Abstract
With the growing recognition of the food system for a transformation toward sustainability, there is a need for future guidance on food consumption and policy. In particular, dietary guidelines (DGs) have received increasing attention as potential tools for enabling transformative change. This paper analyzes how and to what extent different state and non-state actors in Switzerland incorporate sustainability aspects in their dietary guidelines. It examines how these DGs account for different dimensions at the basis of sustainability thinking, including the classic environmental, economic, and social dimensions as well as issues of health and governance. Our analysis shows the explicit inclusion of sustainability aspects in all DGs of the chosen actors in Switzerland, addressing at least one sustainability category predominantly. Through the analysis of the different stakeholders, different areas of focus become apparent, with each stakeholder covering specific niches of sustainability. On this basis, the transformative role of non-state actors in developing the concept of sustainable diets is discussed.
Highlights
Confronted with anthropogenic challenges, humanity urgently needs to begin operating within planetary boundaries—nine biological and physical thresholds that define the "safe operating space" for humanity [1]
Selection within each sector was based on the following criteria: First, we selected the stakeholder with the largest sphere of influence within a sector. It was examined whether the stakeholder provides dietary guidelines or recommendations in English or German that are accessible to the general public and are not older than 2015, except for the official food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) of Switzerland, the current version of which was published in 2011
While different stakeholders cover niche-specific aspects of sustainability, we identified recurrent gaps in economic and social sustainability content: The economic sustainability aspect is almost absent, which is surprising given the significance of markets and neoliberal forms of governance for food system transformation at local and global scale [55,56,57]
Summary
Confronted with anthropogenic challenges, humanity urgently needs to begin operating within planetary boundaries—nine biological and physical thresholds that define the "safe operating space" for humanity [1]. Agriculture, in particular, is a significant contributor to climate change and the greatest driver of transgressions of other planetary boundaries: biosphere integrity and biochemical flows (related to human-induced changes in global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles), along with land-system use, and freshwater use [5]. The literature about dietary guidelines (DGs), called nutritional guidelines or food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs), often refers to the official dietary recommendations released by country governments. Dietary guidelines were originally created with the purpose of providing recommendations from the government to the population on what constitutes a healthy diet. The idea of food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) was born at the Joint FAO/WHO consultation in 1995, with the aim of making dietary recommendations more accessible to the general public who think in terms of foods instead of nutrients [25]. Thereafter, FBDGs has become the common term when referring to country official DGs
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