Modelling Local Food Policy and Greenhouse Gas Emission Due to Transportation

Food Systems: Food Miles

Summary Introduction The aims of this thesis are twofold; firstly, it aims to increase the understanding of the extent to which community gardens enhance social cohesion for those involved; secondly, it aims to gain insight into the importance community gardeners attach to food growing per se, and the extent to which participants perceive community gardens as an alternative to the industrial food system. I define community gardens as a plot of land in an urban area, cultivated either communally or individually by people from the direct neighbourhood or the wider city, or in which urbanites are involved in other ways than gardening, and to which there is a collective element. Over the last years, community gardens have sprung up in several Dutch cities. Although there are various reasons for an increasing interest in community gardens, there are two that I focus on in this thesis in particular. The first is the assumption made that community gardens stimulate social cohesion in inner-city neighbourhoods, to be seen in the light of the 'participatory society'. The second is community gardens' contribution to the availability of locally produced food, in the context of an increased interest in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs). The Dutch government aims to transform the Dutch welfare state into a participatory society in which citizens take more responsibility for their social and physical environment. This way the government not only hopes to limit public spending, but also wishes to increase social bonding and the self-organisational capacity of society. Community gardens fit the rhetoric around the participatory society, as they are examples of organised residents taking responsibility for their living environment. Moreover, the literature suggests that gardens are physical interventions that may decrease isolation by acting as meeting places. However, both the extent to which community gardens enhance social cohesion and under what conditions they may do so are unclear, especially as gardens come in various designs, shapes and sizes. The popularity of community gardens also seems to be related to an overall increasing societal interest in food, and can be discussed in relation to Alternative Food Networks. AFNs are food systems that are different in some way from the mainstream, and are seen as a reaction to consumer concerns about the conventional food system. They are often considered to be dictated by political motivations and injected with a 'deeper morality'. The category 'AFN' is however a heterogeneous category, as is the conventional food system; neither can be easily defined. The degree to which community gardens can be seen as AFNs is therefore unclear. While they do improve the availability of local food and operate outside of the market economy, we do not know how much and how often people eat from their gardens, nor do we know to what extent they are involved in the gardens in order to provide an alternative to the industrial food system. Hence, there is a lack of knowledge about the sense in which community gardens are alternative alternatives. Research questions The overall research question of this thesis is: What is the significance of community gardening in terms of its intention to promote social cohesion as well as its representation as an alternative food system? This broad question is instructed by the following sub-questions: Why do people get involved in community gardens? What are their motivations?How, to what extent, and under which conditions does community gardening promote the development of social relations between participants? How do participants value these social effects? To what extent do the diets of community garden participants originate from the gardens in which they are involved? What is the importance of food in community gardens?What is the importance of growing or getting access to alternative food for participants of community gardens? Methodology An important theoretical lens in this research is the theory of practice. Practices are defined as concrete human activity and include things, bodily doings and sayings. By performing practices people not only draw upon but also feed into structure. Routinisation – of practices, but also of daily life – therefore plays a central role in practice theory. Practice theory allows for an emphasis on practical reality as well as a study of motivations. This focus on how people manage everyday life, and how gardening fits within that, makes it particularly useful for this thesis. I define social cohesion as the way in which people in a society feel and are connected to each other (De Kam and Needham 2003) and operationalised it by focusing on 'social contacts, social networks, and social capital', one of the elements into which social cohesion is often broken up. This element was operationalised as 1) contacts (the width of social cohesion) and 2) mutual help (the depth of social cohesion). This research has a case study design; I studied four Dutch community gardens over a two-year period of time, and later supplemented these with an additional three cases. As practices consist of both doings and sayings, analysis must be concerned with both practical activity and its representation. I used participant observations to study practical activities, and interviews, questionnaires and document study to examine the representation of these activities. Findings Chapters 3 to 7 form the main part of this thesis. They are papers/book chapters that have been submitted to or are published by scientific journals or books. All of them are based