Sustainable Diets: intergenerational challenges from the Global South

The act of eating, besides providing nutrition, is an act of imagination as it involves memories, social realities, perceptions, and people’s aspirations for a better future. Sustainability adds a complex layer to this universe, making people question the environmental impact of their actions, as food production, transportation, and discards have a global ecological footprint.

The Global South gathers different developmental experiences, where the expansion of access to consumption and the nutrition transition represent a challenge to sustainable development with a global impact. In the present research, I analyze first-hand ethnographic data on urban food consumption experiences in Brazil and China. I focus on the intergenerational challenges to communicate new environmental concerns and push for a change in diets, where family memories still play an essential role in constructing the values and practices around food. I investigate how social mobility affects the ways that people across different generations perceive food as it mobilizes memories of aspirational consumption, where certain dishes embody the meaning of achieving a “better life.”

Sustainability and the role of gastronomy demand a cross-cultural, intergenerational, and global debate. This chapter will focus on how urban families in big cities, such as Shanghai (China) and Campinas (Brazil), understand and discuss their own food consumption practices, pointing to the challenges of addressing sustainable diets in the Global South.