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.
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 influential in the recent ‘practice turn’ in the broad field of consumption studies.
Much of his research has focused on food and eating. His most recent book is Everyday Eating: food, taste and trends in Britain since the 1950s (Bristol University Press, 2024). He is also the author of The Social Significance of Dining Out: a study of continuity and change (2020), with Jessica Paddock and Jennifer Whillans, and The Practice of Eating (2016).
About Hal Wilhite Memorial Lecture
The Hal Wilhite Memorial Lecture is organised annually in memory of our dear colleague Professor Harold L. Wilhite. Hal is best known as an anthropologist, but always with a strong interdisciplinary orientation. At the Centre for Development the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, he led groundbreaking research on sustainable consumption and energy.
Hal’s research has had a great impact internationally. His numerous publications based on fieldwork in Asia, Latin America and Norway, are widely read. Hal insisted on the importance of understanding human action in its social and economic context.
He was particularly critical towards the idea of a green transition which did not involve reducing consumption, and considered a low carbon society impossible to realise in a growth-oriented economy. He was deeply passionate about environmental issues, and lived according to his own high standards regarding sustainable consumption.
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