Nutrition, Health and Sustainable Food Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Nutrition, health, and food systems are deeply interconnected, forming the foundation for the well-being of humanity predicated upon both environmental and economic sustainability. As the global population grows and the demand for safe, nutritious food expands, the need to align dietary trends with sustainable practices is increasingly critical. This Special Issue explores the essentials of nutrition and their impact on health, the challenges and opportunities facing modern food systems, and the pathways toward sustainability that support more people while preserving Earth’s ecosystems.

While determined by food choices to a certain extent, health outcomes are also shaped by access, affordability, and cultural preferences, all of which are inextricably linked within the broader food system. Industrialized food production has made calories cheaper and more abundant than ever, but this efficiency comes at a cost. The modern paradox of coexisting hunger and obesity epidemics highlights a key weakness within current food systems—they sometimes place a greater emphasis upon quantity over nutrition and health.

Sustainable food systems have the potential to serve as the crucial connector between nutrition, health, economic stability, and environmental resilience. While the agricultural sector is appropriately lauded as feeding the world, it simultaneously is a significant contributor to ecological degradation, accounting for nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions (largely from livestock production, deforestation, and synthetic fertilizer use), consuming over two-thirds of freshwater resources and contributing to significant biodiversity loss. It is therefore a challenge to reconcile that the systems sustaining human life are concurrently undermining the planet’s capacity to support it. Therefore, transitioning to sustainable food systems involves active reconsideration of the institutional structure of how food is grown, processed, distributed, and consumed.

The aim of this Special Issue is to explore new ways of conceptualizing the interlinkages among nutrition, health, and sustainable food systems and to help chart a path forward in a world facing critical challenges with respect to malnutrition, food inequity, and unsustainable production practices against the backdrop of some of the greatest environmental ecological challenges of our time. This clearly supports the overall scope and goals of the journal Sustainability. In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but not limited to) the following:

• Enhancement of the environmental and/or economic sustainability of institutions within modern food systems.
• Trends in sustainable production practices in the production, processing, and distribution sectors for food and/or commodities.
• Innovations in sustainability affecting the institutional structures of existing food systems.
• Visionary explorations of what future food systems might strive to accomplish.
• Investigations of health impacts of food inequity and how refinements to existing food systems might mitigate these impacts.
• Expositions of world-leading innovative components of the world’s most sustainable and just food systems.

This Special Issue will help chart a course toward a future for humanity that is healthier, more just, and more sustainable from both economic and environmental perspectives. The individual papers will together tell a story about what we can accomplish together. If in the end we do not all succeed, ultimately none of us will. We look forward to receiving your contributions.  

Prof. Dr. Jared G. Carlberg
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• food systems
• sustainability
• nutrition and health
• agriculture
• food processing
• environment