Is it possible to “unlearn” our daily habits and “learn” new ones? Can we minimize our big ecological footprints by taking small steps?

That’s the question we wanted to explore in our expedition “Changing Habits”. Our research topic was cooking as a daily practice – as a habit: We chose traditional cooking recipes from Taiwan and Austria, our home countries, and swapped them like in a radical cross kitchen: What does the Austrian version of Lu Rou Fan, a popular Taiwanese rice dish with pork, look like? What ingredients are available in Taiwan to make typical Austrian potato pancakes? At the same time, there was the question: How can we be as climate neutral as possible in preparing these dishes? It meant not just to (preferably) use regionally produced products, avoid plastic packaging, and use our own shopping bags, but also to make the way to the supermarket as climate-friendly as possible, by foot or bike: Every step on our expedition had to be carefully considered.

Regardless the country, we came to notice that this undertaking wasn’t always easy.

When it came to the eggs for preparing potato pancake, for instance, Taiwan gave us the choice between “ethical treatment and non-regionally produced” or “non-ethical treatment and regionally produced”. In order to get a fruit cocktail without plastic wrapping, we had to go to more than one supermarket. We were also perplexed by some differences in price: Why do regional apples cost more in Taiwan than those imported from France? Noodles not packed in plastic could not be found at all. For the Austrian Lu Ron Fan, we chose a vegetarian version. We even took our bikes to ride out into the countryside for some kilometers and get the eggs directly from the henhouse.