Supervisors: Alice Grønhøj & Susanne Pedersen
Discussants: Jakob Lauring & Carsten Bergenholtz

Abstract
In Denmark, recent research on context-specific diet recommendations suggests that the intake of red meat should be a maximum of 350 g per week when taking both health and sustainability into account (Lassen, et al., 2020). Yet, the current per capita consumption is more than twice as high (Fagt, et al., 2018), which illustrates the challenge of changing food consumption in a more healthy and sustainable direction. While some consumers are ready to transform their diets, making this shift can be a challenge in practice, especially since this transformation often concerns   the consumption patterns of their families as well – maybe the spouse feels uncomfortable by changing all the well-known dishes or maybe the children’s favourite food is spaghetti bolognaise. Surprisingly, there is a paucity of research looking into if and how families negotiate and align sustainability-related values and behaviours. The aim of my PhD project is to explore the social organization of food work and more specifically to get an in-depth understanding of children’s and adolescents’ influence on family consumption and (un)sustainable behaviors. Drawing on qualitative interviews with parents and adolescents (15-20y), our first study sheds light on caring and food work as gendered work. An unintended implication of the public discourse on sustainable food consumption is ‘more work for mother’ which may be a barrier for a change process to happen in families. In the next study we focus more explicitly on adolescents’ experience of food work and sustainable consumption in the family context. 

Everyone is welcome!