The Anatomy of a Sustainable Food Strategy
Within sustainability, food systems are a significant focus because of their holistic importance across environmental and social wellness. Producing and transporting food, as well as handling food waste, is a major source of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, estimated around 14.5% worldwide. Food quality and nutrition are also a major factors in public health. Many of the leading causes of death in the developed world — heart disease, obesity, diabetes — are closely linked to dietary intake. In regions of the world with less abundance, food and water scarcity’s just as deadly.
Moreover, food’s relationship with sustainability and climate change is cyclical: as global warming and biodiversity loss increase, floods, draughts, and other extreme weather put more stress on our ability to successfully grow and produce food in many parts of the world. Everyone, from sub-Saharan farmers to California winemakers, are seeing their crops impact by the climate crisis.
Across the food value chain, many farmers, growers, sourcers, innovators, researchers, and governments are working to plan, adapt, and cultivate more sustainable food systems. Crops that resist draught. Underground dams that limit water evaporation. Plant-based meat and fish alternatives. It’s a dynamic, lively, and active space.
From a big picture, systems perspective, sustainable food strategies need to recognize and ground themselves in all these diverse considerations, including:
Environmental impact
Public health and wellness
Public education
Equity, access, and inclusiveness
Economic development and innovation
One of the best recent examples of this thinking we’ve seen recently comes out of the United Kingdom, a collaboration between restranteur and former management consultant Henry Dimbleby, the Food and Drink Sector Council, and a panel of academic, agriculture, and business leaders. Working together, the group released the UK’s first National Food Strategy (NFS), a policy and action guide for promoting sustainable food systems throughout the UK.
What’s notable about the NFS is it’s well-researched, comprehensive, and highly considerate of economics, human behavior, and existing social systems. It really does (ambitiously) try to push the entire British food system towards broader sustainability.
You’re of course welcome to read it yourself, but we’ll also offer some summary thoughts and commentary here.
The report itself splits its recommendations (summarized below) into four categories: (1) reduce junk food, (2) reduce dietary inequality, (3) use land more sustainably, and (4) shift food culture long-term:
Source: nationalfoodstrategy.org
And, as we mentioned before, the report’s recommendations and findings also map to the five impact or materiality themes we mentioned above:
Environmental impact
Public health and wellness
Public education
Equity, access, and inclusiveness
Economic development and innovation
Each is addressed across multiple interconnected recommendations.
Environmental impact
For environmental impact, the report recommends (a) investing £1 billion in food system innovation, (b) investing another £500m–£700m in carbon removal and natural habitat restoration, and (c) setting clear, long-term, science-based agricultural targets.
Interestingly, the plan calls for major, transitional farmer equity support to incentivize farmers to convert less agriculturally productive land (and high-carbon meat farming) into carbon-capture zones and forests. By paying farmers to make the shift, farmers are incentived to move away from meat/livestock and carbon-intensive or inefficient farming practices toward carbon-neutral approaches and sustainable land management. In effect, NFS would pay the meat industry to shrink itself.
Public health and wellness
NFS actively targets junk food and its health consequences with the nutritional equivalent of a carbon tax: add a £3/kg levy on sugar and a £6/kg surcharge on salt sold for use in processed foods, restaurants, and catering. By charging extra for salt and sugar’s health externalities, the tax should incentivize manufacturers to reformulate products, as well as disincentivize consumers to buy those products in the case where manufacturers pass the costs through.
By creating economic disincentives for unhealthy junk food, the NFS sugar and salt tax is designed to achieve a better cost and availability balance between healthy, natural foods and highly processed foods.
Based on NFS modeling, the potential reduction in sugar and salt consumption alone could “completely halt weight gain at a population level,” increase UK economic output by up to £5.7B, reduce National Health Service (NHS) costs by additional billions, and increase the average British citizen’s life expectancy by 0.6–1.8 months per person. Quite an impact for a modest junk food tax.
“We know that preventing disease is much more cost-effective than treating it,” notes NFS.
In parallel, NFS also focuses on improving youth nutrition through healthier school lunches and other mechanisms. To address the potential unintended consequence of food price inflation for low-income families, NFS proposes additional measures to ensure low-income households get financial support to buy healthier foods.
Public education
Noting that UK childhood obesity rates more than double during primary school, another major pillar of the NFS is public education around food and nutrition. Schools should adopt a “whole school approach” that integrates “food into the life of the school,” says NFS. That includes more curriculum to teach nutrition, subsidizing healthy food availability, and broadening eligibility for free school meals.
The report also suggests the UK government trial a “Community Eatwell” program to provide targeted healthy eating support for low income households. The program would make it easy for low income individuals to talk to a nutritionist and receive a farmshare subscription for free or discounted fruits and vegetables.
“The exact makeup of the programmes should be designed locally, to take advantage of existing facilities and initiatives, and make sure the programmes respond to local needs,” recommends NFS.
Equity, access, and inclusiveness
Another key NFS recommendation is expanding the UK’s Healthy Start voucher program to all households earning under £20,000 with pregnant women or children under five, and promoting the program more to increase participation. Healthy Start provides weekly vitamins and vouchers to buy up to £4.25 worth of fruit and vegetables.
With a joint focus on local solution design, existing program infrastructure, broader marketing, and lowering economic and lifestyle barriers to getting healthy, fresh foods, NFS directly targets the key barriers to food inequality: affordability, access, awareness, and convenience.
“The healthiest products in the Nutrient Profile Model scoring system… cost over six times more per calorie than the least healthy products,” notes NFS. “The poorest 10% of people in Britain would have to spend almost three-quarters of their disposable income on food in order to eat in line with the Government’s recommended Eatwell Guide. But convenience and knowledge also play a role. People on low incomes are less likely to have access to a car and therefore less able to travel out of their area or transport food in bulk. They may not have a fridge or freezer. Finally, they may lack knowledge about the benefits of fruit and vegetables in preventing disease.”
Economic development and innovation
It’s important to consider both environmental and economic sustainability in social problem-solving. From our standpoint, this is perhaps the weakest or least developed area of NFS.
On one hand, virtually all of the NFS’s recommendations and programs “pay for themselves” by proactively avoiding longer-term economic costs and harms (i.e., preventing the disease instead of treating it). The budget math and forecasting is thoroughly sound. However, it’s one thing to expand social services and programs, and another thing to help them sustainably stand on their own.
In this sense, NFS’s “welfare” approach is sensible - Healthy Start, Community Eatwell, and other programs and recommendations make fiscal and moral sense for better public welfare - and could be further supported by a sugar and salt tax. But we’d love to see NFS go beyond that and look at ways to create self-sustaining community wealth and prosperity. Can we develop more community gardens and urban farms? Can we help more underrepresented or low-income entrepreneurs get jobs or start businesses within sustainable food systems? While NFS does recommend £1 billion for “food system innovation,” it remains to be seen how (equitably) those funds might be allocated.
But this shortcoming aside, NFS is a thoughtful and comprehensive policy playbook for creating more sustainable, equitable food systems, and should be a resource for anyone working and problem-solving in these areas.
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