ABSTRACT
Dietary recommendations based on environmental or health research findings can be disjointed from the social realities of consumption. For example, environmental impacts may be described using metrics that are not well understood or helpful for consumers to make decisions. Likewise, ‘prescriptions’ suggested by various entities on what people ‘should’ eat, e.g. for health, are in conflict with people’s habits, routines and representations. As part of a Swiss research project on ‘healthy and sustainable diets’, an interdisciplinary team came together to generate new knowledge on the health and environmental impacts of food consumption, while accounting for consumer representations and practices. To achieve this, approaches from life cycle assessment (LCA) were complemented with approaches from the sociology of consumption and social practice theory. In this chapter, we reflect on the process of integrating our respective discipline’s views on food consumption, as well as the implications of this interdisciplinary collaboration. We discuss the context of our research by describing three gaps in the study of healthy and sustainable food consumption. Turning to our methodology, we show how adopting an interdisciplinary approach allowed us to render our work more relevant to everyday issues as well as to policy concerns. We finally outline the most important challenges brought upon by interdisciplinarity, and what tradeoffs were required in addressing them.
