Within these contrasting ‘greening’ pathways are two key hurdles demanding recognition, and they occur within the transactional ‘dance’ between human and material agency that Pickering (2010) characterised. The first is the inherent limitation to the agency of material and spatial artefacts, even if designed as ecological agents. They can only invite or promote alternate practices, but as Tilley noted, they cannot achieve directive primacy (2001, p. 261). Only householders can adopt and enact the practices so targeted. An understated Australian example addressing the need for such bridging at the scale of
cooking practices, was Giselle Wilkinson’s book The Conscious Cook (2008),
which sought to help readers evaluate the ecological consequences of their food choices integral to offering healthy, flexible and achievable recipes. This example highlights that even our normalised taste preferences are implicated in this much bigger picture, as we have become inured to eating food pre-
prepared, ‘fridge cold’ and out of season as Mielke (2005) lamented.
The second, and particularly daunting hurdle I identify, recognises that barriers to the adoption of ecologically aware household practices are numerous. This is foregrounded in the studies of sociologist David Evans (2011), and psychologist Birgitta Gatersleben (2010) and colleagues, both of which address
sustainability, consumption and lifestyles broadly but from distinct theoretical perspectives. Evans proposed that differing social conventions are accorded levels of worth such that the nascent convention of ‘ecological citizenship’ can be readily out-valued. In practice, being a good parent or keeping up with the latest technologies could well take precedence even for motivated, ecologically
aware householders. This connects with the conclusion of Gatersleben et al.
who did not find “that people who expressed high environmental concern were necessarily less materialistic and vice versa” (2010, p. 47). These two studies, among many, highlight the existence of substantial value conflicts for
householders and the difficulty in defining the kinds of household practices for future ecological agents to target.
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With these value conflicts in mind, it is unsurprising that the dominant ‘greening’ discourse centred on the home frames material consumption and ‘going green’ as quite compatible, in a re-working of the ‘having and doing’ dynamic
characterised by Shove et al. (2007). The kitchen, whether ‘greened’ to some
degree or not, remains an intensive site of material and resource consumption and a hub for household practices, perhaps best understood as a site of complex contradictions, to draw on anthropologist Daniel Miller’s observations
in Stuff (2010). Householders motivated by a growing ecological awareness can
be engaged in actively eschewing proscribed forms of consumption, while simultaneously adopting other emergent forms of having and doing. Greening tied to the logic of capital, as Fry (2009), and Cook and Swyngedouw (2012) insisted, is largely impotent in effecting genuine social-ecological benefit, especially in the relatively affluent West.
5.5 Conclusion
Through the four themed social-ecological readings, this analysis has
underscored that contemporary kitchens are not only indivisible from intensive consumption, but are in fact distributed nodes in the vast networks of global industrial food, manufacturing and media institutions. I have also revealed the kitchen is not one, but multiple products of design simultaneously, structured by, and structuring popular cultural activities and practices. In response to the first research question, these highly consequential connections between food and housing, and ecological conditions position dominant domestic design as a persistent legacy of modernity and the logic of capital. Household practices in turn, such as provisioning, cooking and eating, are interwoven into a range of imperatives including health, the negotiation of social disadvantage, identity and personal politics. The powerful institutions controlling food supply and food culture in the main manipulate food choices, what constitutes cooking, what we eat and what ‘stuff’ we add to our domestic stockpiles, reifying ecologically degrading household practices that have been normalised over decades. By extension, attempts to ‘green’ the kitchen without disruption to the status quo perpetuate market-driven consumption and by reinforcing current
In parallel, the contemporary kitchen still performs a crucial and positive role in supporting social relations, food and cooking knowledge and skills, and food- related community development. These roles highlight opportune areas to engage with and foster in this social-ecological design research. Food policy, public health, education, and existing sustainability agendas are all relevant platforms to leverage. There exists too potential to ‘mine’ further the pre- industrial food axes of the past for guidance on spatial-material and functional affordances, low energy food preservation methods and regenerative cycles. The outcomes of this social-ecological analysis help to define the problems of research for, and through design in Phases 2 and 3: re-visioning the meta-level concept of the kitchen, and dismantling its commodity phase in favour of the kitchen and garden as ecological agent. In Phase 2, I turn to the social collectivities already engaging in ecologically literate household practices to guide a practice-led re-visioning. This leads to my involvement with 12
Tasmanian households whose generous inhabitants committed to assisting me to this end, as I elaborate fully in the following chapter.
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