Sustainable Diets

How Ecological Nutrition Can Transform Consumption and the Food System

Pamela Mason, Tim Lang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317770022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Nutrición, dietética y bariatría

How can huge populations be fed healthily, equitably and affordably while maintaining the ecosystems on which life depends? The evidence of diet's impact on public health and the environment has grown in recent decades, yet changing food supply, consumer habits and economic aspirations proves hard.

This book explores what is meant by sustainable diets and why this has to be the goal for the Anthropocene, the current era in which human activities are driving the mismatch of humans and the planet. Food production and consumption are key drivers of transitions already underway, yet policy makers hesitate to reshape public eating habits and tackle the unsustainability of the global food system.

The authors propose a multi-criteria approach to sustainable diets, giving equal weight to nutrition and public health, the environment, socio-cultural issues, food quality, economics and governance. This six-pronged approach to sustainable diets brings order and rationality to what either is seen as too complex to handle or is addressed simplistically and ineffectually. The book provides a major overview of this vibrant issue of interdisciplinary and public interest. It outlines the reasons for concern and how actors throughout the food system (governments, producers, civil society and consumers) must engage with (un)sustainable diets.

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Chapter 1

Sustainable diets

Welcome to the arguments

Contents

Core arguments

Sustainable diets: both a practical and conceptual problem?

Sustainable diet as code for better consumption

The intellectual case for sustainable diets

Reactions to the case for sustainable diets

The framework used in this book: six key headings

References

Core arguments

This chapter introduces the terrain and key ideas explored in this book. It outlines what is meant by the notions of sustainable diets and sustainability, and describes the practical and conceptual problems of sustainability and food. We introduce some key debates and problems. Not everyone favours exploration of sustainable diets. Some question whether it matters, others whether sustainable diets are possible, and there are serious discussions about how and whether human health and environmental health conflict or coincide. The chapter sets out the framework for the book. It summarises the conventional approach to sustainability as being about three overlapping concerns – environment, society and economy. Instead, we propose that food requires a more subtle and complex combination of factors, arguing that sustainable food and diets can usefully be viewed under six broad headings: quality, health, environment, social values, economy and governance. These headings form the structure for this book and, after a look at indicators, are addressed in turn in Chapters 3–8.

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Sustainable diets: both a practical and conceptual problem?

This is a book about sustainable diets or sustainable eating. This simple two-word phrase – sustainable diet – has become associated with a variety of meanings. The word ‘sustainability’ is tricky enough. It means different things to different people. It entered everyday and policy language in the 1980s to provide a different set of criteria by which human activity could be judged, and mainly to try to achieve a better alignment of environmental, economic and societal goals. In common parlance the word came to refer to living in a manner that is environmentally benign. The meaning narrowed in common usage to refer to the capacity of the environment (or what is often now referred to as ‘ecosystems’) to maintain humanity. Yet the wider meaning remains crucial. Even if people want to use the word ‘sustainable’ only to mean the environmental, they have also to consider how other factors impinge on the environment. In practice sustainability can be highly contested, as this book shows. Sustainability in food and diets can be interpreted in either a soft or hard way. One could choose a meal, for example, and claim that this or that feature is environmentally sound or that it is slightly healthier than normal (implying some sacrifice on what would be ideal or normal). Or, on the other hand, one could be rigorous and only eat a total diet across a month or year measured as being low fat, low sugar, low salt, low carbon, low impact everything. The soft version implies minor choice change. The harder version could be made to sound like a culinary hair shirt. Yet both versions could lay claim to being sustainable. Also, both versions have to draw upon other factors than the environment such as culture, cost, values, production, social norms and more. This book explores what is entailed if whole societies really want to eat more sustainably.

