualization of the foodscape seems engrained in ‘Dutchness’: most participants noted it to be part of our culture to not share resources. One participant mentioned she misses this most when she moved to the Netherlands: a lack of sharing. In the field diary, the researcher notes: [the participant mentioned that] “The neighborhood is not really keen [to share]. In Rotterdam-Zuid, where she first lived, it was a little better. ‘There, it’s a mishmash of all kinds of cultures.”. The culturally ingrained emphasis on self-sufficiency interacts with material configurations of Dutch foodscapes, particularly suburban neighborhoods centered around supermarkets and private consumption. Practices such as eating with the nuclear family only are not only materially supported (for example, supermarket meal boxes cater to 2-3 people maximum) but also culturally reinforced by ideals of frugality and self-sufficiency. Foodscapes structured around individualism reduce the opportunity for social meaning and interconnectivity to flourish.

On the other hand, Dutch frugality contributed to a focus on waste reduction. A participant said about her waste: “A banana peel maybe, but other than that I don’t have much. Just like with potatoes, I always prepare them with the skin. And cauliflower, broccoli, I cut those all the way up.” Another participant mentioned: “Last week we had a bunch of strawberries left, I made jam out of that”. Dutch focus on thrift and frugality give them a reputation of being careful and responsible with money and other resources. A participant said: “Well, I got that from my mom [not wasting any food], she would make jam when I was little and give it to our friends and neighbors.” Here, cultural meaning and competence combine to reproduce practices that can foster social connection, despite dominant cultural tendencies.

Some households had their own compost bin, most put their food waste in their general waste bin. When communal collection points were available and accessible, they were used mostly for garden waste, and less for food waste. Participants living in flats mentioned the food waste getting smelly in a small bin on the counter, with no garden option available to them. However, most participants with a garden also did not use their ‘green bin’ (supplied by the municipality) for food waste, but only for garden waste. Waste practices seemed unchanged (regardless of having a garden) as long as green waste was taken away by the municipality, indicating that interventions should modify not only the material landscape but the integrated conditions that make sustainable practices performable. Indeed, waste practices changed when composting was possible, see chapter 3.3.

One household built a large compost bin that they used not only for their own food waste, but also for the fruit and vegetables that they pick up at the end of the market day. What was still good was redistributed to family members, neighbors and the chickens, what was rotten went in the compost bin. By preventing food waste and reintroducing what could not be salvaged into the soil, this practice fostered a relationship to food where it is not just consumed, but used as a way to care for both human and more-than-human communities.

Connection to the natural environment

The land, plants, animals, and ecological cycles that participate in food practices also shape how these practices unfold and must be considered as practitioners shaping the foodscape. In this case study, the food practices that connected participants more closely to where food comes from, such as composting and (communal) gardening, encouraged a practice of care. It fostered cooking, preparing, buying, and eating in a care-full manner, treating food as something valuable, not to be wasted. For example, one participant who regularly visits a communal garden said, while she was teaching the researcher how to prepare a dish, “You need a spatula, you shouldn’t waste anything! It is holy, it is from Pacha Mama. It is so rich, all the minerals and vitamins and it is good for our bowels. So that’s why [you should not waste].” Their strong appreciation of what the earth provides reinforced an embodied cooking skill that is care-full, influencing waste practices as well.

This connection to nature was also evident in the way participants understood food production. Households with that grew their own food or had access to community gardens, expressed an understanding of the effort involved in food production. This amplified their treating of food as valuable. Similar understanding was expressed by participants that handled food waste regularly (as opposed to households that had the municipality ‘take it away’). An employee of the foodbank noted: “At some point last year, there was way too much ginger. Entire containers full of ginger just thrown out. It makes you think, how much water was involved in growing that?”. This emphasizes the role of waste practices in sensing the agency of the more-than-human in our foodscape (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Harvest.

The interactions between waste practices and other food practices were mitigated by participants’ engagement with non-humans, and composting practices played a key role in this engagement. One household learned about the decomposition process directly from observing animals in their compost: “So last year we had a lot of woodlice, worms, and false scorpions. Those are the real waste managers. But this year we had almost none. […] I think it is too compact for the woodlice. They can’t get in there.” The knowledge gained from engaging with these more-than-human practitioners transformed their waste practices. The food waste is not simply ‘managed’ by human intention or infrastructure, but by the multispecies agency of decomposers. The participant responds to the critters’ needs by adjusting the compost structure in response to their absence, revealing a reciprocal relationship.

This type of reciprocal relationship with nature went beyond waste practices, and shaped participants interconnected food practices. When this relationship was supported by local infrastructures, they enabled more sustainable practices. Spaces like community gardens provided material opportunities for participants to engage with food in a way that did not reduce it to a commodity. For example, one participant described working in the garden helped them realize the importance of seasons: “Yeah that’s what we’ve come to find, do we need everything, all the time? It’s actually more fun this way, the cherry season, the peach season, we just ate kilos of cherries, so good!”. Seasonality, like decomposition, is able to become an active agent (again) in shaping food practices.

