Vegs to school – experimentative research for sustainability transition

Abstract

Mitigation of climate change urges to reduce our meat consumption. This necessitates new eating practices and ways of thinking about food. In this paper we discuss how experimentative research can participate in making such changes. We introduce notions of pragmatic tinkering, speculative thinking and ethical discussion and evaluate their contribution to understanding of change in everyday practices. We investigate their prospects in relation to our experiments with sustainable school dining. In these experiments we introduced a free vegetarian choice to school meals and engaged pupils in their development. The results highlight the dynamic nature of change in everyday practices. The notion of tinkering highlights the small adjustments needed to reconcile the different goals in school dining. Our results stress that the practical adjustments easily uphold the conventional practices. Speculative thinking is needed in challenging them. In our experiments, the engagement of pupils opened places for hesitation, and eventually also to new ways of thinking about school food. The pupils also challenged our experiments. They reminded how eating is entangled to our shared cultural meanings on food, but also to our identity and understandings of gender. In future, experimentative research should build settings, which allow them becoming more multiple as well.