Purpose-This aim of this study is to identify the ways of helping public authorities bring about change to environmentally sustainable household food practices. Design/methodology/approach-The authors identified the practices involved in this concept from the consumer perspective and measured their diffusion among French households. The analyses were conducted following two successive data collection campaigns comprising 571 and 501 respondents in France. The methodology involved two complementary scaling techniques: factor analysis and item response theory. Findings-The results show that consumers understand sustainable food through five food practices: buying and cooking products with sustainable attributes, anti-waste storage, self-production, plant protein consumption and anti-waste cooking. Originality/value-The findings suggest that while at the individual level people appear to have incorporated anti-waste practices into their daily lives, at the household level, there is still work to be done for improving diets and stimulating the production of home-grown food. It is also worth noting that the emerging vision typically involves sustainable foods that are organic, locally grown, seasonal, based on fair trade and packaging-free.