In her new project, Associate Professor Alice Grønhøj will investigate sustainable food habits. Independent Research Fund Denmark (IRDF) has recently granted her DKK 2,879,755 from a special pool for research on green transition.

Alice Grønhøj is very happy to receive the grant:

“Having a project funded by IRFD is an honour and a welcome recognition of the scientific relevance of the work you do as a researcher,” says Alice Grønhøj and continues:

“Regarding the importance of the research for a green food transition, this project taps into very practical, every-day discussions taking place at the dinner tables in many Danish families at the moment: How do we as families in our every-day lives reconcile family members’ food habits and preferences while also taking sustainability and health into account?”

According to Alice Grønhøj, young people are of great importance when it comes to making new sustainable habits, and she is looking forward to bringing new knowledge to the research field.

“My research delves into the question of whether and how our teenagers and young people may potentially act as catalysts for more meat-reduced consumption patterns. At the moment, we have very little research-based evidence of this, but hopefully we will be able to provide some well-founded answers based on the results of our forthcoming studies!”    

Project description for ”Meet the family: A family and transition stage approach to sustainable food consumption”
The food system represents one of the main drivers for environmental impact, and a diet rich in plant-based foods and with fewer animal sourced foods promises both environmental and health benefits. The EAT-Lancet commission has suggested that global consumption of fruit, vegetables, nuts and legumes should double, while consumption of red meat and sugar must be reduced by more than 50%. For many countries, including Denmark, this will entail a radical transformation of food-related lifestyles, not least in terms of the challenge of aligning norms, identities, practices and cultural traditions with the requirements of a sustainable diet.

The objective of the current proposal is to study the barriers, facilitators and strategies of engaging in sustainable diets in a family context with a focus on young people in the transitional stages of late adolescence and young adulthood. 

A key question is how individual and collective pro-environmental, food-related identities are negotiated in the family and how and why they conflict or align. In terms of application and impact, the proposal's aim is to explore what this process means for families’, and in particular young people’s engagement in sustainable dietary changes and for sustainable dietary socialisation and reverse socialisation. This project thus contributes with new knowledge that can be used in public communication, policy making, and to support the ’greening’ of the food industry when targeting the family as consumer in a sustainable food transition.