About this Research Topic

Background

Malnutrition provides a challenge for every country in the world, but low and middle-income countries are particularly impacted. Current trends are unfavorable: more people are going hungry and are suffering from micronutrient deficiencies, while at the same time obesity rates are rapidly increasing. This indicates that our food systems are not providing consumers with attainable and attractive options to choose diets with adequate nutritional value. In order to provide options for healthier diets, we need new innovations in our food systems that simultaneously support supply-side opportunities and demand-side motives for healthier food choices at prices that make healthier food accessible for everyone, regardless of their income. At the same time, these innovations should not compromise environmental sustainability.

In recent years, many authors described the need for a food systems approach and a number of theoretical frameworks have emerged. However, there is little known about what a food systems approach entails in practice and what multi-dimensional results have been achieved by applying these food systems approaches.

The goal of this Research Topic is to gain a better understanding of how to operationalize a food systems approach for achieving food system transitions towards sustainable healthy diets in low and middle-income countries.

Research is needed on the potential and cost-effective ways to catalyze transitions in food systems that a) guarantee that food producers and traders provide sufficient options for consumers to obtain diets with adequate nutritional value, b) establish a food environment that helps consumers make conscious and unconscious choices for healthier diets, and c) enhance consumers’ demand for healthier diets. Food system innovations could have synergies with other ongoing food system changes, leading to improved outcomes, but could also generate negative feedback loops that dampen the desired effects. In addition, food system innovations targeting diets may negatively affect other outcomes, such as environmental sustainability and inclusion of women and youth. Optimal innovations for promoting food system transitions avoid trade-offs and exploit synergies with other societal objectives.

This Research Topic welcomes Original Research, Perspectives, Policy and Practice Articles/Reviews, and Reviews. Contributions addressing ways to operationalize the food systems approach for achieving food system transitions towards sustainable healthy diets could range from priority setting exercises with stakeholders, to processes and examples of co-designing innovations with the public and/or private sector, to the evaluation of specific food system innovations. Potential research questions are (but are not limited to):
- What are the priorities for researchers and policy-makers for sustainable food systems and healthier diets?
- How can innovations for healthier diets promote environmentally sustainable production that increases healthy food availability while reducing product waste and losses?
- Which aspects of the food environment, e.g. food availability, prices, vendor and product properties, and promotional information, can be changed to induce healthier consumer choices?
- How do different groups of people respond to different innovations, particularly at the consumer level, and how do gender and age influence the composition of a healthy diet?
- What gender-accommodating or gender-transformative food system innovations could reduce gender discrepancies in healthy diets and malnutrition?
- How can we engage (public and private) stakeholders to bring food system innovations to a larger scale?
- What are the existing or needed institutional and social innovations that can be used to bring to scale selected successful food system innovations?

We encourage the use of robust qualitative and/or quantitative methods.

Keywords: Food Systems, Food System Innovations, Diets, Nutrition, Food Environment, Consumer Choice, Value Chains, Low and Middle Income Countries

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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