Transition Towards a Sustainable Food System

About this project

Current production and consumption of food have come at alarming environmental and health costs (e.g. nitrogen crisis, unhealthy diets). In the Netherlands, the production of food is far from climate-neutral at present and insufficiently circular in nature.

The nutritional pattern of an average Dutch person leads to a loss of health and pressure on the environment, nature and the climate, both in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the world. This necessitates a fundamental change of the food system and not just in adapting parts of it or reducing its symptoms.
Bringing together a broad transdiciplinary consortium of 30 scientists together with a large number of companies, NGOs and innovative networks, the project revolves around the research question: what is a sustainable food system and what control mechanisms can accelerate a transition to a sustainable food system in the Netherlands?

Though the project focuses on the Dutch food system it also considers the international dimensions. The aim is to achieve a better understanding of the Dutch food system, a new design for a sustainable future food system and to identify and validate steering mechanisms to realize the transition to such a food system.

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