The ambition of quite a lot of research within food studies is – more or less explicitly – to stimulate change. However, this goal takes many forms, for instance, critical discourse analysis of food politics seeking to question the current state of affairs (Warrer & Leer, 2018) or in follow-up studies of interventions which evaluate new initiatives (Andersen et al., 2017). The most overt form of research with an ambition to change things is action research (AR) (Reason & Bradbury, 2008). In this type of research, the researcher stimulates change in a collaborative process with practitioners. This approach to research has, nonetheless, a series of inherent challenges. Notably, it reframes a) the traditional role of the researcher; b) the relation between practitioners and researchers; c) the scientific and practical objectives of doing research.