From fine dining restaurants to everday food practices : sustainability in accounts of dining out

Abstract

As one of society's critical systems, the global food system is confronting food insecurity and environmental degradation, requiring a deeper understanding of consumption as an essential yet underexamined component. This aspect is explored using the theoretical foundations of Shove, Pantzar, and Watson's SPT and Warde's compound practices, asking: How do patrons account for sustainability in performances of fine dining? What does this reveal about fine dining's capacity to engage patrons with sustainable food practices beyond the dining occasion?

The questions are addressed through a multimodal qualitative content analysis of 12 Substack articles and their images, treated as diary data, with a combined inductive and deductive coding approach. The analysis establishes the articles as mediated accounts of the performance of dining out, evidenced by the shared script and communication conventions. In the accounts, sustainability is connected to the restaurant and detached from the performance, available only by inference in Materials, named without procedure in Competences, and held as a credential in Meanings. This detachment leaves no evident path for sustainability to be constituted within the practice of dining out and, thereby, within the larger compound of food practices. Fine Dining as Indulgence, Stewardship, Culture, and Community emerge as orientations describing the dominant focus within the accounts; sustainability sits in close proximity to each orientation but is named only in Stewardship, making the articulation of that connection, rather than the introduction of sustainability, what these accounts show to be missing.

As the articles were pre-selected for documented sustainability credentials, this represents an optimistic estimate of engagement rather than an underrepresentation. Theoretically, the study finds that SPT offers no analytical means of establishing whether sustainability is constituted within a performance, pointing to a development the framework requires. Methodologically, it explores the potential of long-form Substack articles as a source of diary-like data for practice research, while noting that retrospective accounts of this kind are better suited to identifying practices than to evidencing practice change.