The workshop on Food Planning for Sustainable Consumption and Healthier Living was coordinated by SLU representatives together with Food & Cities. It brought together an international audience of researchers, students and practitioners to explore the concept of food planning for creating sustainable foodscapes, discussing different tools within the food planning toolbox that can promote increased food awareness and healthier food consumption.
Uppsala Health Summit – Transforming food systems for human and planetary health
Our food systems - how we produce, supply and consume food – is at the heart of ongoing food and climate. Evidence-based solutions are urgently needed to understand how to transition towards sustainable food systems that support human and planetary health. The keynote speakers and workshops explored a range of different challenges, opportunities and solutions for transforming food systems.
Food systems for health
The opening keynote by Dr Francesco Branca, Director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Safety in the World Health Organization, evidenced how food systems affect health and environment through multiple pathways of interaction. The dual burden of malnutrition and obesity is a central challenge that demonstrates how unhealthy diets impact food security. Foodborne diseases, environmental contamination, and climate change impacts are central challenges illustrating the complex interface between human, animals and the environment that require multiple interventions. Dr Branca stressed the need for actions to be taken across the whole food system, which requires a holistic view of the food system and the collaboration of diverse stakeholders to create necessary policy change.
Dr Patrizia Fracassi, Senior Nutrition and Food Systems Officer, Food and Nutrition Division, FAO, explored how biodiversity and healthy diets are levers that can transform agri-food systems in the context of climate change. She highlighted that the complexity and high connectivity of the food system requires the identification of key entry points in transforming agri-food systems, which are ecosystems, the food supply chain, food environments, and consumer behavior. Dr. Fracassi argued that if these entry points are levered through biodiversity and health, they can trigger actions in other areas across the agri-food system.
Dr Namukolo Covic, ILRI Director General’s Representative to Ethiopia, International Livestock Research Institute, shared African perspectives on food systems challenges. She argued that Africa has multiple food system challenges that are specific to their contexts, such as malnutrition, poorly equipped health systems, dependency on food imports and vulnerability to climate change. She argued that Africa is in a unique position to transform its food systems by harnessing opportunities for change, generating synergies, and seizing upon the collective momentum for change. Creating visions for food system transformation could align efforts across Africa using the African experience, creating the opportunity to set a different development trajectory than developed countries and “hop over” the negative food system outcomes that are seen today.
Food system transformation: what does it mean?
The focus of the second plenary session explored the meaning of food system transformation and looking at how change happens. Dr Cass R. Sunstein, Founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School, discussed how the concept of nudge theory, forms of choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in predictable ways when it comes to improving decisions about health, Wealth, and happiness.
Dr Marie Chantal Messier, Assistant Vice-President and Global Head of Food and Industry Affairs, Nestlé, gave a private sector perspective on transforming food systems that are good for people and the planet. She shared Nestle’s strategy, ‘Generation Regeneration’, which plans to support and accelerate the transition to a regenerative food system through the creation of incentives and investments that protect and restore the environment, improve the livelihoods of farmers and enhance the well-being of farming communities.
Dr Tara Garnett, Director of TABLE and researcher at the Food Climate Research Network, Environmental Change Institute and Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, discussed the meaning of transformation with regards to the food system. She emphasized that there are different approaches to understanding the food crisis, which all hold different notions of ‘the problem’, whether this is technological insufficiency, greed, or inequality present in socio-economic systems. All stakeholders have biases of what the problem is, which leads to different understandings of what transformation looks like (from what, to what). Tara argued that the urgency of the sustainability and food crisis requires immediate change; and this should happen through processes of experimentation because our systems are paralyzed due disagreement between decision-makers and food systems actors.
Transformations on the ground
The third plenary session looked at transformations on the ground: policy, participation and ethics. Professor Corinna Hawkes, Professor of Food Policy at the University of London, told a story of the sick food system. She argued that 4 toolboxes can facilitate food system transformation: 1) A food systems approach to decision making, which leverages benefits and risks for multiple food systems objectives and that manages power relations and conflicts within these agendas; 2) Creating connections, co-benefits and synergies to align food systems for health through place-based community co-creation; 3) Creating incentives for a healthy food system economy that talks to powerful actors to re-orient policies, governance, finance, trade, and regulations towards health and sustainability objectives; and 4) the inclusion of people in decision making through understanding the lived experience of food and ensuring that healthy and sustainable food has meaning in people’s lives.
Dr. Meena Daivadanam, Associate professor in Global Health at Uppsala University emphasized the need to operationalize ‘leaving no one behind from the SDGs. She presented the SHIFT framework, which is a tool to actively enable and equity focus throughout food transformation processes. She specifically highlighted her work in mapping cardiovascular disease and how it is tightly connected to socio-economic disadvantage. Dr. Daivadanam stressed the need to engage communities in food system transformation and ensuring that people have agency in co-design processes for change.
Ms. Antje Becker-Benton, Managing Director, Behavior Change & Community Health at Save the Children, gave insights into the worsening food security situation in Uganda and Cambodia created from a complex interaction of issues like climate change, conflict, disease and bias against nomadic populations. Antje reflected upon the nature of behavioural change in these settings when it comes to nutrition and sanitation for community health. The presentation demonstrated examples of interventions, arguing that change comes from both individual and community level interventions that are multi-sectoral and consider the complexity of socio-economic, environmental and cultural issues in the given context. Interventions cannot be imposed from top-down but must be co-designed and co-owned by communities in order to sufficiently understand and address the realities on the ground.
