Alternative food practices for climate futures: listening to the voices of young adults in the Canadian Southeastern Prairie Region
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For decades, climate scientists and activists have warned us of the ever-growing threat of global warming and the urgent need for climate commitments from elected representatives. In response to the constant exposure to environmental catastrophes, experiences of distress and concern for the environment are rising, particularly among young adults. Meanwhile, industrial agricultural systems are increasingly understood as contributing to environmental degradation, inciting many to explore alternative food systems for their potential to secure the food supply while contributing to ecological health. My research is situated at the intersection of food and climate distress, where I explore why and how alternative food practices are adopted by young adults, and how these practices interact with their climate distress. I conducted interviews with 20 young adults in cities in the Southeastern Prairie Region of Canada who have an alternative food practice (e.g. gardening, canning, foraging, dumpster diving, participating in local food organizations, etc.) that is influenced by their climate distress. I found that for participants, the food domain constitutes a critical and accessible area of climate action. Negotiated using personal and relational enablers, and against systemic barriers, participants’ food practice is reconfigured by the incorporation of alternative materials, meanings, and competencies. The main motivations for alternative food practices identified by participants include contributing to socio-ecological well-being and transformation towards climate futures and reaping benefits to personal well-being. In turn, the ability to contribute to ecological health, paired with a conscientious framing of their individual agency, allows participants to manage their climate distress and sustain their alternative food practices over time. A practice-theoretical approach reveals the ways in which alternative food practices embody meanings and food realities distinct from conventional food systems, while sometimes remaining entangled within them. This research provides insight into the experiences in alternative food practices of young adults with climate distress, which are poorly understood, and identifies pathways for further research on examining and easing climate distress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".