An interview with Eline van Ballegooij
Eline is currently a PhD candidate at the Environmental Policy Group, in collaboration with the Consumption and Healthy Lifestyles Group at Wageningen University & Research. Their research focuses on the normalisation of food consumption in the Netherlands, with particular attention to cultural diversity and local diets. This work contributes to both the NWA project “Transition to a Sustainable Food System” and the EU4Advice initiative.
Prior to starting the PhD, Eline completed a transdisciplinary master’s degree in ‘Global Challenges for Sustainability’ at CHARM-EU, specialising in sustainable and just food system transformation. Their thesis explored the concept of social supermarkets in the Dutch context, examining issues of dignity, morality, and food security in their implementation.
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Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your current research?
I am Eline van Ballegooij, a PhD candidate at Wageningen University working on food consumption and how it changes in the Netherlands. Being born and raised in Wageningen with two parents working at the university, I have always had a strong connection to the fields of research that WUR excels in such as food production, the living environment and (sustainable) lifestyles. During my international master’s degree ‘Global Challenges for Sustainability’ I delved deeper into food systems and their transformation towards sustainability. Through field trips, workshops, and my master thesis, I developed a keen interest in food security, societal diversity, and the strength of communities in achieving change. Now, in my PhD project, I work on an adjacent yet different topic: restaurants, eating out, and how they contribute to change.
Our current food system, both globally and in the Netherlands, is not sustainable. If we want to live in accordance with planetary boundaries it must change. Food consumption in affluent societies such as the Netherlands is one of the major contributors to environmental issues. My research focusses on how food consumption changes over time when it comes to what we find normal: what we eat, how we eat, where we eat, when we eat, and so on.
What we found normal in the past is different from what we find normal now. In 2025, conventional Dutch supermarkets sell products such as hummus, sumac, and tahini, which was not the case 20 years ago. Train stations and shopping streets include more food vendors, which is a relatively new development. Evidentially, change has been happening and is happening continuously when it comes to what we find normal food consumption. At the same time, what we find normal now needs to change. Hence why I am taking a past-present-future approach to look at what changes have already happened and what changes are envisioned for the future.
To understand these changes over time and explore processes of normalisation, I am taking the perspective of restaurants and ‘eating out’. In the Netherlands, eating out of home has become a cultural norm. It is also a major way in which consumers experience new (to them) foods and food practices, by discovering tastes, ingredients, and recipes that they have not tasted or used before. Furthermore, restaurants are embedded in broader systems of provision, allowing for an in-depth exploration of both marketing and sourcing perspectives. Two major trends in the Netherlands are represented in the research: the case of ethnic restaurants relates to diversity in cuisine, and the case of local-food-oriented restaurants relates to the normative direction towards local food as sustainable food.
In my research I speak mostly to restaurant owners and chefs, who have diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and run restaurants with varying cuisines. This allows me to gain in-depth insights into the cases at hand. Currently, I am interviewing chefs, restaurant owners, wholesalers, and other experts related to these restaurants to gain an understanding of changes that have happened so far and visions of change towards the future. In interviewing them I have learned that while various origins of restaurants relate to different approaches in terms of sourcing ingredients, profiling of and engaging with consumers does not differ across these varying origins. There is a strong theme of differentiating between ‘familiar’ and ‘unfamiliar’ consumers, who are perceived to associate different meanings and materials to the specific cuisines.
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What is your role in the EU4Advice project, and how does it relate to or enrich your PhD work?
The EU4Advice project is connected to my research both thematically and geographically. I am interested in perceptions of local and global food and how these ideas are used in debates around sustainable food, and these themes are a major focus throughout both of my case studies. The city of Amsterdam, a culturally hyper-diverse city as well as a major hub for sustainable[1] restaurants, is a perfect location to collect data for my research. In addition, WUR and AMS Institute, a research center working on Amsterdam urban challenges and EU4Advice partner, have a long-standing collaboration in research and initiatives around themes such as food, waste and Living Labs.
Working from the bottom-up, the AMS Institute eco-system operates in the real-world context of Amsterdam as a prime example of food system dynamics around themes such as urbanisation and rural-urban interactions, population diversification, and consumption related health and sustainability challenges.
My work specifically relates to the concept of Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs) in terms of locality. Through my societal exploration of local vs. global food in restaurants, I am contributing to the project by helping understand the context in which SFSC advisors would work. Moreover, to support EU4Advices’ goals, I will connect my findings to the consumer side in a later stage of my research.
I apply a critical lens to SFSCs by investigating perceptions of local food, its’ cultural appropriateness, and current implementations and visions of such supply chains. The first case study relates mostly to cultural appropriateness of food and cultural diversity. It dives into the multicultural and globalised context that is Dutch society and highlights the malleability of familiarity and authenticity of food. This relates to the meanings and implications of local food as sustainable food: is it sustainable to eat local food given the cultural diversity in the Netherlands? The second case is future-oriented and relates specifically to normative ideas of local food as sustainable food.
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Can you share any insights or findings from your participation in the NWA ‘Transition to a Sustainable Food System’ project?
In developing my research design and throughout most of the work on my first paper, I was able to interact with many researchers and experts through the NWA project ‘Transition to a Sustainable Food System’. This ambitious project was a transdisciplinary effort to map the Dutch food system from different perspectives and to identify pathways towards making it more sustainable. The many different angles used to look at a food system, such as biodiversity in meadows, cultural appropriateness of food, food choice behaviour, and health, helped me develop a well-informed PhD project that zooms in on remaining gaps and questions. A magazine containing this projects’ findings (in Dutch) can be found here.
