Q&A with Gunhild Stordalen: Feeding the world and protecting the planet with healthy and sustainable diets

Abstract

Dr. Gunhild Stordalen, the founder and executive chair of EAT, recently spoke with One Earth about her vision and mission on exploring healthy, sustainable, and suitable diets for all. The views expressed by Dr. Stordalen are hers only and not necessarily those of EAT. Dr. Gunhild Stordalen, the founder and executive chair of EAT, recently spoke with One Earth about her vision and mission on exploring healthy, sustainable, and suitable diets for all. The views expressed by Dr. Stordalen are hers only and not necessarily those of EAT. There are two ways to answer that question. First, there’s an obvious and logical link between food and medicine. What we eat is a major determinant for whether we are healthy or not. And the ways we are currently producing, processing, and consuming food in our world have become a major driver of ill health and premature death around the globe. And this simply has to change. But here’s a more personal answer to this question: Yes, I’m a doctor by training, but since childhood I’ve always been an environmental activist. And food systems have become the single biggest driver of climate change and environmental disruption, undermining the very fundament for human survival on this planet. So, when I discovered about ten years ago that nobody was really looking at food from a holistic perspective, across health, nutrition, climate, biodiversity, and social justice, I decided to do something about it. EAT is a global, science-based and -driven non-profit organization, dedicated to driving the shifts in policies, practices, and finance required to make our food systems healthier, more environmentally sustainable, and more effective in overcoming poverty and inequality. We basically do three things, and it is really the combination of the three that sets us apart: (1) curate major science initiatives to plug critical knowledge gaps, always with an interdisciplinary approach; (2) convene all relevant stakeholders in and around the entire value chain of food and across policy, business, academia, and civil society to stimulate collaborative action grounded in the science; and (3) catalyze new partnerships and initiatives to drive change. In the area of science, our greatest claim to fame is the report by the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet and Health, published in 2019. For the first time, we had a robust scientific assessment of the footprint of food globally from the twin perspectives of human health and the health of our planet. In the area of convening, it started in 2014 with the first EAT Stockholm Food Forum. We brought together academics, policy makers, business leaders, chefs, farmers, and other key actors around the critical challenges associated with our food systems. This became an annual major event and very quickly the “go-to place” for collaborative problem solving and mobilization for action. In 2017, we also hosted the EAT Asia-Pacific Food Forum in Jakarta, with the Indonesian government. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a pause of these forums, but EAT continued to play an active convening role, contributing amongst other things to the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit. In addition, EAT is frequently highly visible in other major global gatherings, including the UN General Assembly, UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COPs), the World Economic Forum (WEF), IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings, etc. Finally, in terms of catalyzing action, EAT has been centrally involved in incubating and building major new initiatives that are driving change through action: We are a founding member of the Food and Land Use Coalition; together with C40, we established a network of some 50+ major cities working to transform food systems from the demand side and inspiring the Good Food Cities Declaration, which commits 16 major cities to meet the EAT-Lancet scientific targets by 2030; we helped design, pilot, and roll out the Food Systems Dialogues, which became the model multi-stakeholder dialogue approach for national dialogues in more than 120 countries in the run-up to the UN Food Systems Summit; and we were instrumental in setting up (in 2021) and building/expanding the Good Food Finance Network as a major initiative to drive the required shifts in finance and investment into food systems, and which is now the central driving force for establishing a major Co-investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation across all relevant sources of capital into food systems—multilateral, public, private, and philanthropic. This work is part of a wider effort to achieve meaningful breakthroughs for food systems transformative action at COP28 later this year. We faced and overcame lots of challenges during the early years, in terms of how to build an effective organization, securing funding, and hammering out our strategic direction and role. And starting from scratch, it wasn’t all that obvious that we would be seen as credible and relevant out there. But all in all, I think EAT filled a real gap, a real need, and the contributions we made, such as the EAT-Lancet Commission, put us on the map as an organization that mattered. And it is important for me to stress here that we were not alone. Everything we have done has been in partnership with others, and we have been guided by a fantastic advisory board chaired by Professor Johan Rockström, whom I co-founded EAT with. The greatest contribution by the Commission was its over-arching conclusion: Yes, it is possible to feed 10 billion people by 2050 a healthy diet, within safe planetary boundaries (meaning, without wrecking the planet)—but this required major shifts in food production and consumption, and associated policies and practices. The Commission produced scientific targets and guardrails to guide the transition to healthy and sustainable food systems, including the Planetary Health Diet. This report had a major impact on global understanding and debate: we counted some 6,000 articles in the global press during the days immediately after publication, and it was ranked amongst the 20 most discussed scientific papers in the world by 2019 by Altmetrics. The report was a major contribution behind the call by the UN Secretary General to hold a UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. The report has also informed evolution in policies in several countries and regions, including most notably the European Union Farm to Fork Strategy. It also has had a very real influence on the strategies and practices of many large and small companies (e.g., the fertilizer company Yara, major food companies like Unilever and Danone, food service and retail companies like Compass Group and Lidl, and large associations of companies such as Consumer Goods Forum), cities and other constituencies (e.g., associations of farmers, networks of chefs, schools and universities that have revised their curricula, etc.). We are pleased with these impacts, but it is also very clear