Sustainable eating in the “new normal” Italy: ecological food habitus between biospheric values and de-globalizing gastronationalism

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of a survey on sustainable food consumption in Italy during COVID-19 times. The study examines the changes triggered by the pandemic, both in sustainable food practises and in consumers’ value-based priorities. The goal is to identify the structuring of an ecological dietary habitus and even a culinary ethos as attention is paid to the reflexive, axiological dimensions of emerging eating habits. The complexity of the phenomenon has suggested a multi-paradigmatic research approach that accounts for the role of human agency in restructuring eating practises in transitional times. The results highlight an emerging nonlinear axiology in which biospheric universalism ambiguously coexists with the lionizing of locavorism and the glorification of food origins, and the direct provision of local food gains prominence despite the increasing mediatization of food choices. A deglobalizing eating style is emerging, where ecological instantiations seem to indulge culinary nationalism and conservative communitarianism. One of the challenges of the “new normal” will be to endow these dispositions with the axiological coherence of an appropriate ecological culinary ethos, as well as to create the conditions for younger generations to prioritize forward-looking ecological values over conservative gastronationalism to promote the sustainable regeneration of food systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable consumption
• ecological food-habitus
• culinary ethos
• COVID-19 “new normal”
• biospheric values
• locavorism
• deglobalization
• gastronationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. MG Onorati wrote sections 1,2,3, and 5; FD d’Ovidio wrote section 4. Both wrote conclusions. The research presented in this article has been approved by the Pollenzo University Ethics Committee with the Deliberation of the January 11, 2021.

2. For a list of the Countries Schwartz studied and their distal relationships on a world map, see (Schwartz 2006b, 156).

3. Schwartz never used pure economic indices as putative determinants of the identified value clusters. He opted for a socioecological explanation based on composite social measures such as democracy index, household size, gross national income per capita, which he correlated with subjective dimensions (values, income, etc.) to obtain a reduced multidimensional set of factors explaining both socioeconomic levels and democratic values in the countries compared.

4. The question on income (Q25) was included in the survey but proved to be unreliable and nondiscriminatory in the exploratory phase because of the high number of unreported incomes (N = 750) and irrelevant Cronbach’s alpha values (< 0.2 when Q25 is correlated with Q19, Q21, Q22). Therefore, in line with the data-driven approach of this study, income disappeared in the further analysis steps.