Keywords
Food Consumption
Sustainable Food Consumption
Contradictions in Food Consumption
How to Cite
Abstract
Objective: This study investigates how middle-class consumers in Brazil experience, justify, and negotiate the contradictions present in their daily sustainable food consumption practices, considering the tensions between discourses, intentions, and actual behaviors.
Methodology: This research adopts a qualitative, interpretative, and inductive approach. The data analyzed refer to the Brazilian phase of the study and were collected through 31 in-depth interviews and an ethnography with 10 participants. The analysis followed the principles of constructivist grounded theory.
Originality: By shifting the focus from moral judgment to a contextualized understanding of practices, the article contributes to more realistic and inclusive debates on food sustainability, especially in emerging economies.
Main results: The findings reveal that sustainable food consumption is marked by ambiguities and moral dilemmas, organized into three central categories of contradictions: conscious, explicit, and tacit. These contradictions emerge from the interaction between ethical values, economic constraints, convenience, habits, and sociocultural contexts.
Theoretical Contributions: This study contributes to the literature on sustainable consumption by proposing a typology of contradictions in food consumption—conscious, explicit, and tacit—broadening the understanding of sustainable consumption as a situated practice marked by tensions between values, contexts, and everyday constraints.
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