In a Danish contemporary context, the necessity of foraging or cultivating food oneself can be interpreted as an outdated practice, where the common everyday life act of eating are supplied from the larger entity of the food system, ensuring that foods are available and accessible no matter the season, night or day. However contemporarily, food practices as urban gardening and foraging are flourishing in the Danish urban settings. Thus, the practitioners must benefit from or be motivated to perform these practices of other reasons than bare necessity.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how the urban gardeners’ and foragers’ practices can be understood in a Danish contemporary setting, and to contribute with knowledge on the characteristics of the currents among these practitioners, in terms of how their food practices can be suggestive to future qualities of the food system.

To investigate this, a qualitative multi-sided research method was applied entailing a literature study and a multiple-case study with ethnographically inspired observations of four practice sites in the urban setting of Køge, and ten semi-structured interviews with practitioners. The practitioners and their practices are focal points in the analysis on what have motivated them by using the theoretical and analytical grip of theory of practice and everyday life perspectives. This theoretical approach insists on having an eye for the complexity of practices and everyday life, thus the motivations are diverse and relates to several aspects of the practitioners’ lives.

Based on the analysis of the produced data, the thesis concludes that the investigated urban gardeners and foragers are motivated to practise, because they comply with their attitudes that are characterised by a distrustful relationship to the food system’s supply of food, in terms of food quality, production-, and processing methods. The urban gardeners’ and foragers’ practising settle their desire to know how the food is produced and processed from their mental and bodily interaction with the food during the production or identification of sprouting place to plate. Furthermore, the practitioners are motivated by a range of quality parameters, where they consider the food they cultivate or forage to be more fresh, healthy, local, natural, and as giving them flavourful everyday life food experiences.

The results are suggestive to future qualities in the food system in terms of reconnecting the individual with their food, by strengthening the material bodily experiences before consumption, focusing on giving the consumers the opportunity to sense the process from production to plate.