WHAT WE WILL DO
The food that we grow, transport, process and eat makes a huge impact on our planet. Technological improvements on farms, changes in the way that we process and transport food, and reductions in food waste can all help reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the food system. But we cannot hope to meet Net Zero targets without changing our diets by reducing the amount of meat consumed in high income countries like the UK.
Changing our diet to reduce its planetary impact could potentially have co-benefits for our health. Poor diets are a major risk factor for disease in the UK, and the health impact of poor diets are not felt equally across the country. On average, less affluent groups are less likely to meet dietary recommendations and more likely to have diet-related diseases like overweight / obesity and diabetes.
The THRIVING Food Futures research hub will help policymakers implement policies that will move us towards healthy, equitable and sustainable diets.
We will
- Establish a new transdisciplinary network of experts in theory, policy and practice of healthy, equitable and sustainable diets.
- Design a Nutrient and Environment Profiling Model that provides a standard definition of unhealthy, unsustainable foods
- Deliver new digital research tools to support better evaluations of dietary interventions
- Establish a prioritised set of policies based on the views of policymakers and citizens
- Run field trials of the policies and interventions to demonstrate what is, and what is not, effective at driving healthy, equitable and sustainable diets
- Write guidance for decision-makers in the food system, based on robust, co-produced evidence
Our work packages
1. Community engagement
We will work with diverse publics in community panels and citizens juries to ensure our research and strategic direction is informed by the priorities of people’s lived experiences. To do this we will recruit a community panel to discuss, scrutinise and improve research design and inform our wider public engagement plans. We will also establish citizens juries who will be tasked with identifying the most promising Net Zero food system policy options.
2. Tools and metric development
We will develop a Nutrient and Environment Profiling Model – an algorithm for classifying and ranking foods based on both their nutritional content and environmental impact. Such a model can support policies for healthy, sustainable diets. We will extend the FoodMetric Toolkit into a data pipeline for estimating the environmental impact of multi-ingredient foods. We will develop smartphone apps that allow us to collect data on online food purchasing (e.g. online supermarkets; food delivery companies) and deliver interventions in real-life shopping scenarios.
3. Policy understanding
We will explore the policy options for achieving Net Zero targets. This will include conducting a rapid review of the policy landscape and synthesising the perspectives of key stakeholders to identify policy priorities and global best practice for healthy, sustainable and equitable diets. We will also develop a typology of policy functions (mechanisms) to support healthy, sustainable and equitable diets with evidence to demonstrate which functions are more effective.
4. Policy optimisation
Using findings from Work Packages 1 and 3, we will provide a thorough understanding of how identified polices would affect the UK citizen-facing food system and sit alongside the existing policy landscape. We will prioritise policies to evaluate in field trials and explore how proposed policies would co-exist with the current policy landscape.
5. Field trials
Using tools developed in Work Package 2, we will run field trials of interventions and policies that are matched to the policies identified in Work Packages 1 and 3, and those prioritised by Work Package 4. These trials will take place in real-life food purchasing settings with input from the public through our community panel and citizens’ panel.