Marlyne Sahakian is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Geneva. She specialises in consumer behaviour, primarily in sociological aspects of sustainable consumption. | Image: Niels Ackermann

Smart food wants to replace meals with nutrient juices, powders and pastes. Is this a viable way to make the transition to a healthier and more sustainable diet?

The smart food trend has taken off in California: forms of body worship have helped it to flourish. In Switzerland, people are attracted to processed foods that provide a practical solution when they have little time to prepare a meal. On the other hand, there is resistance to highly processed products like smart food. They are perceived as contradicting two of the prevailing Swiss attitudes towards healthy and sustainable food: the idea that food should be sourced locally, and the principle that food should remain a source of pleasure.

The survey carried out with my colleagues as part of the Swiss Diets project showed that the smart food trend only involves a very small minority. We were somewhat surprised to find that the stakeholders who promote healthy and sustainable food, particularly the associations, are absent from this field and that the smart-food trend is mainly driven by companies, sometimes in collaboration with research centres. It is, I believe, a niche that attracts a public that itself is intrigued by a technological approach to food and by the novelty effect.

Do members of these associations have any objections to smart food?

One objection raised in these circles is to animals being killed, cattle in particular, and only parts of them being consumed with the rest being thrown away. The preparation of small pieces, which is very time-consuming, used to be a task that further burdened women in households, and we can be glad that this is no longer the case. But it is questionable whether it’s worth developing new technologies, e.g., smart food, rather than tackling the functioning of a meat industry that wastes a lot of protein.

Are cashew nut or veggie steak substitutes a more promising avenue?

These vegetarian and vegan alternatives are growing in popularity in response to the fairly widespread call for less animal products. Three main types of concern are raised with regard to eating meat: environmental, because of the multiple impacts and greenhouse gas emissions; health; and moral, because it involves taking the lives of other living things.

On the other hand, the ingredients used in these preparations sometimes come from agricultural production systems that are problematic from an ecological point of view (such as the almond industry in California) or in terms of working conditions. In response to this, there are initiatives to produce alternative protein sources locally. For example, organic tofu is beginning to be produced in the Geneva region.

This is a problem for all vegetarian and vegan food. In assessing the impact of these diets on health and the environment, we have found that they have a lower carbon footprint than the meat diet, but nevertheless above what is recommended as the maximum according to the ‘one-tonne lifestyle’ principle (i.e., one tonne of CO2 emitted per year and per person, all areas of consumption taken together). It can be noted that the ecological impact of these alternatives to meat mainly concerns imported products, e.g. quinoa and avocados. But solidarity is also one of the issues involved when we aspire to healthier and more sustainable food. In other words, favouring local produce does not exclude thinking about producers in other countries who depend on access to our markets.

Your studies show that some initiatives have ambivalent effects in terms of health and the environment. For example, an incentive to eat local food can result in a pro-meat bias.

In the pro-meat trends, there is an emotion that unfolds around a pride in the terroir and the idea that inter-generational knowledge is transmitted in this domain. There is a taste that forms around Swiss meat, which is perceived as being more trustworthy than that of neighbouring countries.

Do taste and disgust hinder change in food consumption?

Disgust appears to be a specific obstacle to the adoption of insects as an alternative to meat. But there is a difference between eating the animal whole and eating it ground down into a hamburger. This process is similar to that described a century ago by the sociologist Norbert Elias in The History of Manners. Whereas in the Middle Ages a peacock with all its feathers would be presented on the table, our society has gradually moved away from the physical body of the animal in order to consume its meat without ‘eating its death’, so to speak.

What are the most effective measures to promote changes in eating habits?

Several tracks emerged from our project, centred around the idea of showing how change can be achieved in practice. The canteen in a workplace that introduces a vegetarian day, for example, can help to create a taste for it by building on social relations between colleagues. The same applies to school canteens. In this respect, we have found that children who become vegetarians have an incentive effect on their parents. Finally, a particularly interesting gateway to change is that of mobility, because in Switzerland people often buy their food in places of transit. Healthy and sustainable solutions should therefore be integrated into these sales points, so this kind of food becomes a default option and not an exclusively individual choice.