What about the ‘diet’ word? And food? While people mostly think they know what is meant by food or diets, these too can mean different things. Food is nutrients and is essential for the maintenance of human life, but humans are not the only species that eat. Food sits in a web of relationships both human and non-human: plants, climate, animals, insects – the web of life in a Darwinian sense. Diet and food also have cultural meanings. What people eat varies by social class, ethnicity, culture, income, history, aspiration and occasion. Feast-day diets are exceptional. But what if any society starts to eat feast-day diets everyday? This change of dietary pattern is precisely what happened in the twentieth century in the rich world, and it has spread around the world rapidly with economic development in the twenty-first century. This dietary shift or nutrition transition, as it is called, has got to the point where the rich world eats as though there are multiple planets, and yet its diet is seen as optimal – feast-day food on most days.

The word ‘diet’ is not just a matter of the food. Like the environment, the word ‘diet’ carries baggage and its reality is shaped by socio-cultural pressure such as human preferences, availability, normality, cost, moral values. What you like to eat might not be what others like and vice versa. Diets are more complex than the simplicity of the word implies. The word refers to the total intake of foods across a period of time. It is more than a meal; it’s a sequence and even a lifetime of meals, a total dietary intake and pattern. In that respect, diet is about normality, habits, acculturation, what people eat conventionally across a year or their full lifespan. Seen in that way, as social scientists and nutritionists all agree, trying to capture what a diet is at the population level requires considerable tracking of data. A snapshot of one meal or one day may not convey the longer term shifts in dietary patterns. That is why longitudinal studies are so interesting and important for policy makers.

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What happens if these two deceptively simple terms – sustainable + diet – are put together as ‘sustainable diet’? The complexities multiply. If scientists want to measure the sustainability of diet in the USA or Europe, can they use the same indicators as in Africa, India or China? Also, is a sustainable diet the same in the USA or Europe as in Africa, India or China? Doesn’t what people eat make a difference to any evaluation? And what about cultural, economic or terrain differences? We should note, too, that sometimes the phrase is used in the singular ‘sustainable diet’, sometimes in the plural ‘sustainable diets’; in this book we use both.

The term is often used to refer to both health and environment, and to encapsulate the multiple goals of eating well for human health, in a manner that causes least environmental damage or, at best, even promotes environmental resilience, and that meets other socio-economic and cultural goals. But what does health imply and what is environmental resilience? As we show in these pages, the exploration of how food links human health with environment raises complex challenges for terminology and theory, for practicality and policy, for production and consumption, for people and the planet. Health and well-being are not just purely physiological or contextual matters. They are social, cultural, economic and policy constructs. Sustainable diet is a broad, perhaps even loose, term that signifies all this. That is why this book argues that, if the term is to be retained, consumers, producers and policy makers all need to recognise that it is more than just health + environment. As we argue in the following chapters, even if one does seek only to focus on health and environment, other values and considerations creep in. One cannot understand ‘the environment’ without bringing in the economy, culture and more. It is arbitrary and narrow, moreover, to restrict ‘health’ to the purely physiological because, for example, bodily functions are framed by social location, life chances, culture and history.

Before you, the reader, cast the book aside, thinking that this is a study in philosophy or epistemology (the theory of knowledge), and that the clarification of sustainable diets is impossible, let us assure you that the purpose of the book is to unpick some of the complexity and looseness to get at the practical matters that need to be addressed. We do this throughout, but especially in the final chapters. We also propose a simple but pragmatic template for ‘sustainability’, which enables you – whether your interest is the pursuit of better eating or better policy or supply – to think practically about how to reduce impact and improve prospects. The six headings we use to investigate sustainable diets are a useful heuristic for everyday life. A sustainable diet is one that optimises good sound food quality, health, environment, socio-cultural values, economy and governance.

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On these fronts the evidence from science is becoming overwhelming and clear. The good news is that the academics are offering some broad pointers as to what a sustainable diet is and must be. The bad news is that this poses some tricky problems for policy makers and some food industries, particularly associated with meat and dairy and highly processed foods. It also poses a challenge to consumers who are highly divided globally and over- and mal-consuming in the West while under-consuming in low-income countries. Food culture is awry. Consumers eat only partially aware of the consequences. The strength of evidence on all this is why academics are becoming firmer in their advice. There is agreement within the natural and social sciences concerned with food that the twenty-first-century food system is in a troubled state, and that the consequences of not changing course are serious. What humanity eats ...