Professor Alan Warde will hold this year’s Hal Wilhite Memorial Lecture. In the context of the many problems of food systems in the 21st century – climate change, obesity and undernutrition, for example – Warde discusses the implications of his recent analysis of change in the UK for understanding how popular food habits and preferences change, or do not change, over time. He concentrates on processes of consumption and the practices of eating.
Everyday meals, shopping, cooking and dining out are briefly described in order to establish what has and what has not changed since the 1950s. Warde offers an explanation in terms of demographic, social and cultural processes which constrain and enable significant change in the direction of greater social and environmental sustainability.
The case of Britain is employed to identify obstacles to the promotion of rapid cultural change and to evaluate some proposals from social scientists regarding how they might be overcome. He also discusses the difficulties involved in giving systematic accounts of continuity and change and projecting those into the future.
The event is hosted by Centre for Global Sustainability (GLOBE) and Research centre for socially inclusive energy transitions (Include).
Portrait of Alan Warde
Alan Warde is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester and Honorary Fellow of the Sustainable Consumption Institute. He is a key scholar in the sociology of consumption and has been highly in