on the field work. In chapter 3 we compare two of the case studies and determine to what extent they can be seen as 'alternative'. We argue that although reflexive motivations are present, most participants are unwilling to frame their involvement as political, and mundane motivations play an important role in people's involvement as well. By using the concept of 'food provisioning practices' we show that participants of community gardens are often required to be actively involved in the production of their food. This means that participants are both producers and consumers: the gardens show a 'sliding scale of producership'. This chapter also shows that political statements are not a perfect predictor of actual involvement in community gardening. This finding was one of the main reasons for starting to use the theory of practice, which is the main topic of the next chapter. In chapter 4 we compare one of my case studies with an urban food growing initiative in New York City. By comparing the internal dynamics of these two cases and their relations with other social practices, we investigate whether different urban food growing initiatives can be seen as variations of one single practice. We also study the question of whether the practice can be seen as emerging. In particular, we take the elements of meaning, competences and material (Shove et al. 2012) into account. We found both similarities and differences between the two cases, with the main difference relating to the meanings practitioners attach to the practice. We conclude, therefore, that it is not fully convincing to see these cases as examples of the same social practice. We also argue that urban food growing may be considered an emerging practice, because it combines various practices, both new and established, under one single heading. In chapter 5 we use the theory of practice to explore how urban food growing is interwoven with everyday life. We compare four community gardens - two allotments and two cases which we define as AFNs. We found that participants of the allotments are involved in the practice of gardening, while members of the AFNs are involved in the practice of shopping. The gardening practice requires structural engagement, turning it into a routine. The produce is a result of that routine and is easily integrated into daily meals. As AFNs are associated with the practice of shopping, they remain in competition with more convenient food acquisition venues. Eating from these gardens is therefore less easily integrated in daily life; every visit to the garden requires a conscious decision. Hence, whether members are primarily involved in shopping or in growing has an impact on the degree to which they eat urban-grown food. This shows that motivations are embedded in the context and routine of everyday life, and 'only go so far'. Chapter 6 concerns the organisational differences between the seven case studies in this thesis and the extent to which these influence the enhancement of social cohesion. We study people's motivations for being involved in the gardens and compare these with the three main organisational differences. This comparison reveals that the gardens can be divided into place-based and interest-based gardens. Place-based gardens are those in which people participate for social reasons – aiming to create social bonds in the neighbourhood. Interest-based gardens are those in which people participate because they enjoy growing vegetables. Nevertheless, all of these gardens contribute to the development of social cohesion. Moreover, while participants who are motivated by the social aspects of gardening show a higher level of appreciation for them, these social aspects also bring added value for those participants who are motivated primarily by growing vegetables. In chapter 7 we present a garden that exemplifies that gardens may encompass not only one, but indeed several communities, and that rapprochement and separation take place simultaneously. While this garden is an important meeting place, thereby contributing to social cohesion, it harbours two distinct communities. These communities assign others to categories ('us' and 'them') on the basis of place of residence, thereby strengthening their own social identities. Ownership over the garden is both an outcome and a tool in that struggle. We define the relationship between these two communities as instrumental-rational – referring to roles rather than individuals - which explains why they do not form a larger unity. Nevertheless, the two communities show the potential to develop into a larger imagined garden-community. Conclusions This thesis shows that the different organisational set-ups of community gardens reflect gardeners' different motivations for being involved in these gardens. The gardens studied in this thesis can be defined as either place-based or interest-based; gardens in the first category are focused on the social benefits of gardening, whereas gardens in the second category are focused on gardening and vegetables. Nevertheless, social effects occur in both types of gardens; in all of the gardens studied, participants meet and get to know others and value these contacts. Based on this finding, I conclude that community gardens do indeed enhance social cohesion. Place-based community gardens specifically have the potential to become important meeting places; they offer the opportunity to work communally towards a common goal, and once established, can develop into neighbourhood spaces to be used for various other shared activities. Most interest-based gardens lack opportunities to develop the social contacts that originated at the garden beyond the borders of the garden. These