Farm-to-Fork: Exploring Sustainability in Ethnic Food Systems – A Critical Case of Bangladeshi Curry Houses in Birmingham, United Kingdom

Abstract

Despite growing recognition of the food sector's critical role in sustainability transformation, mainstream frameworks systematically exclude marginalised ethnic food enterprises from research attention and policy support. This exclusion is particularly acute for ethnic minority food businesses—vital yet overlooked components of the UK's £55 billion food economy. Bangladeshi-owned curry houses, representing over 85% of the UK's 'Indian restaurants' and generating over £4.2 billion annually, face an existential crisis due to cascading structural pressures. This thesis addresses critical gaps: sustainable entrepreneurship literature's focus on well-resourced enterprises, food systems perspectives' neglect of culturally specific enterprises, and policy frameworks poorly adapted to informal, culturally embedded businesses. Through an embedded multi-stakeholder case study of 15 Bangladeshi curry houses in Birmingham (65 interviews spanning operators and food system stakeholders, focus groups, observation, secondary sources), this research investigates how sustainability is understood and practised within resource-constrained contexts. Employing a cross-domain theoretical framework grounded in stakeholder theory and institutional theory, the study integrates sustainable entrepreneurship, ethnic minority entrepreneurship, and food systems perspectives—often siloed domains. The findings reveal 'survivalist sustainability'—distinctive, place-based environmental practices driven by necessity, frugality, constraints and cultural wisdom rather than strategic choice or resource abundance. This challenges dominant paradigms that position sustainability as a luxury for well-resourced actors, demonstrating instead how constraint drives environmental innovation. Curry house operators develop sophisticated waste minimisation, energy efficiency, and circular resource practices as survival strategies, embedded within webs of kinship labour, informal networks, and cultural obligations, revealing how sustainability is enacted at the margins of formal food governance. The thesis makes four key contributions: theoretically, it develops an integrated framework of survivalist sustainability that challenges normative models of sustainability; empirically, it provides a novel comprehensive analysis sustainability in curry houses, documenting vernacular environmental practices and their typology; practically, it identifies pathways for enabling sustainability transitions in resource-constrained ethnic minority enterprises; and for policy, it maps structural 'chokepoints' and offers culturally responsive recommendations. This research reveals how marginalised entrepreneurs already practice sophisticated environmental strategies that merit recognition and theoretical integration, demonstrating that meaningful sustainability transformation requires engaging diverse entrepreneurial realities beyond mainstream frameworks.