Transitions towards sustainable food systems: The case of the protein transition

Abstract

Food is essential to human life, yet the current food system is threatening the environment by significantly contributing to climate change and a range of other impacts, including biodiversity loss, terrestrial ecosystem destruction, freshwater consumption, and water pollution. The sustainability of meat and dairy production has become an important concern because of the negative environmental impact of livestock agriculture. Moreover, while meat is an important component of the human diet, scientific studies show adverse health impacts for individuals with high intakes of red processed meat. Taking the environmental and health implications of livestock agriculture and meat consumption into consideration, the importance of diets in determining food system sustainability is paramount. The shaping of dietary consumption patterns has been intertwined with the evolution of the food-processing sector. At the same time, food choices are shaped by societal aspirations, responses to new identities and preferences, and the expression of cultural meaning. Therefore, a change of dietary consumption patterns towards sustainability requires a sustainability transition, radical interlinked shifts in technologies, infrastructures, organizations, markets, regulations, and behavior. This thesis builds on sustainability transitions literature to advance the conceptualization of transition dynamics in the food system by developing insights into the protein transition case, i.e. the recent reorientation of the food industry towards plant-based meat substitute products. While there are many empirical studies on sustainability transitions in electricity and mobility systems, research on meso-level sustainability transition dynamics in the food-processing industry is limited. This gap is significant when seeking to understand shifts in food production and consumption, because the conceptualization of innovation dynamics derived from previous transitions literature does not necessarily hold for transitions in the food industry. This thesis specifically focuses on institutional change processes regarding the emergence and diffusion of plant-based meat substitutes and the behaviour of firms. The chapters in this thesis draw insights from different sustainability transitions frameworks, as well as other streams of social science literature, including organizational science and communication literature. Overall, this thesis illustrates that while empirical sustainability transition studies have over-emphasized the bottom-up dynamics of radical innovation processes in the energy and mobility system, the protein transition case highlights the importance of endogenous change enacted by users and incremental improvements in existing products. It makes a number of important theoretical contributions including illustrating how political change processes can be a lever for accelerating sustainable innovation.