Project
PLAN'EAT - Fostering healthy and sustainable EU food consumption
The Horizon Europe PLAN’EAT project aims to better understand how environmental, social, cultural and individual factors affect people’s food choices, ultimately aimed at co-designing interventions to effectively reverse trends in dietary behaviour.
Background
Across the world, dietary patterns are shifting towards dominant food consumption patterns and eco-agri-food systems that have high health, societal and environmental costs. Without a significant change in current trends, non-communicable diseases will continue to rise while the quality and quantity of available natural resources will decline. As dietary behaviour is a strong determinant of food consumption, it represents a key lever for action to transform food systems and vice versa. The main objective of PLAN’EAT is to foster the transition to health and sustainable dietary behaviour through an in-depth understanding of its underlying factors and drivers and through the design of effective recommendations, tools and interventions targeting food system actors.The impact of EU consumptive practices as opposed to other places in the world is enormous. Whilst the EU only houses 10% of the world population, the environmental footprint of European food systems almost transgresses global ecological limits. At the same time, 52% of EU citizens have become overweight, and diabetes type II is on the rise due to unhealthy food environments. To curb these environmental and health effects, PLAN’EAT aims to develop effective dietary interventions and policy solutions for triggering a food system transition.
Description
As Public Administration and Policy group, we contribute and lead various research activities in the PLAN’EAT project. We specifically work on:
-systematically mapping policies and current member state actions for healthier and more sustainable consumption;
-assessing the main clusters of underlying drivers that affect the European food system;
-developing a coherent mix of interventions, including methodologies, tools and materials, that will allow policymakers and other food system actors across Europe to steer a transition toward healthier and more sustainable dietary behaviour. These interventions will be designed and tested through co-creation methods in the project’s living labs.
WUR pilots the implementation of a four-step design-process to design a coherent mix of interventions across governance levels. In the process, the organization of national and EU policy summits will be central to co-design solutions with stakeholders.
