Sustainable Food Systems and Diets

Sustainable food systems and diets is and interdisciplinary course offered in collaboration by four Departments at Science KU. Based on a systemic understanding of the food system as a complex web of actors, businesses and institutions an interdisciplinary approach combining social and natural sciences will be applied within five themes:

• Aspects affecting the environmental sustainability of primary production: farming systems; type of produce, fertilizers/pesticides, trophic level of food; food security, waste recycling.
• The transformation and preservation of raw materials to maintain a good food quality (shelf life and sensory properties). Strategies to reduce waste in the food production chain, including minimization of energy and water use. Methods and technologies to utilize side-streams from production for human food consumption will be addressed.
• Nutrition, diets and health: introducing different sustainable diets and their nutritional qualities. This topic will address issues like protein/nutrient quality from meat and plants as well as novel protein sources like insects. Include discussion of dietary/nutritional quality based on the NOVA food classification and the use of dietary guidelines.
• Social and cultural aspects: aspects of social sustainability will be addressed along the importance of social and cultural factors constitute as a framework for changes of the food system. This includes the importance of social structures (culture, norms etc.) as well as the role social relations and individual factors like taste and acceptance of food technologies.
• Food policy, economics and planning: this concluding theme will address how governance towards a sustainable food system must take economic factors as well as the power of different stakeholders into account. Based on this it will be discussed, how a sustainable food policy that takes the multitude of factors into account, can be developed.

The course features a comprehensive analysis of sustainability of a self-selected and a given meal in relation to the five themes mentioned above.

Students are assigned randomly to groups and collaborate with other students from diverse fields in an interdisciplinary manner. This meal serves as a small-group case study that supports the contextual topics of the course with an application in practice. The student groups eventually prepare the meal in KU´s Gastro Science Lab, an advanced research kitchen for food exploration and innovation, and work independently to plan, develop and discuss the meal from a food systems perspective. The journey of the course allows the student to work interdisciplinary and in collaborative ways which is needed to solve today´s complex problems that the food system face.