The growing demand for meat and animal products in emerging economies has become a concern given its environmental and health impacts. The sustainable diets approach has emerged to address the multidimensional challenge of reaching a context-based diet that minimizes negative environmental impacts, provides health and nutrition to all segments of the population, and is affordable and coherent with the local culture and traditions. The aim of this study was to explore the prospects for meat consumption reduction and challenges encompassing the environmental, and health spheres. In order to do so, we analyzed: (1) The current carbon and water per capita footprints for two animal-based options and two plant-based options; and (2) the contribution of each food alternative to the local dietary reference intakes based on average per capita daily consumption and significant differences among the nutrient values for each food alternative through a two proportion Z-test. Our results show that the annual per capita carbon and water footprints for beef were higher compared to other alternatives, despite a higher per capita consumption of chicken. Also, our findings reveal that the average consumption of beef and chicken contributes 39% of the maximum recommended daily intake for cholesterol and 61% of the Recommended Dietary Allowance for protein in the country. Finally, relevant promoting forces and barriers related to meat consumption reduction were identified based on the two dimensions evaluated. This study calls for a joint effort to make changes in public policy, food systems, and consumer education.

The study of sustainable food consumption is key in the transformation of current unsustainable food systems. We explore the tensions that emerge between individual motives and sustainability spheres when making food consumption choices in a university community in Bogotá, Colombia. This complex phenomenon is addressed through a qualitative methodology based on observations, visual diaries, and a game-based protocol, which allow us to delve into food consumption motives while trying to avoid social desirability bias. Our results show a plate that is high in cereals, roots, tubers, plantains, and animal-based protein, and low in vegetables, fruits, and plant-based proteins. Behind this plate, most tensions emerge between family traditions and other sustainability spheres. These tensions are related to socio-affective risks, animal suffering, time constraints, effort, and monetary costs. Integrating sociocultural elements such as family traditions in public policy becomes fundamental when promoting sustainable diets in similar contexts. This study contributes to the discussion about the sociocultural changes required in the transition toward sustainable food systems.

Narratives based on our capacity to care for others can foster more sustainable interactions in socioecological systems. This article explores the role of care in the stories that we tell about ourselves and how these stories shape our relationship with the more-than-human world. It offers a framework for tilting narratives presenting human nature as self-centered and extractive toward ones characterizing humans as caring and other oriented, aiding the transition to a more sustainable basin of attraction. We bring into dialogue narrative psychology, narrative therapy, ethics of care, and complex adaptive systems theory. Based on this, we propose a framework that can aid in changing narratives in wider social–ecological systems, which is composed of three synchronized phases: (1) identification of the problem and the story that supports it, (2) creation of possibilities for change, and (3) reinforcement of new scenarios. We apply this framework to the topic of consumption and propose that sustainable consumption can be constructed as an act of care rather than a sacrifice. We conclude by inviting readers to act on their concerns about caring for others and for the more-than-human world to strengthen and spread emerging narratives based on care.

This study traces how narratives of care around food shift within an intentional community, moving from a model in which food is a privately held commodity that secures family survival, towards a model in which food is a commons that holds a wider community together. We take the case of Nashira, a female-led ecovillage in Colombia, and read it through a feminist political ecology and an ethics of care lens, using a narrative change framework that allows us to observe the shift in narratives around food. Through ethnographic observation, 10 life story interviews, and a communal narrative session, we trace the community’s movement from childhood food stories grounded in exclusivity, privatization, and patriarchal hierarchy, towards shared and care-based food narratives grounded in inclusion, reciprocity, and peer-to-peer empowerment. These transformations materialize through everyday acts of care, through collective infrastructures such as the home gardens, the communal pot, the community kitchen, the recycling center, and the solar panels, and through community empowerment based on education. We find that vulnerability within a caring community, functions as an invitation to reciprocity rather than as weakness, that knowledge transmitted between peers is the engine of the narrative shift, that material practice and narrative are mutually constitutive, and that tensions are not obstacles to caring community life but rather generative features of it. The paper contributes to the literature on narratives in sustainability transitions and to feminist political ecology, by showing how care narratives around food can be a vehicle for transformation towards more sustainable systems.