Ethical Food Practices and Gender in Consumer Choices: Care, Sustainability, and Animal Welfare in Urban and Rural contexts

Rooted in feminist anthropology and environmental humanities, this thesis examines how women taking on caregiving roles in Italy navigate food provisioning as an ethical and ecological practice. While much of the public discourse on food systems focuses on large-scale production and consumption, this research focuses attention on the domestic sphere, where everyday decisions carry moral and environmental weight. It investigates how caregiving women enact food ethics under varying socio-economic and geographic constraints. The study compares urban and rural settings to show how geography shapes access to fresh, ethical food and how women develop strategies to reconcile caregiving duties with ecological values. Practices such as sourcing from local producers, minimising waste, and avoiding industrial meat emerge as care-driven forms of everyday ecological renaissance. The findings reveal significant urban–rural disparities in access to fresh, ethical and sustainable food. Rural participants benefit from proximity to producers and informal networks; urban participants face price, time and infrastructural constraints that steer purchasing toward wholesale and supermarket supply, often at the expense of quality and ethical fit. These patterns align with feminist care-ethics and food-justice paradigm and foreground a woman–care–food–non-human animal rights nexus: when caregivers control industrially produced meat, privilege seasonal/local options where feasible and reduce waste, they enact an everyday ecological renaissance that counters consumerism and intensive livestock logics, with co-benefits for non-human animal welfare, human health and environmental protection.