Rewiring food systems to enhance human health and biosphere stewardship
By Line J. Gordon, Victoria Bignet, B. Crona, P. Henriksson, T. Holt, M. Jonell, T. Lindahl, M. Troell, Stephan Barthel, L. Deutsch and 4 more. 2017
162 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Food lies at the heart of both health and sustainability challenges. We use a social-ecological framework to illustrate how major changes to the volume, nutrition and safety of food systems between 1961 and today impact health and sustainability. These changes have almost halved undernutrition while doubling the proportion who are overweight. They have also resulted in reduced resilience of the biosphere, pushing four out of six analysed planetary boundaries across the safe operating space of the biosphere. Our analysis further illustrates that consumers and producers have become more distant from one another, with substantial power consolidated within a small group of key actors. Solutions include a shift from a volume-focused production system to focus on quality, nutrition, resource use efficiency, and reduced antimicrobial use. To achieve this, we need to rewire food systems in ways that enhance transparency between producers and consumers, mobilize key actors to become biosphere stewards, and re-connect people to the biosphere.
Subfields: Ecology, Food Science, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fbdf36d758f5eda4915ce3321af0e492551ce3b9
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- C. Isendahl
- Benjamin N. Vis
- A. Drescher
- D. Evans
- Arjan van Timmeren
- Stephan Barthel
Citations in the corpus
- Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land: Leverage places to mitigate impacts on SDG2 and on the Earth System (2019, background): “Between 1960 and 2005 global food imports quadrupled, leading to a more distributed access, but at the same time increasing the spatial distance between producer and consumer, creating vulnerabilities to potential spikes in food prices and cuts in trade flows (cf. Bren d’Amour et al., 2016; Clapp, 2”