How to achieve more equitable, sustainable, and healthy diets at scale?

Transforming our food systems is essential for improving global health and addressing social and environmental challenges in a world with limited resources, growing population, overconsumption practices, and rife with inequity. However, despite progress, achieving equitable healthy food consumption across societies remains a daunting challenge.

The complex behavior of food production and consumption

In a recent paper my co-authors and I argue that successful transformative change requires recognizing food production and consumption as dynamically complex systems. The behavior of such systems results from interactions among various actors – different consumers, producers, retailers, NGOs, governments, etc. – each responding in their way to changes they observe within the system. For example, consumers not familiar with preparing fresh food meals are unlikely to suddenly buy fresh products even if these appear in retail outlets. In turn, retailers will not take the risk of offering these foods if consumers are not considering these. Or, willingness to try healthier food options may grow with repeated exposure through peers already doing so, but for those peers to become adopters they themselves need to learn through others. Such two-way relations point to the presence of self-reinforcing feedback loops giving rise to chicken-and-egg problems. When many such feedback loops exist and interact, a system can lock into established practices and resist change efforts. Further, there are many delays in such systems – it takes time for companies to move ideas from R&D to profitable innovation, consumers need to get used to new tastes, small shop holders need to discover how to offer perishable foods profitably. This strengthens the grip of established patterns of production and consumption. As a result, many well-intended individual interventions, whether by firms, NGO, or governments, are likely to have limited impact or may even completely fail.

The role of market infrastructure

Understanding these feedback mechanisms is therefore vital to identify not only barriers to, but also drivers of change. In our research we examined this problem for the challenge of achieving healthy equitable food at scale within the North American context. We first characterized the feedback relations, focusing on the role of market in the production and consumption of food. Combining knowledge from existing research and detailed data on the Province of Québec, we identified and characterized three main interdependent market transformation mechanisms. These involve the following three dimensions:

• industry capabilities to produce competing healthy food options: affordability, convenience, etc.
• consumer consideration: familiarity with alternative products, tastes, preparation methods, etc.
• systems & institutions: availability and visibility of foods, including in local outlets and of more perishable products, reliable distribution to places where needed, etc.

Together these make up the social and material “market infrastructure” through which the feedback relations operate (see figure below, boxes). Scrutinizing the market infrastructure state of development allows seeing how easy or how hard it is to change the system for a population segment. For example, for most lower socio-economic status communities, all three dimensions tend to be underdeveloped. This in turn helps explain the challenge of changing established food consumption and production patterns. The systems view, and the notion that market infrastructure itself is produced through the system interactions (see figure, blue links between variables), thereby also underscores that healthy eating is not just a personal choice. Rather, our choices result from a complex set of interactions within a local and global food system.

Changing the food system: The need for collective action

The good news of the behavior of complex adaptive systems is that with sufficient suitable systemic efforts, these same feedback loops can come to operate in a virtuous rather than in a vicious direction leading to transformative change. To identify leverage points for transformative change, we converted our characterizations of the system and the market infrastructure for different demographics into a computational model. We then simulated the system’s responses to diverse real-world-like interventions. Such interventions include for example for-profit (FP) firms dedicating intense R&D efforts to develop functional foods, or not-for-profits (NFPs) developing “complete meal” ready-to-eat soups for lower income households or training programs for cornerstones to carry fresh foods. Others include governments launching enhanced food nutrition guides or offering grants or imposing regulation to help drive purposive innovation and production, or NGOs promoting fruits and vegetable consumption or providing funds for low-income households to purchase nutritious food. Engaging these interventions individually and jointly, using as key metrics “scale”, “equity-improvement”, and “health-oriented induced innovation”, we compared impacts against a no-intervention baseline. A key finding is that strong and lasting equitable impacts must leverage the synergistic effects across all market infrastructure dimensions. We then demonstrate the essential role of collective efforts – across private and public actors, including FP producers, social entrepreneurs, NFPs, governments, consumers, and other intermediaries – to help build a market infrastructure that supports self-sustaining equitable production and consumption of healthier foods at scale.

Moving beyond collective action

Our systems analysis also shows that transforming our food systems requires more than well-targeted initiatives. Self-sustaining equitable healthy food at scale in a resource constrained world implies that we must come to see food production as a semi-public good. Thus, rather than serving as a mere engine for economic growth, the value-creation efforts of the private sector should be more inclusively defined. Various actors, including NFPs, must guide the processes that help create a level playing field, shift norms and expectations, and spur creativity in a direction of societal-value creation. To help this, more public-private interactions and development of lasting new coopetition models are critical.

Beyond altered views on production and distribution, consumer behavior is also key, given the importance of peer-influence in considering alternative ways of consuming. Achieving sustainable and equitable food consumption requires substantial behavioral changes at all levels of society. Consumers, especially those with means, can be leaders in lifestyle changes beyond simple product choices, including revised food purchasing, preparation, and reduced consumption. Thus, beyond technological innovation, success demands transformations across individual (lifestyles and livelihoods), professional (mindsets, skills, practices), organizational (business models, practices, and supply chains), and systemic (policy, political economy, culture) levels. Solutions must encompass cross-disciplinary collaborations involving diverse sectors and jurisdictions.

In summary, transforming our food systems requires more than search for successful change initiatives. New research must examine how society can move towards a system that integrates healthy eating with economic goals. In the paper, we demonstrated how one may identify and analyze market mechanisms that both resist and enable food system change and so find high-impact interventions for sustainable change at scale. Our research with focus on North America can be seen as a testcase for helping policy for food system transformation (and, in fact, sustainability transformations) more generally, whether at the local, national, or global level. The key is to guide market mechanisms towards promoting healthier, more equitable eating habits that align with Earth’s resources.