gardens are often maintained by people who do not live close to the garden or to each other, and those who garden are generally less motivated by social motivations per se. Important to note is that community gardens do not necessarily foster a more inclusive society; they often attract people with relatively similar socio-economic backgrounds and may support not one, but several communities. Most participants from place-based gardens eat from their gardens only occasionally; others never do so. This type of community garden can therefore hardly be seen as a reaction to the industrialised food system, let alone an attempt to create an alternative food system. Nevertheless, certain aspects of these gardens are in line with the alternative rhetoric. By contrast, most gardeners at interest-based gardens eat a substantial amount of food from their gardens, and to some of them the choice to consume this locally-grown food relates to a lifestyle in which environmental considerations play a role. However, this reflexivity is not expressed in political terms and participants do not see themselves as part of a food movement. Participants who buy rather than grow produce showed the greatest tendency to explain their involvement in political terms, but many of them have difficulty including the produce in their diets on a regular basis. I therefore conclude that community gardens cannot be seen as conscious, 'alternative' alternatives to the industrial food system. Nonetheless, the role of food in these gardens is essential, as it is what brings participants together – either because they enjoy gardening or because the activities which are organised there centre around food. Theoretical contributions In this thesis I used and aimed to contribute to the theory of practice. Using participant observations to study what people do in reality was particularly useful. It turned research into an embodied activity, enabling me to truly 'live the practice', and therefore to understand it from the inside. Deconstructing the practice of food provisioning into activities such as buying, growing and cooking was helpful in gaining an understanding of how people manage everyday life, and how food acquisitioning fits into their everyday rhythms. It sheds light on how and to what extent people experience the practice of community gardening as a food acquisitioning practice, and to what degree they relate it to other elements of food provisioning such as cooking and eating. The focus on the separate elements of food provisioning practices helped me realise that acquiring food from community gardens represents a different practice to different people; some are engaged in the practice of growing food, others in the practice of shopping for food. This thesis showed that motivations delineate how the practice 'works out in practice'; the way in which a practice such as community gardening is given shape attracts people with certain motivations, who, by reproducing that practice, increase the attractiveness of the practice for others with similar motivations. This implies that while community gardening appears to be one practice, it should in fact be interpreted as several distinct practices, such as the practice of food growing or the practice of social gathering. Motivations therefore influence a garden's benefits and outcomes. This thesis thus highlights that motivations should not be overlooked when studying practices. Apprehending the motivations of community gardeners is also an important contribution to the literature around AFNs, since it helps us to understand the extent to which urban food production is truly alternative. By studying motivations, this thesis reveals that AFNs do not necessarily represent a deeper morality, or that not all food growing initiatives in the city can be defined as alternative. However, participants of community gardens are often both producers and consumers (there is a 'sliding scale of producership'); the gardens are thus largely independent from the conventional food system. Moreover, for participants who buy produce, the meaning of the gardens often goes beyond an economic logic (there is a 'sliding scale of marketness'). Hence, while the gardens studied in this thesis are no alternative alternatives, most of them can be qualified as 'actually existing alternatives' (after Jehlicka and Smith 2011). This thesis showed that even those gardens in which the commodification of food is being challenged do not necessarily represent a deeper morality, which is contrary to what is argued by Watts et al. (2005). This implies that understanding whether or not initiatives resist incorporation into the food system is insufficient to be able to determine whether or not they can be defined as alternative food networks. However, determining whether or not deeper moral reflection is present is not a satisfactory way of defining food networks as alternative either, as this neglects the fact that motivations do not always overlap with practical reality. This suggests that establishing whether a food network can be regarded as alternative requires studying both motivations and practical reality. The thesis also raises the question to what extent the label AFN is still useful. Since it is unclear what 'alternative' means exactly, it is also unclear whether a given initiative can be considered alternative. Moreover, the world of food seems too complex to be represented by a dichotomy between alternative and conventional food systems; the gardens presented in this thesis are diverse and carry characteristics of both systems. I therefore suggest considering replacing the term AFN with that of civic food networks, as Renting et al. (2012) advocate.

