Reconfiguring food materialities: plant-based food consumption practices in antagonistic landscapes
Maria Fuentes, Christian Fuentes
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to conceptualize and discuss how plant-based food consumption is accomplished in an environment pre-configured by meat-based food practices. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with thirteen consumers, and using a socio-material practice approach, the paper demonstrates how plant-based shopping, cooking and eating practices are enabled and shaped by material reconfigurations. The paper shows how developments such as an expanding range of plant-based food products, the increased use of social media, and the re-appropriation of shops and kitchens all entail the continuous reconfiguration of the materials involved in shopping, cooking and eating practices. Together, these material reconfigurations form a socio-material landscape that is mutable and changing, thus enabling plant-based food consumption. In addition, the paper also suggests that these material reconfigurations are not something that can be managed due to having evolved as a collective process in which multiple actors take part, all guided by their own interests. In doing so, the paper illustrates that, in order to understand plant-based consumption, as well as its emergence, performance, and complexities, we must take into account the practical and material aspects involved, not just the cultural or cognitive mechanisms.