The global food system is unsustainable and urgently needs an overhaul. Yet current approaches to finding solutions through applied academic research are too narrow and treat the food system as a collection of isolated components within established disciplines such as agronomy, sociology or nutritional science.
What’s needed is a truly interdisciplinary approach that views all elements of the food system as part of a single, comprehensive framework, according to a group of 12 University of Michigan faculty members who issued a call to the global academic community July 23 in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.
The researchers, who are part of U-M’s fledgling Sustainable Food Systems Initiative, urged colleagues worldwide to adopt a new scholarly focus for food-system studies, calling it an “urgently needed transformation.”
“A global system that leaves millions food-insecure while contributing to obesity, that generates significant environmental degradation, and that compromises the well-being of consumers and producers alike challenges the research community to ask new research questions and apply novel analytical frameworks for analyzing them,” the U-M researchers concluded.
“Such a paradigm would inform new, transdisciplinary, and high-impact research questions that will help re-route the food system toward a path of environmental, social, and economic sustainability,” they wrote.
More information:
- New scholarly focus needed to help solve global food crisis, U-M experts say, Michigan News, July 23, 2018
- “Feeding Prometheus: An interdisciplinary approach for solving the global food crisis, DOI: 10.3389/fsufs.2018.00039
