Food consumption as social practice: Solidarity Purchasing Groups in Rome, Italy

In Italy the Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (GAS) are groups of households that cooperate in purchasing food and other goods directly from producers on the basis of ethical and environmental criteria and considerations of solidarity. They present themselves as a movement with a shared critique of the dominant model of consumption, a movement whose aim is to build a more sustainable economy by changing the way they buy their food and other goods. These specificities make GAS an ideal case study for analysis of how a new practice of enhanced sustainable food consumption can emerge and develop. In this paper we examine the discourses and practices of GAS operating in Rome (Italy). We look specifically at the social and demographic characteristics of GAS members, the way their belief in sustainability and the motivation to support it can change food buying habits and how personal and collective motivations interconnect with normative, social and material factors in the generation and reproduction of a new practice. Transcending dichotomous perspectives of sustainable consumption as a matter of changing individual behaviour patterns or as something that is constrained by material and normative considerations, we employ concepts derived from theories of practice and sustainable consumption to analyse the social construction of a new food buying routine, allowing the interconnections between agency, cultural and social norms and material/functional structures to emerge in a continuous dialectical process of routinisation and reflexivity.