How do calculative trust and relational trust influence the emergence of institutional-based trust in farmers’ markets? We fill a gap in the literature by studying how diverse forms of trust influence the way frequent consumers evaluate the institutions of a farmers’ market. We analyze a data set of 687 frequent shoppers from the U.S. state of Missouri, assessing the institutional-based trust in farmers’ markets in comparison with the level of institutional-based trust in conventional food systems. The results suggest that calculative trust plays an important role in the consolidation of institutional-based trust in local food systems. More specifically, consumers who shop frequently and live closer to a farmers’ market tend to trust more in local food systems than in conventional food systems. Likewise, affinity towards conventional food systems—i.e., convenience-oriented lifestyle preferences—seems to influence the level of institutional-based trust in local food systems. Consumers who eat out more often tend to trust less in local food systems, possibly due to the lack of repeated experiences with sellers. Following the literature, we also show that consumers search for a broader set of attributes when shopping at a farmers’ market. Even though relational trust is correlated with higher levels of institutional-based trust in alternative food systems, strong ties do not increase the trust in the information found in a farmers’ market.

Alternative Food Networks (AFN) is a concept that has emerged in opposition to conventional food systems and the global food regime. AFN are localized food networks that connect actors from food producers to consumers creating a pathway that strengthens ecological, social, and economic sustainability. Much of the literature on AFN focuses on geographies and food systems in the Global North, often recommending schemes such as farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, organic certification, and fair trade. However, these strategies are not always appropriate for food systems in the Global South. In Colombia, small producers have maintained a parallel traditional food system, despite the growing pressure and investments to transition to a conventional food system. This research analyses the local food system of Cauca addressing the following questions: 1) what are the dynamics of the local food system in the Andean region of Cauca and 2) how can the local food system in the Andean region of Cauca be conceptualized as an alternative food network in the context of the Global South? To answer these questions, transdisciplinary research was carried out using SWOT analysis during multiple stakeholder workshops, followed by a reflexive thematic analysis of the results. The results show coexistence of both traditional and conventional food system dynamics, with participants assigning greater value to traditional food systems and agroecological production (akin to AFN literature), yet the economic insecurity and socio-political unrest that underlies daily life prohibits a more robust transition from conventional food system. It is argued that the understanding of AFN should be expanded to incorporate socio-cultural context as well as the dynamics of AFN in the Global South.

Global warming caused by greenhouse gases is threatening our ecosystem. Moreover, our food system is in severe danger. Recently the local food system is emerging as an alternative food network, decreasing food miles and carbon dioxide emissions, protecting the safety of our foods, and helping local economy. However, carbon labelling for agricultural products has not been introduced yet in Korea. Accordingly, research on food miles and carbon labelling for agricultural products should be urgently conducted. The study compared the food miles and the carbon dioxide emission of major agricultural products. In addition, the food mileages of garlic and carrot are compared between Korea and China. The results show that radish has the highest carbon dioxide emission, and followed by onion and cabbage. These products are produced from Jeju island and have a high Shipment volume. Although Chinese Garlic and radish have lower shipping volume and food miles than Koreans, they have higher carbon dioxide emissions due to ship transportation. Based on these results some valuable implications can be identified. Current food distribution system, which heavily focuses on the Metropolitan area, should be changed into a local system, in which foods are consumed in the local area first then transported to other area.

There is growing recognition that the direct marketing initiatives favored by many local food activists and proponents often lack the capacity to meet rapidly expanding consumer demand for local food. To address these needs, some food systems researchers have identified a role for ‘transitional’ food systems that piggyback on the pre-existing, conventional local food system infrastructure, while moving toward the social and economic benefits of direct marketing. This paper uses a value chain model (based on business management studies and adapted to the context of agrifood enterprises) as a framework for investigating how actors who are accustomed to working within the logic of the traditional produce industry incorporate local food into their overall operations. Using a qualitative comparative case study approach, the paper examines how features of the value chain structure and governance mechanisms operate in two food distribution networks that are transitioning toward localization in a rural and an urban region of Pennsylvania, respectively. Case study analysis focuses on conventional wholesale produce distributors as the link between local producers and local buyers. Interviews with the distributors, producers and buyers reveal the sources and outcomes of challenges affecting how the distributors organize their purchasing and selling of local produce. Network practices, in turn, have equity implications as distributors struggle to pay producers enough to maintain their economic viability, while still making local produce accessible to a wide range of consumers. Policy-makers and practitioners seeking to support the ‘scaling up’ of local and regional food systems should consider targeted development of technical infrastructure in processing and distribution, as well as outreach on appropriate shared ownership models. Future research should be longitudinal to determine the longer-term role and contribution of the conventional food system infrastructure in transitioning to more sustainable local and regional food systems.

This study compares energy use for food transport to a farmers' market in Sweden with energy use for transport in the conventional food system. The farmers' market was investigated through data sampling from on-site investigations. The conventional food system was studied with the aid of life cycle assessments reported in the literature. Overall, the study found no significant differences in levels of energy use for transport to the farmers' market compared with the conventional food system. For certain products, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, transport-related energy use was much lower in the local system although the season in Sweden for this kind of product is restricted to two or three months at the end of the summer. However, there is considerable potential to increase energy efficiency in local food systems by organizing the selling in new ways and by using more energy efficient vehicles.