The establishment of spaces that cultivate a connection to the non-human practitioners of the foodscape requires support. As one participant highlighted: “[…] two 3 years ago we tried to start a community garden. […] But we couldn’t manage because there was hardly any support from the municipality.” The participant continues that despite having willing community members and only needing a small plot and some tools, it was not possible for them to work their way through the bureaucratic complexity created around (sub)urban planning.

Discussion

The analysis shows how the practices of grocery shopping, cooking, eating, and waste management unfold in everyday life within a suburban foodscape. The interactions between these practices come together in three overarching themes: material/infrastructure, community, and connection to the natural environment. These themes capture how practices, through their interactions, create each other’s conditions for sustainability. More specifically, this paper shows that these interactions are often governed by dominant, institutionally supported anchoring practices which shape and constrain the sustainability of the interconnected practices. Their anchoring force (Swidler, 2005) reinforces certain unsustainable configurations while crowding out alternative possibilities. Simultaneously, the analysis reveals how smaller-scale, community-based practices can emerge to challenge these dominant configurations, offering footholds for systemic change.

When new or reconfigured (sustainable) food practices fit within the web of practice interactions and the infrastructures supporting them, a feedback loop can amplify its impact (Crivits and Paredis, 2013). This research showed that this loop is generated through connections, interlinking ‘unsustainable’ or ‘sustainable’ practices, not by singular ‘bad practice elements’ in need of fixing. For example, within the practice of handling food waste, throwing out usable parts of food (for example, the broccoli stem) is not inherently unsustainable, but it can have adverse environmental effects generated through its interaction with other practices, such as the practice of composting or general waste practices. Leftovers only become an issue for sustainability when we look at how this practice interacts with, for example, what food is being thrown out, or how that waste is treated in waste facilities. Is it left to rot between general waste, producing CO₂ gases, or is it separated at a waste facility?

Looking at food practices in isolation thus produces few leads for interventions. Following the ideas of Schatzki on networks or bundles of practices, you might conclude that the network of food practices could represent the sum of their interactions, and that is thus what interventions should target. However, bundling practices in networks does not place any weight nor political concern within or on these networks or bundles. When we consider what produces CO₂, or increases waste, the analysis shows this is not evenly distributed within or over practices and their networks. Not all practices nor practice interactions are equal (Swidler, 2005). The findings of this study identify which practices hold anchoring power within a foodscape, and how these are supported or challenged through interconnecting practices. This refines SPT’s capacity to analyse the dynamics of transformation within practice networks.

Practice-interactions of concern in the current case study

In this study, ‘supermarketization’ anchored the larger domain of food shopping practices, impacting heavily which interconnections and reconfigurations of practices were possible. Research participants predominantly relied on chain supermarkets, noting that local specialty stores with local and unpackaged produce such as butchers and greengrocers had disappeared. In other parts of the Netherlands smaller specialty food stores have also disappeared (Christiaanse and Haartsen, 2020), mirroring broader socio-material shifts where supermarkets gradually displace smaller, more specialized stores (Dixon, 2007), while the latter could have a positive effect on the sustainability of food practices (Reed et al., 2023). The practice of ‘getting food’ in this study was dependent on large chain supermarkets, reinforcing a profit-driven model of food provision at the expense of sustainability (Evans et al., 2017).

Supermarkets shape food practices through spatial-material configurations, including layout design, location, product availability, and packaging. In this study, these environments encouraged a form of disembodied consumption: getting food as a chore that should be done quickly and efficiently, without any recognition of the origin of that food. Food was handled differently in this setting than it was on the market. It was not selected based on embodied knowledge, but chosen through packaging aesthetics and expiry dates. This reshapes bodily engagements, encouraging fast, efficiency-oriented movements through the space and discouraging tactile exploration. This disconnect is a structural outcome of profit-driven configurations designed to maximize consumer spending (Evans et al., 2017). DeLind (2006) elaborates on this disembodiment, arguing that supermarketization displaces consumers from local, bodily, and place-based food relationships. The result is a grocery shopping practice where the labor, land, and local ecosystems involved in food production are rendered invisible.

This study shows that the disembodied-consumer approach to consumption disrupts the relational and collective dynamics that can help sustainable food practices gain foothold and spread. Packaging dominance worsens this dynamic, making food appear clean and individualized, appealing to logics of hygiene and control. Pre-cut carrots in the plastic bags offer convenience but also transform how food is valued. The packaging asserts its own logic into the carrots: worthy insofar as it fits into a grab-and-go routine. Sensory engagement is minimized, and food becomes frictionless, easy to consume, easy to discard. This abstraction severs the sensory and emotional connections that can ground food practices in place and community, which can lead to an image of food as disposable and replaceable (Quested et al., 2013).

