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Articles

• Food environments and EU Food Policy
  28 June 2022, by Mathilde COUDRAY

  The aim of this policy brief is to further sharpen understanding about food environments and what a ‘food environment approach’ entails for EU food policy and the transition to sustainable food systems.

• Peruvian cuisine’s slippery road to UNESCO (Raul Matta)
  24 mai 2017, par Clarisse

  An increasing number of strategies of cultural preservation acknowledge local particularities by including them in political and economic programmes. Recent research has demonstrated how governmental and private institutions work to stabilise, promote and manage the particularities of ’national’ foods and cuisines and the image of the countries themselves (Caldwell 2002 ; Karaosmanoglu 2007 ; Hiroko 2008 ; DeSoucey 2010). Food heritage emerges in this context...

• A ‘lived experience of food environments’ international decisionmakers panel: Enhancing policy impact through improved research evidence translation and communication
  1 June 2021, by Mathilde COUDRAY

  Mark Spires, Centre for Food Policy – City, University of London Sigrid Wertheim-Heck, Environmental Policy Group – Wageningen University and Research Michelle Holdsworth, UNESCO Chair in World Food Systems/Montpellier Interdisciplinary Centre on Sustainable Agri-food Systems – Montpellier, France Corinna Hawkes, Centre for Food Policy – City, University of London
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  Food environments – the interface between people and the food system – play a critical role in shaping (...)

• Food swamps predict obesity rates better than food deserts in the United States
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  This paper investigates the effect of food environments, characterized as food swamps, on adult obesity rates. Food swamps have been described as areas with a high-density of establishments selling high-calorie fast food and junk food, relative to healthier food options. This study examines multiple ways of categorizing food environments as food swamps and food deserts, including alternate versions of the Retail Food Environment Index. We merged food outlet, sociodemographic and obesity data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Environment Atlas, the American Community Survey, and a commercial street reference dataset. We employed an instrumental variables (IV) strategy to correct for the endogeneity of food environments (i.e., that individuals self-select into neighborhoods and may consider food availability in their decision). Our results suggest that the presence of a food swamp is a stronger predictor of obesity rates than the absence of full-service grocery stores. We found, even after controlling for food desert effects, food swamps have a positive, statistically significant effect on adult obesity rates. All three food swamp measures indicated the same positive association, but reflected different magnitudes of the food swamp effect on rates of adult obesity (p values ranged from 0.00 to 0.16). Our adjustment for reverse causality, using an IV approach, revealed a stronger effect of food swamps than would have been obtained by naïve ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates. The food swamp effect was stronger in counties with greater income inequality (p < 0.05) and where residents are less mobile (p < 0.01). Based on these findings, local government policies such as zoning laws simultaneously restricting access to unhealthy food outlets and incentivizing healthy food retailers to locate in underserved neighborhoods warrant consideration as strategies to increase health equity.

• The future of food and agriculture. Alternative pathways to 2050
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  This report explores three different scenarios for the future of food and agriculture, based on alternative trends for key drivers, including income growth and distribution, population growth, technical progress and climate change.

• Hungry city. How food shapes our lives
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  How do you feed a city ? It’s a question that we rarely ask, but which lies at the core of civilisation. The feeding of cities arguably has a greater social and physical impact on us and our planet than anything else we do. Yet few of us living in modern cities are conscious of the process. Food arrives on our plates as if by magic, and we rarely stop to wonder how it might have got there.

• Ultra-processed products are becoming dominant in the global food system
  26 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  The relationship between the global food system and the worldwide rapid increase of obesity and related diseases is not yet well understood. A reason is that the full impact of industrialized food processing on dietary patterns, including the environments of eating and drinking, remains overlooked and underestimated. Many forms of food processing are beneficial. But what is identified and defined here as ultra-processing, a type of process that has become increasingly dominant, at first in high-income countries, and now in middle-income countries, creates attractive, hyper-palatable, cheap, ready-to-consume food products that are characteristically energy-dense, fatty, sugary or salty and generally obesogenic. In this study, the scale of change in purchase and sales of ultra-processed products is examined and the context and implications are discussed. Data come from 79 high- and middle-income countries, with special attention to Canada and Brazil. Results show that ultra-processed products dominate the food supplies of high-income countries, and that their consumption is now rapidly increasing in middle-income countries. It is proposed here that the main driving force now shaping the global food system is transnational food manufacturing, retailing and fast food service corporations whose businesses are based on very profitable, heavily promoted ultra-processed products, many in snack form.

• The new nutrition science project
  27 octobre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  To show that nutrition science, with its application to food and nutrition policy, now needs a new conceptual framework. This will incorporate nutrition in its current definition as principally a biological science, now including nutritional aspects of genomics. It will also create new governing and guiding principles ; specify a new definition ; and add social and environmental dimensions and domains.

• Recycling, recovering and preventing “food waste” : competing solutions for food systems sustainability in the United States and France
  3 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  Drawing on a distinction between “weak” and “strong” sustainability, this paper argues that “strong” prevention based on holistic changes in the food system is the most sustainable solution to food surplus and waste. It suggests that academics focus on strong food surplus prevention, but also that advocates encourage government and corporate actors to differentiate between weak and strong actions to diffuse strong sustainability across organizations and countries.

• Understanding Lived Experience of Food Environments to Inform Policy : An Overview of Research Methods
  10 novembre 2021, par Mathilde COUDRAY

  With poor diets being the leading cause of ill-health in the world today, the imperative to explore how to leverage food systems for better diets has never been greater. Significant attention has been placed on how to improve one particular component of the food system : food environments. Food environments comprise the foods available to people in their surroundings as they go about their everyday lives and the nutritional quality, safety, price, convenience, labelling and promotion of these foods (FAO, 2016).