Local food system initiatives are an increasingly popular attempt to address environmental and social-equity problems that seem to be inherent in the conventional global food system. However, relatively few studies have been undertaken to assess the ability of local food system initiatives to ameliorate these concerns. This study focuses on a community with food system vulnerabilities related to geographic isolation and a marginal agricultural climate that limits local food production. The study seeks to develop tools to test hypotheses important to this community and others: whether local foods can be as physically and economically accessible as conventional foods. Using spatial analysis and quantitative price comparisons, the study concludes that at this time, locally grown foods in Fairbanks, Alaska, are not as accessible as conventional foods. The tools applied in this study could be used elsewhere to develop a more robust literature on the impact of local food system initiatives on urban food systems.

Conventional food systems are viewed by the literature as unsustainable in that they provide consumers with convenience while disconnecting them from producers thus leading to environmental and social problems. By contrast, sustainable or “alternative” food systems are viewed as correcting such problems. Wholesale produce auctions, which are well established in the Old Order Mennonite community, are physical sites where large quantities of produce are sold through a competitive bidding process to local buyers. These are seen as a way of better connecting producers and consumers and thus realizing a more sustainable food system. However, this potential has not been tested. Therefore, this paper explores two produce auctions in southwestern Ontario, Canada, using an interview based methodology (N = 48) and demonstrates that despite wholesale produce auctions offering many opportunities to promote the benefits of alternative food systems, produce auctions are limited in that they fail to provide a practical and functional way of distributing food to individual consumers. Overall, this research highlights what appears to be a tension in the alternative food systems literature: producers and consumers may be simultaneously looking for the sustainability benefits associated with “alternative food systems” without wanting to sacrifice any of the convenience found in conventional food systems.

International trade related food miles – The case of Canada

Most trade union approaches to climate change focus on the push for ‘green jobs’ and the need to secure rights for workers employed in industries/sectors that would necessarily be phased out as well as rights for workers in the newly created, climate-friendly jobs (‘just transition’). The shortcomings of this approach are two-fold. First, it can underestimatethe extent to which current technologies are embedded in power relations that require more than rational arguments to transform. Technology is never socially neutral. Casual talk of a ‘Green New Deal’ obscures the extent to which the Rooseveltian New Deal was a response to an unprecedented social collapse, financed through massive public investment. Market mechanisms won’t deliver what we need – global warming is the definitive ‘market failure’ – and pressure from financial markets following the global financial meltdown has led governments to attack public expenditure, including various subsidies and supports for alternative energy. Second, the ‘just transition’ approach tends to overlook that rights are never granted, but always fought for. A different approach to the global food system and its pre-eminent role inheating the planet indicates a path to a more climate-friendly system of food production through food workers’ own struggle for their rights. Approaching the issues in this way establishes workers’ struggles as a key vector for changing the food sector’s environmental footprint, rather than seeing workers as passive suppliants at the end of a hypothetical transition in which they have played no role. From this perspective, the transition is embodied in and propelled by the struggle for trade union rights; the movement itself is a constituting element in the transition. The global food system today is in permanent, deepening crisis, the matrixat the intersection of the global hunger, climate and water crises. Crisis is an overused word, and is employed here in the strictly medical sense, as a condition threatening the survival of the organism. An estimated 1.2 billion people are malnourished and hungry. Subsidised overproduction feeds the destruction of local and national food-producing systems. Our food system is addicted to diminishing sources of increasingly costly fossil fuels, depleting and destroying water and topsoil through production methods that contribute massively to global warming through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while failing itsWhile until recently much of the discussion on food and global warmingfocused on transport (‘food miles’), the food system’s largest contribution to GHG production occurs before food leaves the farm gate. According to the Stern Review (2006) (and other studies report similarresults), agriculture and land use (principally agriculture and forestry) jointly account for 32 per cent of GHG emissions – greater by far than any other single industry or sector (the Stern Review puts industry and transport at 14 per cent each – and products for agriculture like fertilizers and pesticides fall under industry in this report). If one includes processing, transport, packaging, waste, etc., the food system is responsible from 40 to as much as 57 per cent of all GHG. According to the Stern Review (Annex 7.g Emissions from the agriculturesector):Fertilisers are the largest single source (38%) of emissions from agriculture. Agricultural emissions are expected to rise almost 30% in the period to 2020 … Around half of the projected growth in emissions is expected to come from the use of fertiliser on agricultural soils. Nitrous oxide is 296 times more potent a GHG than carbon dioxide.

