Sustainable Food Systems and Diets

Sustainable food systems and diets is an 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 four themes:

• Environmental sustainability of food systems: this theme will introduce life cycle assessment as a methodology to assess the environmental impacts of food production, considering the whole production chain, including agricultural practices, production and use of farm inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, food processing, waste recycling, transportation and retail. Impacts on the climate and the environment of different types of foods will be discussed, as well as potential trade-offs between environment and other sustainability aspects.
• Consumer acceptance and perception of diets with lower environmental impact: exploring plant-based alternatives, foods rich in alternative proteins; upcycled foods and insect-containing foods. This topic addresses issues that can be barriers to the widespread adoption of sustainable diets among Danish and European consumers. It includes discussions of strategies to increase acceptance of the less environmentally impactful alternatives.
• 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. Include discussions of dietary/nutritional quality based on the NOVA food classification and the use of dietary guidelines.
• Food ethics, food economics and value chain aspects will be three social science inputs to understanding issues relating to sustainability dimensions of the dietary aspects in food systems. All three dimensions are crucial in order to be able to assess sustainability aspects in relation to diets and to be able to discuss the dilemmas and trade-offs that follow decisions on how to optimize sustainability in diets.  

The course features a comprehensive analysis of sustainability of a self-selected and a given meal in relation to the four 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 in interdisciplinary and collaborative ways, which is needed to solve today´s complex problems that the food system faces.