Envisioning and Negotiating Plural Food Futures: Sustainabilities, Food Values, and Evaluations of Gene Technologies in Australian Agriculture
Submitted 9 July 2026
ABSTRACT
This thesis investigates the intersections of sustainabilities, plant-based eating, and agricultural gene technologies in Australian foodscapes. I argue that sustainable food futures are not singular destinations, but plural and contested pathways shaped by situated values, scientific claims, environmental pressures, and uneven scales of agency.
The thesis is organized around three connected studies. First, I examine how agricultural genomics researchers frame “sustainability.” Through a systematic review of scientific articles and the use of a Traffic Light Rating System, I show that much of the recent literature invokes “sustainability” without clearly defining, measuring, or evidencing it. I argue that this lack of transparency weakens scientific accountability and obscures the ethical assumptions, priorities, and future-oriented goals that underpin biotechnological innovation.
Second, I examine how Australian publics understand and practice sustainabilities through everyday food talk. I develop a macro-meso-micro framework of perceived agency to show how participants locate responsibility across wider systems, communities, and individual practices. The findings show that participants often felt frustrated by their limited control over macro-level forces, including corporate power, industrial foodscapes, policy settings, and global supply chains. At the same time, they identified relational forms of influence at the meso level and maintained moral coherence through micro-level practices such as reducing waste, careful provisioning, cooking, budgeting, and choosing what to eat.
Third, I focus on how plant-based eaters evaluate gene technologies when these are framed as responses to sustainability crises. I introduce the concept of moral adaptive capacity to describe the ethical labor participants undertook as they reweighed lived food values such as naturalness, stewardship, and care in response to climate urgency and perceived necessity. I show that plant-based eating did not produce a fixed rejection of gene technologies. Instead, participants expressed conditional openness when gene technologies appeared to respond to systemic and environmental pressures and when they perceived few viable alternatives.
Across these studies, I argue that sustainabilities are plural, social, situated, and lived. Food values are not static principles that people simply apply to new technologies or ways of eating. They are adaptive practices negotiated under structural, environmental, and ethical constraints. The thesis therefore challenges accounts of sustainable food futures that narrow responsibilities around technological inevitability or individualized choices. Instead, it argues for more democratic, transparent, and accountable approaches to foodscapes, in which publics can participate in defining the problems, values, alternatives, and responsibilities that shape sustainable food futures.