Whether the food movement is most likely to transform the food system through ‘alternative’ or ‘oppositional’ initiatives has been the focus of considerable scholarly debate. Alternative initiatives are widespread but risk reinforcing the conventional food system by supporting neoliberal discourse and governance mechanisms, including localism, consumer choice, entrepreneurialism and self-help. While oppositional initiatives such as political advocacy have the potential for system-wide change, the current neoliberal political and ideological context dominant in Canada poses difficulties for initiatives that explicitly oppose the conventional food system. As such, some argue that the food movement requires convergence between alternative and oppositional initiatives. In this paper, we investigate convergence using survey results from 143 food movement organizations in four Canadian provinces. Results based on cluster analysis and descriptive statistics on organizational discourse, activities and visions of sustainable food systems demonstrate convergence around neoliberal discourse and governance mechanisms. Localism and consumer education characteristics are particularly prominent, with a majority of respondents describing their organizations as ‘local’, engaging in consumer education activities, and stating the importance of consumer education activities, indicating convergence around alternative, rather than oppositional, initiatives. While convergence around these discourse and strategies may limit the transformative potential of the food system when interpreted as neoliberalisation of the movement, such a reading does not demonstrate their full potential, as survey results also indicate trends of transformative visions of change and political engagement, particularly at the municipal level. This research demonstrates that the movement can work simultaneously within, and opposed to, the conventional food system, and provides understanding of both neoliberal leanings and the politics of the possible of the food movement.

The ecological footprint of food transport can be communicated using carbon dioxide emissions (CO2label) or by providing information about both the length of time and the mileage travelled (food miles label). We use stated choice data to estimate conventional unobserved taste heterogeneity models and extend them to a specification that also addresses attribute nonattendance. The implied posterior distributions of the marginal willingness to pay values are compared graphically and are used in validation regressions. We find strong bimodality of taste distribution as the emerging feature, with different groups of subjects having low and high valuations for these labels. The best fitting model shows that CO2and food miles valuations are much correlated. CO2valuations can be high even for those respondents expressing low valuations for food miles. However, the reverse is not true. Taken together, the results suggest that consumers tend to value the CO2label at least as much and sometimes more than the food miles label.

Some have suggested that in order for local foods to reach broader consumer segments and become price-competitive with foods sold in mainstream market channels, local farmers need to scale up their production and distribution operations to match the efficiencies of the conventional food system. In this study, we take a first step in evaluating how scaling up production and distribution could make locally produced foods more competitive with the conventional food system. We compare the transportation efficiencies of the conventional and local fruit and vegetable transportation networks in Knoxville, Tennessee, and determine the Knoxville-area food system's competitive transportation zones, defined as the region in which local farmers' shorter travel distances to market give them a locational advantage in transportation over their long distance, conventional food supply chain competitors. We analyze the extent to which local farmers' scales of production and distribution affect their transportation efficiencies, and we investigate factors that could improve their competitiveness with conventional distribution networks. We find that farms located within 25 miles (40 km) of the downtown market tended to deliver their produce to market at least as efficiently as conventionally distributed foods from California. More distant farms needed to scale up their production and distribution operations to remain within the competitive transportation zones. Investigating travel distance thresholds could provide policy-makers with useful information in planning land use and infrastructure investment projects for local food systems and in designating sustainable geographic boundaries for foodsheds and local food economies.

The concepts of food security and food sustainability are two main paradigms in the food system discourse—however, they are often addressed separately in the scientific literature. We argue that this disconnect hinders a coherent discussion of sustainability transitions, which will be necessary to solve problems (environmental, social, economic, and health) generated by conventional food systems. Our review highlights linkages between sustainability transitions and food and nutrition security using the perspective of sustainable food systems. We explore the diversity of food security narratives and food sustainability paradigms in the agro‐food arena, analyze relations between food security and food systems sustainability, and suggest options to foster a transition toward sustainable food systems. It is widely acknowledged that food systems sustainability must entail long‐term food and nutrition security in its availability, access, utilization, and stability dimensions. For food systems to deliver food and nutrition security for present and future generations, all their components need to be sustainable, resilient, and efficient. These linkages between food sustainability and food and nutrition security intersect at global, national, local, and household levels. Different strategies can be pursued to foster sustainability transitions in food systems: efficiency increase (e.g., sustainable intensification), demand restraint (e.g., sustainable diets), and food systems transformation (e.g., alternative food systems). Creating sustainable food systems requires moving from an agriculture‐centered to a food system policy and research framework. This will be fundamental to foster the complex and holistic transformation necessary to achieve sustainable food systems, which is, in turn, a prerequisite to achieving sustainable food and nutrition security.