The analysis showed that when the supermarket was dominant in the practice of getting food, other practices were less sustainable, as they reframed food as an object of abundance, managed by logistical systems. However, capitalist economic relations do not entirely suppress more grounded and collaborative forms of food provision (Warde et al., 2020). In this study, food growing emerged as a key anchoring practice, at times replacing food shopping and reshaping other practices. Participants engaged in collective food initiatives reported significant changes in their relationships with food. These spaces enabled embodied learning, skill-building, and the normalization of sustainable eating and waste practices. Some participants mentioned learning directly from critters, and others say that attuning their food practices to the seasons shaped their shopping and eating practices towards less resource-intensity. Overall, when participants’ food practices connected food back to soil, plants, bacteria etc., this embodied reflection was extended towards non-human actors in the foodscape. They could grasp what and who was involved in the production of food, recognizing the energy that goes into the growing, through putting their own energy into the process.

Strong community ties enabled the exchange of knowledge and resources, such as sharing cooking techniques or trading surplus produce. Morgan and Sonnino (2010) emphasize this role of community-building in promoting sustainable food practices, showing that cooperative models encourage collective responsibility and reduce the environmental impact of food practices. Participants in this study indeed showed that sharing food with neighbors fostered a sense of belonging and mutual support. Community-driven alternatives like food cooperatives could also offer a sustainable and socially equitable model for food provision. Promoting diversity within foodscapes can also help reduce reliance on globalized supply chains, promoting both food sovereignty and sustainability (Reckinger, 2022).

The study shows that the promotion of (sub)urban agriculture or community supported agriculture are effective ways to strengthen participants’ connection to food and reframe the meaning of food. Especially when a food garden facilitates an inclusive community environment (Kurtz, 2001). Furthering the argument that these feelings of connection are key, Ganglbauer and colleagues (2013) found that emotional investment in food production strengthens the connection to food and reduces waste. This is congruent with practice theorists’ ideas on the important (overlooked) function of emotion in practices (Weenink and Spaargaren, 2016).

Concerning the role of emotions, it should be noted that caring for crops is not sentimental notion but a material and practical necessity for ensuring the flourishing of interconnected life (De la Bellacasa, 2017). The ethnographic data suggests that growing food and connecting physically with the land can provide an embodied form of knowledge that recognizes the agency of non-humans in the foodscape. As demonstrated, this connection could create a ‘spill-over’ (Truelove et al., 2014) to other food practices through their interactions, generating new sustainable practices or re-configuring existing ones. As such, an embodied connection to the land forms an important anchoring practice that has great influence on practice interactions and reconfigurations.

This study demonstrates that spaces such as communal food gardens can attune food practices back to the rhythms of their immediate ecosystem, which goes for human as well as non-human connections. Considering this impact of strengthening community bonds, it makes sense to follow Harraway’s thinking-with, prompting category transgressions, to extend ‘the community’ beyond human-to-human relationships when considering reconfiguration of the foodscape (Haraway, 2003). The data shows that the foodscape is not just a space for human practices and interactions, but a living ecosystem where humans and non-humans co-create food practices and hold agency over the shape of those practices. Pollinators, critters, and fungi are all active co-creators (De la Bellacasa, 2017). Recognizing their contributions, but moreover sensing their contribution in an embodied way, could disrupt the hierarchy that places humans at the center and instead frame food production as a collaborative endeavor.

Conclusion and implications

Working towards a more sustainable and resilient foodscape requires imaginative and grounded responses that disrupt alienating consumption patterns, enabling sustainability to emerge as a lived, collective practice. To support such shifts, the role of governance must be understood as a co-shaper of the material and symbolic conditions in which food practices are shaped, not as an external enforcer of sustainable behaviour. This means working with residents (human and non-human) not as consumers, but as co-practitioners, shaping foodscapes together. In this study, the bureaucratic hurdles around community gardens illustrate how local institutions may disrupt emerging sustainable practices by failing to provide enabling infrastructures. Similarly, the potential for more-than-human collaboration is foreclosed by institutional inattention to more-than-human needs and relations (De la Bellacasa, 2017), even though it is these human–nonhuman assemblages that support more sustainable food practices.

Interventions should focus on fostering positive interactions between food practices rather than attempting to isolate or fix individual ‘bad’ elements. For example, instead of targeting the reduction of meat consumption, interventions should focus on the wider infrastructural and communal systems that support plant-based eating, such as making local, sustainable produce more accessible through public markets or community-supported agriculture initiatives. Policies can help ensure that food waste management systems encourage composting, reducing emissions from landfills, while encouraging initiatives that work towards communal composting solutions. Creating spaces where skills, resources and meanings around food are shared can help make sustainable practices more accessible and social, fostering the emotional connections that sustain them. Lastly, engaging in collaborative action across food practices involves cultivating a deeper understanding of where food comes from and supporting the creation of circular systems that include both human and non-human entities. Recognizing the fundamental importance of these relations is crucial to reconfiguring sustainable food practices where the natural environment is seen as a key partner in shaping human food practices.