Researchers use shared meals to drive sustainability behavior change
A new study shows that eating together—literally—can be an effective design tool for building community commitment to sustainable practices. Researchers created shared dinners around a farmers market meeting and found that commensality, the social bond formed over food, helped members internalize their roles as agents of change in their organizations.
Originaltitel: Co-creating commensality
<p>Commensality is the feeling of fellowship when eating at the table with others. In a research context, commensality unveils dimensions of social relations between people, as well as human and non-human actors. We present an example of co-creating commensality, enacted with members of a local sustainable mar- ket association around their Annual General Meeting (AGM). We devised a suite of activities that we believed would generate social and cultural significance for the association members, as a pathway to fostering change. These activities used food as a design material, as well as research concern, and included: an inspirational talk by the CEO of a local vegan business; a mapping, envisioning and backcasting exercise; and a co-created dinner following the AGM. A driving intention in designing these activities was to support participants to leverage comensality as a way of infrastructure their development as agents of change.</p>