Reaching Across the Metaphorical Divide: Understanding Sustainable Diets and Food Systems

Jeffrey Sachs did it. In his address to the International Conference on Nutrition 2 (ICN2) in Rome on the 20^th November 2014, Sachs challenged the nutrition community to develop better metrics around what is meant by hunger, adequate nutrition and sustainable food systems. He is not alone.

Recommending diverse diets

The ICN2 Framework for Action continues the fondness of global agendas to call for no less than 60 recommendations in all. Recommendation 10 ambitiously states: “Promote the diversification of crops including underutilized traditional crops, more production of fruits and vegetables, and appropriate production of animal-source products as needed, applying sustainable food production and natural resource management practices.”

Efforts to sustainably feed populations have dominated us for thousands of years. Fifty years ago, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” brought the concerns about our engagement with the environment into the homes of millions and firmly on the policy table. The 1996 World Food Summit included a detailed plan of action for achieving food security in an environmentally sustainable way. And this message has been reinforced in many global and national meetings since then. The Common Vision statement from the Rio+20 Summit in 2012, “The Future We Want” calls for sustainable development and for “the promotion of an economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable future for our planet and for present and future generations.” This was reinforced with the Sustainable Development Goals presented at the UN in 2014. It is not only at global forums that this message is repeated. Consumer groups, many large companies (Mars, Unilever, Nestle, and others), and Governments, such as Ireland, have policies and strategies in place to produce, procure, and purchase sustainable raw materials, processed foods and water. The global dietary transition towards more processed, energy dense and high sodium foods has seen a renewed interest in dietary guidelines shaping healthier eating patterns in such places as Brazil, the Netherlands, the Nordic Countries, the United Kingdom and efforts in countries where lobbying from commodity and industry groups is fierce, such as Australia and the USA.

Divide between food systems and nutrition

There is a shift in focus among various sectors with a call for trans-disciplinary work on food systems. Part of the metaphorical divide comes about as a result of the need to understand and promote the health of populations and ecosystems but the tension has spurred an exciting and rapidly evolving area of study. The ongoing work on climate change is an excellent point of reference with lots of lessons on the science, the metrics, and most importantly, the political economy and just plain politics of understanding and moving on complex systems.

Selecting chilies for market in Peru. Photo by Bioversity International/X. Scheldeman

The many efforts to examine national diets in terms of their environmental impact using measures like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions illustrate the importance of context, availability of data and what goes into a model. Examples include the UK by Macdiarmid and her colleagues and for France by Vieux and his colleagues. The choices of the measures of diet, environmental impact, price and other dimensions in modelling are important and are still an area for more work. Modelling complex systems represents a major challenge for us and reflects the early stage of our work but also the opportunities for simple metrics, simpler choices and doable policy options.

What makes a sustainable diet?

We began our own work on Sustainable Diets and Food Systems in 2012 by building on the work of FAO which gave definition to the term and a roadmap for moving forward. At the centre of that roadmap was a need to identify a framework in which metrics could be developed to describe, monitor and assess sustainable diets and food systems. We recently published a paper in Advances in Nutrition that reviews sustainable diets with the view to peel back the many layers of a complex topic. A graphic we used in the article (see below) illustrates the overlapping components each with its own vocabulary, advocates and measurement systems. Our work in metrics demanded that we capture these dimensions. We drew inspiration from the work on the multi-dimensional poverty index by researchers at the University of Oxford and others. What Akire and Foster did was to enable the unidimensional and inadequate measures of poverty to include different and much needed dimensions of nutrition, gender, inequity, distribution and other factors that has transformed a score card on income to a score that now populates World Bank reporting and continues to titillate the metrics community.

From the paper “Understanding sustainable diets: a descriptive analysis of the determinants and processes that influence diets and their impact on health, food security, and environmental sustainability,” in Advances in Nutrition.

We are not alone in this work. We are working with partners including the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, the Eat Initiative, FAO and many others to study and promote sustainable diets and food systems. We are at the end of the first phase of a multi year endeavour to develop the metrics for sustainable diets that enable us to describe it and monitor changes over time. In early November in Montpellier, we brought together approximately 50 people from academic and policy organizations from Europe, North America and Sub Saharan Africa to learn about our work with CIHEAM-IAMM, Carasso Foundation, and the CGIAR including several research programmes. This collaboration has resulted in important papers in peer-reviewed journals. We have laid out the framework for the metrics and engaged in a process to prioritize the measurement system using the Delphi method. In addition, we have held three global symposiums at Madrid (2012), Grenada (2013) and Montpellier (2014) attended by approximately 500 people which brought together speakers and participants from multiple disciplines and regions. Most significant in a field that is trans-disciplinary, we have new partnerships and networks around Sustainable Diets and Food Systems with a) Bioversity and French and Regional CIHEAM-IAMM’s own group of about 36 experts in metrics, nutrition, economics, ecology and agriculture; b) Bioversity’s partnership with the Stordalen Foundation and its EAT Initiative; and c) a formal link and proposal development with the Food Climate Research Network at the University of Oxford.

Transporting bananas in Benin. Photo by Bioversity International/B. Vinceti

Shift to multi-dimensional thinking

We recognize that what we are dealing with when discussing Sustainable Diets and Food Systems is complex. We recognize that understanding the determinants, factors, and processes that comprise a sustainable diet will become increasingly important with economic growth, climate change, and dietary transitions. The definitions of a sustainable diet can be unwieldy and confusing at times. Also the models we are developing are often inadequate and naïve.

We recognize that there needs to be a shift in thinking about diets from a single dimension of a nutrient, a food or even nutritional adequacy to an understanding of diets that incorporates aspects of access and affordability of foods, environmental sustainability, and cultural acceptability. Professor Sachs was right at the ICN2 but he only challenged us for assembling part of the Rubric’s cube. Sustainable diets highlight how food production and food consumption are interconnected and ecosystem dependent. This, in turn, requires an enhanced understanding of what composes a sustainable diet, how the level of sustainability is measured, and identification of the impacts and tradeoffs involved in promoting. Evidence of what works, the trade-offs needed and the metrics to support systems need to be developed. Most of all, there is a need for a dialogue. A safe space for negotiation on terminology, options, and approaches. For this we need to work with consumers, producers, manufacturers and the many disciplines that make up this work. We cannot do it alone but must rely on the support from some and the partnerships with many. A genuine trans-disciplinary approach to problem solving. We welcome an opportunity to develop this new and important focus area.