that it is just the beginning. If we are to bend the current trendlines, we need more action, by these and many more players. There are several levers that we need to activate; there is no single silver bullet. Awareness and understanding amongst people are of course critical. People need to know that their dietary choices are the single biggest contribution they make to their own health and the health of our planet. But this is not enough. Three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and current food policies and industry practices make it much harder than it should be to make the right choices. Take agricultural subsidies, for example, which by and large give huge preferential treatment to the production of calorie-dense nutrient-poor food and meat, while very little support is provided to the production of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. And the same goes for fiscal policies, which generally do very little to make healthy foods more affordable for people. And food industries continue their intensive marketing of unhealthy foods, much of it processed, packaged, and marketed in such a way as to make it as irresistible as possible. I am convinced that with the right incentives in place, and with the right social policies to make healthy foods more accessible for vulnerable populations, people will respond, especially as awareness increases and spreads. The most important knowledge gap, which yes, we will address in EAT-Lancet 2.0, is social justice. It will constitute the third key dimension alongside human health and the health of our planet. This will address the most important, valid, criticism of the first report. In addition, we will do three things: First, we will expand on the Planetary Health Diet by contextualizing it for different regions and countries of the world, in light of their food traditions and their conditions for food production. This will tackle a limitation of the first report as well. Second, we will be able to be more granular and precise when it comes to several of the planetary boundaries, such as biodiversity and water, and we will cover boundaries where we lacked data for the first report, namely air pollution and chemicals. Finally, we are investing in modeling capacity on par with the IPCC in order to generate robust and powerful scenarios for possible food system trajectories. In parallel with the Commission’s work on EAT-Lancet 2.0, we are running an extensive global consultation program, to generate inputs from the perspectives of the widest possible range of stakeholders: farmers, chefs, academics, religious leaders, youth, business leaders, policy makers, investors, civil society, and Indigenous people. This is also about building awareness and interest in the work of the Commission. We launched the Good Food Finance Network (GFFN) together with other partners (UNEP, WBCSD, FAIRR, Food Systems for the Future) at the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. We did that because food systems transformation will not happen unless capital flows into our food systems support it. Currently, the sad fact is that these flows are shockingly misaligned with what we need. Critical constituencies are also largely excluded, including hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, while others are overlooked, like our cities, which could play a very important role in driving the shifts we need on the demand side. GFFN is about catalyzing a rapid shift in the mindsets prevailing in the world of finance, across multilateral, public, private, and philanthropic funding. It is interesting that when it comes to energy, this mindset shift has spread quite significantly: actors get that the future is about investing in clean and renewable energy. But when it comes to food, we are decades behind. Global food finance basically has to catch up, and fast. But we can’t stop with mindset shifts. We also have to catalyze real action, real change in behaviors. We have to make it easier to invest in the things we need more of: regenerative production practices, slashing food loss and waste, and making healthy and sustainably produced foods more accessible and affordable. So a key initiative that we are currently spearheading in GFFN is to build a new kind of collaborative finance platform, under the working title of a “Co-investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation,” where the key aim is to build a critical mass of multilateral, public, private, and philanthropic finance actors that collectively will scale Good Food Finance as a new norm, a new standard and that will co-create new and innovative finance instruments and tools that can help plug critical gaps and bring finance to the places and actors that need it the most. This platform will be anchored and grounded in the best available science, including of course EAT-Lancet 1.0 and 2.0. We are working towards an initial launch of the platform at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates later this year. Very briefly, my advice is the following: Be evidence-based in everything you do; zoom in on real gaps and failures that are not being tackled by others already, or are not being tackled well; take a systems approach, since there are no quick, simple fixes (a new type of technology or gadget for example) to our sustainability challenges; be fundamentally extroverted and inclusive, as open to collaboration with others as possible, since diversity is strength and key to innovation—aim for having all stakeholders around the table, across gender, geography, and generations; and don’t take no for an answer. Stay the course! My vision for EAT is that we play a strong and meaningful role in driving food systems transformation. The science is loud and clear: we need to see fundamental shifts in food production and consumption between now and 2030, and these shifts need to become unstoppable and basically the only acceptable ways of producing and consuming food as we look to 2040, 2050, and beyond. A lot is at stake for humanity, and failure is not an option. My hope is that EAT will be able to work in a smart and strategic way, together with a wide range of partners, to increasingly influence the decisions of government policy makers, leaders in food industry and finance, city mayors, and ultimately the choices people (those of us who have real choice) make every single day at the supermarket or wherever we buy food. In the near-term, a couple of exciting events are already underway: Later this year, another major contribution will come out: the final report by Food System Economics Commission, which will make a robust economic case for transforming our food systems and explore viable pathways for doing so. And I have already highlighted the second EAT-Lancet Commission. The goal is to publish the final report, again in The Lancet, in late 2024 or early 2025. And through this work, we are aiming to provide the world with the most robust and authoritative guardrails possible for healthy, sustainable, and just food systems, in many ways building a de facto, interim IPCC for food. The author declares no competing interests.