The paradox of knowledge and food practices: navigating the tension between healthy eating, nutrition knowledge, and everyday life routines among middle-class consumers in Kunming (China)

This paper explores the paradox between middle-class consumers' understanding of healthy eating and their actual food practices which often contradict to their knowledge, in the middle-sized Chinese city of Kunming. Based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted across various food consumption settings and in-depth interviews, the study examines how middle-class consumers navigate tensions between aspirations for healthy eating and the realities of modern life. Drawing on social practice theory, it investigates how materialities, competences, and social meanings collectively shape food behaviours, complicating efforts to actualise healthy and sustainable consumption. Unlike international studies suggesting that raising environmental consciousness or promoting health-related knowledge directly leads to sustainable and more nutritional food choices (Hansmann, R., & Binder, C. R. (2020). Determinants of different types of positive environmental behaviors: An analysis of public and private sphere actions. <i>Sustainability</i>, 12(20), 8547; Jaiswal and Aagja, 2024), this research reveals that middle-class consumers in Kunming were equipped with substantial knowledge about healthy diets but struggled to enact these ideals due to competing demands, temporal, and socio-material constraints.