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Current meat consumption trends are associated with extensive resource use, environmental degradation, and detrimental effects on animal and human health, making meat reduction a core sustainability target. The experiences of meat reducers, often conceptualised as flexitarians, have gradually attracted more academic attention. This literature has shown that in many cases meat reducers do not radically reduce their meat intake and have untangled a complex web of factors contributing to meat consumption, reduction and avoidance. This article contributes to a nuanced understanding of the experiences, approaches and challenges faced by meat reducers. The data was collected through in-depth interviews with 26 self-declared meat reducers in Norway. By framing consumption as embedded in social practices, this article highlights how broader cultural, social and material conditions structure eating and hence meat consumption. A central finding is that through processes of socialisation and habituation, performances of eating often conform to the prevailing conventions inscribed in the socio-material environment in which they are embedded. We thus question the popular depictions of individuals as efficient drivers of dietary changes and highlight the many factors involved in reproducing the ‘normalness’ of meat-intense diets, demonstrating how individual intentions, choices and habits are themselves rooted in, and circumscribed by, prevailing conventions, that is, practices.
Unsustainable patterns of consumption in affluent societies are at the heart of global climate and environmental challenges and seemingly highly resistant to change. While decades of research have revealed how consumption is deeply embedded in society, recently calls have been made for (re-)engaging with the systemic conditioning of consumption in studies of everyday practices. In this paper, we analyse the ways in which eco-conscious households in Norway (N=20) perform and negotiate sustainability in everyday life. With theories of practice as a point of departure, we combine Bente Halkier’s work on social interaction with Sherry B. Ortner’s conceptualisation of agency as power (dominance and resistance) and agency through ‘projects’ to study how sustainability is negotiated in the everyday. Through this framework we explore how consumers perform ‘sustainability projects’ and how these are defined through, constrained by and negotiated against everyday normativity and dominant socio-material arrangements. Our findings demonstrate the compromises, trade-offs and negotiations that participants engage in when balancing their sustainability projects against other social roles, expectations and goals, often carried out within socio-material arrangements that are scripted towards less sustainable options. Hence, they provide detailed insight into the boundedness of consumer agency, being both socially and materially negotiated and contextualised. While often undertaken as mundane actions, the challenges our participants experienced is ultimately part of negotiating consumer society, often experienced as a constant pressure towards more consumption as expansive consumption is embedded in, and embodied and habituated through, a wide range of social practices.
