Sustainability of global food systems – from understanding to actions

by Marina Ivanović and Qianwen (Vivian) He

Multi-indicator sustainability assessment

Focusing on a system-oriented approach and considering the total value chain in food production, Dr. Mathys presented a multi-indicator sustainability assessment that takes all three important dimensions into account -- economic, environmental and societal as the most challenging one. Particularly, together with his research group, he analyzed 156 countries, applying 25 sustainability indicators across seven domains. These domains span from ecosystem stability, across societal aspects, to resilience, which was particularly important for the food systems during the Covid-19 crisis.

As one of the seven domains, they suggest Food Nutrient Adequacy, which includes nutrition and the outcomes of nutrition. For this case, they use the Nutrient Balance Score (NBS), developed by Nestle Researcher and Dr. Drewnowski, which addresses the completeness of a diet. Further, they analyze how the Food Nutrient Adequacy varies across the countries and show that countries in Europe and North America have a relatively good diet thanks to the animal-based compounded diet. However, they show that the Ecosystem Stability is rather low in these countries. Finally, their analysis shows that high-income regions perform very well on the social aspect but very poorly on environmental, food waste and health-sensitive nutrition indicators. On the other side, low-income regions have significant challenges with food safety but perform much better on food waste than many high-income countries, like Switzerland.

In the other study, which also addresses different dimensions of sustainability, they analyzed human health, nutrition, environmental and economic aspects, conducting a case study for a sustainable Swiss diet. They use the current diet in Switzerland as a reference, followed by the Recommendation of the Swiss Society of Nutrition (RSN), Vegan, Vegetarian and many others. According to their model, the RSN diet is the most sustainable and the cheapest option, which can help reduce the environmental footprint by 36% in comparison to the reference. Furthermore, they analyzed yellow pea integration into bread, cereals and pasta, partially replacing wheat in different proportions. For instance, yellow pea is a more complete nutritional ingredient and needs less fertilizers, which means that this would lead to a higher NBS and reduced carbon footprint. Most importantly, this could be done immediately in the industry, and as such could be a short-term solution for more sustainable food production.

Global food waste

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that around one-third of food was wasted or lost annually in the world. Thus, to achieve SDGs, we should also raise awareness of the global food waste issue. Dr. Mathys introduced their findings of nutritional and environmental losses embedded in food waste among 151 countries. The research concluded that the embedded environmental footprint in daily food waste on average per person is 124 g CO₂eq. Additionally, the Country-specific Wasted Daily Diets (WDD) embedded in national per capita per year food waste was introduced with an average value of 18. The WDD represents the days for which a person can be fed a healthy diet meeting the daily required nutrient intake of all 24 essential nutrients and calories.

In order to tackle the food waste problem, intervention policies and actions can be considered in the food system, including prevention, multiple R-strategies (reuse, recycle and recovery) and disposal. Waste hierarchy illustrated the rank of potential approaches based on the evaluation of environmental protection and energy consumption. Among these actions, prevention is the most favorable one, aiming to avoid food surplus and waste throughout the food supply chain.

Environmental impact of protein sources

In sustainable food processing research with a focus on insects, the Sustainable Food Processing group uses sustainability methodologies on the product and service level. Particularly, they use the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) framework, calculating the midpoint environmental and endpoint impact potentials around resources, ecosystem quality and human health.

For better sustainability in the food system, we need to reduce animal-based consumption, which further needs suggesting alternatives. For that issue, they compared some final results of the environmental impact of protein sources. For instance, they show that lab-grown, which is very popular, has a huge environmental load and is very costly so far, as it is at an early stage of the innovation cycle, with many optimization opportunities. On the other side, soybean meal is very optimized and has a highly scaled value chain. And finally, insects have a very beneficial performance, according to these results.

Further, their research assessed the environmental impacts of plant-based and insect-based products through attributional and consequential LCA approaches, indicating lower environmental impacts than established animal-based food. Besides, insect products potentially offered more sustainable protein, fertilizer and lipid production, which might be environmentally preferable compared to animal-based food and use less water and land compared to plant-based proteins. This crucial analysis could help us identify potential applications and suggest protein alternatives for more sustainable food systems.

Sustainable food supply chain

In the light of previous sustainable food processing research, Dr. Mathys presented two case studies to show more sustainable food supply chains using alternative sources of proteins, microalgae and black soldier fly. After being cultivated in algae bioreactors, the proteins and lipids in microalgae can be disintegrated and processed into quality food. Similarly, the protein of insects can be separated and made into quality food/feed. Besides, a comprehensive pulsed electric field (PEF) system was created to improve the efficiency of microalgae processing, which could enable potential applications for increased cell proliferation, targeted release of intracellular valuables, cyclic protein extraction of living microalgae, and microbial inactivation.

However, some people showed concerns about the acceptance level of insect-based food. Dr. Mathys replied that they focus a lot on fishmeal replacement as aquaculture feed and Asians seemed to accept insect products more easily because insects already existed in their recipes. Additionally, the insect industry is growing rapidly in EU countries with relative consumers’ concerns.
In the end, Dr. Mathys also shed light on the globalization of the food supply chain after the impacts of the pandemic. He considered the global food systems were very resilient during the global health crisis, although food transportation was influenced by movement restrictions and other factors for a short period. People might tend to choose local food and support local businesses more in the future.

We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Alexander Mathys for the interesting and insightful presentation.