This paper takes as a starting point "food consumption prescriptions", or guidelines on what and how one should eat when it comes to "healthy and sustainable diets". Through qualitative research in Switzerland, involving discourse analysis, observations, in-depth interviews, and focus groups, we set out to uncover the more dominant prescriptions put forward by a variety of actors, how consumers represent these prescriptions, as well as overlaps and tensions between them. The notion of a "balanced meal" is the more prominent prescription, along with the idea that food and eating should be "pleasurable". Guidelines towards eating local and seasonal products overlap with organic and natural food consumption, while prescriptions to eat less meat of higher quality are in tension with prescriptions around vegetarian and vegan diets. We then consider how prescriptions play out in daily life, as both a resource and obstacle towards the establishment of eating habits, and what dimensions of everyday life have the most influence on how certain prescriptions are enacted - contributing to conceptual deliberations on food in relation to social practices. Time, mobility, and the relationships built around food and eating are forces to be reckoned with when considering possible transitions towards the normative goal of "healthier and more sustainable diets".

In Western countries, moving toward more sustainable lifestyles often involves the disruption of well-established routines and habits in relation to consumption domains such as food, washing and cleaning, heating and cooling, transportation, and managing “stuff” more generally. These activities are deeply embedded in our everyday lives and often tied to care, which is the work invested in maintaining the well-being of oneself and others. In this paper, we are interested in the ways sustainable consumption and care interlock within the household, how they relate to gender inequalities, and how change toward more sustainable lifestyles can both impact and be impacted by these inequalities. With this in mind, we conducted a critical review of the academic literature by analyzing a corpus of 75 papers on household consumption and sustainability, paying particular attention to the role authors attribute to care and gender. The analysis shines light on the relational character of care and consumption, emphasizing the ways sustainable consumption is dependent on relationships within and outside the home. We suggest that care often acts as a barrier to the establishment of more sustainable consumption practice. Care work, per definition, upholds routines and habits while mobilizing the very resources that are needed to transform them. This insight invites us to rethink the role of households as a site for change. We suggest that the transition toward more sustainable consumption practices within the home relies on reducing and redistributing care work, transforming the world of work, and actively promoting an ethos of care that includes people, other beings, the material world and the planet.

In this article, we explore the possibilities for a transformation toward more sustainable energy usage by engaging with mundane activities, such as doing the laundry. Across European households, laundry practices rely on social norms and material arrangements, which makes these practices rather “sticky” and resistant to change. Through the lens of consumption corridors, and accounting for wellbeing in relation to the basic needs of participation, health, and autonomy, we study laundry practices and their transformation in 73 Finnish and Swiss households that took part in a challenge to reduce their weekly wash cycles by half over a four-week period in autumn 2018. By using both qualitative and quantitative data, we analyze how participants defined minimum and maximum standards for cleanliness and convenience, for themselves and for others, over the course of the challenge period. Specifically, we consider how the sequencing of tasks associated with “doing the laundry” changed, as well as the significance of social relations and sensations in representations of social norms. The participants’ experiences helped uncover how setting limits toward consumption corridors can be achieved, whereby reductions in consumption can result in sustainable wellbeing.

The first Swiss national dietary survey (MenuCH) was used to screen disease burdens and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of Swiss diets (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, slimming), with a focus on gender and education level. The Health Nutritional Index (HENI), a novel disease burden-based nutritional index built on the Global Burden of Disease studies, was used to indicate healthiness using comparable, relative disease burden scores. Low whole grain consumption and high processed meat consumption are priority risk factors. Non-processed red meat and dairy make a nearly negligible contribution to disease burden scores, yet are key drivers of diet-related GHGs. Swiss diets, including vegetarian, ranged between 1.1–2.6 tons of CO₂e/person/year, above the Swiss federal recommendation 0.6 ton CO₂e/person/year for all consumption categories. This suggests that only changing food consumption practices will not suffice towards achieving carbon reduction targets: Systemic changes to food provisioning processes are also necessary. Finally, men with higher education had the highest dietary GHG emissions per gram of food, and the highest disease burden scores. Win–win policies to improve health and sustainability of Swiss diets would increase whole grain consumption for all, and decrease alcohol and processed meat consumption especially for men of higher education levels.

In this article, we examine a change initiative designed to involve households in testing ways to transform two everyday practices ‒ heating and doing laundry. The research design included an examination of the challenges of changing practices either in a setting that fosters collective engagement or with individual households. Two different types of living labs were carried out simultaneously in eight European countries in Autumn–Winter 2018. We reflect on differences in results in terms of both changes in practices and the experiences of participating households that we argue can be at least partially attributed to householders’ engagement in different types of living labs. We discuss the implications of an individual-focused vs. community-oriented approach for change initiatives seeking to challenge social norms for sustainability transitions, concentrating in particular on differences in the nature of participants’ engagement and their willingness and ability to challenge routine practices. This is complemented by analytical reflections on the differences in design, interaction, and performance between the two types of living labs. We show that an explicit focus on collaborative engagement in living labs can produce results that reflect shared experiences, community support, challenging established norms, and collective commitment toward change.