When sustainable cuisine imaginaries become unsustainable : Storage and preservation practices in Swedish restaurants

Sustainability is a key concern within the restaurant industry, which offers a variety of initiatives and approaches to it. This, in turn, creates different shared understandings, what we here call sustainable cuisine imaginaries. The practices fostered by these imaginaries are now facing unforeseen challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic, creating a dissonance in the way restaurants normally operate. By using storage and preservation practices as an entry point, this ethnographic study of six Swedish restaurants uses the concept of imaginaries to explore the different beliefs and ideals for restaurant sustainability and the practices fostered by those ideals. Three distinct imaginaries of sustainable cuisine were identified: locality as a quality, reducing meat in favor of vegetables, and the creative and knowledgeable professional. These imaginaries are materialized through different storage facilities, like root cellars, wine cellars, or meat aging fridges. This study shows how disruptions in restaurants, triggered by unexpected situations, exposed the fragility of these imaginaries. We argue that the sustainable cuisine imaginaries, as a complexity reducing mechanism, help restaurant professionals manage the intricacy of sustainability. However, they also demonstrate an array of simple solutions very susceptible to external factors. Sustainable practices can thus easily become unsustainable