Within this project I contributed to a newly developed participatory method related to future visions of the Dutch food system, designed by my promotor Sigrid Wertheim-Heck and in collaboration with a team of researchers, producers, an animator, and a software engineer. It consists of a dilemma-based quiz and some short videos visualising different future scenarios. The data collected through this method shows that, contrary to what we might believe, there is quite a lot of public support when it comes to making changes to our food system. To be updated on the forthcoming publication about this method and the results, follow this link.
- Have you found any tensions or synergies between sustainability goals and cultural food practices in your work?
Restaurants are ‘consumption junctions’: key sites where provision and consumption meet, making them crucial for understanding and potentially changing consumption and related practices. In restaurants, food is not just consumed, but prepared, assembled, and presented. Ethnic restaurants specifically are pivotal sites where global and local influences converge, facilitating the normalisation of diverse food practices in everyday life. For example, many ethnic restaurants are owned by migrant-entrepreneurs. They are 1) introducing food practices from their original home-countries in the Dutch context, 2) gaining existing Dutch food practices and 3) establishing new practices that combine the two cultures. Their existence in the Dutch context therefore is a performance of active change as well as changing the context itself.
Couple Eating Lunch with Fresh Salad and Appetizers
A recurring theme in the research is authenticity: what is seen as ‘real’ Thai, Spanish, or Surinamese food, and why? I have found that authenticity is tied to competences rather than materials. Chefs are replacing ingredients with what is available to them, even if it differs from the original recipe, but the skills associated with the dish to them means it is still authentic. This suggests that authenticity itself is a malleable concept and therefore shows an openness to change which could be leveraged in terms of sustainability.
Second, from a sourcing perspective, restaurants grow their sourcing networks over time while suppliers diversify over time. For example, a Surinamese restaurant when first opening in Amsterdam might have family members in Suriname sending them specific products as they do not know where to source them or the product is not available in the Netherlands. Over time, they increasingly engage with the Surinamese community in Amsterdam and learn different routes through which the product can be sourced: at a local Surinamese ‘toko’ (store) or from a certain specialised exotic produce supplier. At the same time, this specialised supplier might find that offering meats and frozen fries alongside the fresh produce increases their customer base as non-Asian restaurants can buy a larger share of their needed inventory at one place. While there is not necessarily a causal relation, these changes are happening simultaneously thus confirming diversification throughout sourcing networks.
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How can policymakers better support culturally diverse food practices while promoting sustainable consumption?
Restaurants are one of many ways in which culturally novel food practices enter a society, but within the scala of ethnic restaurants there are multiple mechanisms through which the restaurants themselves emerge. With any given cuisine or culture, there is a distinction between familiar and unfamiliar consumers. Recruitment of ‘unfamiliar’ consumers to become ‘familiar’ consumers in restaurants happens through different marketing practices and from different narrative understandings. Akin to this recruitment, when promoting sustainable consumption, our starting point should always be that there is more than one way to be sustainable.
Second, as mentioned before, people will try to find ways to cook culturally appropriate foods within the limitations of the system they find themselves in. If ingredients can be sourced, be it through retail, direct import, travel, or otherwise, they will be sourced and thus introduced to ‘unfamiliar’ consumers. However, if sourcing proves to be too difficult, ingredients will be replaced with something that is available and of good quality rather than importing expensive and lower quality items from abroad. An interviewee who owns a Spanish restaurant mentioned using bell peppers from Dutch greenhouses rather than importing them from Spain, and another restaurant uses a Dutch variety of pumpkin in their Colombian soup recipe. This flexibility of what is culturally appropriate, authentic ethnic food means that sustainable consumption and culturally diverse food practices are not mutually exclusive: if Dutch pumpkins are used, the dish will still be perceived as authentically Colombian.
Changes to the food system from the supply side are highly influential for the daily food practices of citizen-consumers. I would therefore urge policymakers to engage with consumers about what is culturally appropriate food to them and let this inform their decision making, keeping in mind that system-level limitations in sourcing lead to adaptations in cooking.
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Do you see a role for citizen participation or community-led initiatives in shifting food norms?
Based on the research I have done so far; I would say that citizen participation or community-led initiatives can indeed help expediate or steer the cycles of change by informing participants’ performance of norms. However, this will happen within specific norm circles, or in other words, ‘social bubbles.’ Social norms such as food norms are performed by and within their corresponding norm circles (groups of people that act on and enforce the norm). Norms are not static but change over time, in other words, they go through cycles of change. The cycles of change that norms go through happen through the performance of them and this change is happening continuously.
To achieve real change on a large scale, we need more than trendsetters or examples of good practice. We need to involve those who might not be already engaged with the narratives around food system change towards sustainability, as multiple and different food norms and thus food norm circles exist within any society. Furthermore, any such involvement needs to happen from an open-minded, unassuming and constructive outlook towards those whose norms are deemed in need of change. The 2022 paper by Brons et al.: “A tale of two labs: Rethinking urban living labs for advancing citizen engagement in food system transformations”, perfectly illustrates the importance of how, why and when citizens are engaging in decision making processes around food system transformation. In this paper, which reflects on urban living labs conceptually, methodologically, and pragmatically, a sociological perspective on consumption in applied to highlights citizens as experts of their own everyday life.
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