Our food has a cost: and I don’t just mean the immediate one we pay at the checkout, often the only one we take into account.
There is a much greater cost, which concerns the environment and resources, which we are little aware of but which becomes decisive if we look to the future for a moment, a difficult but necessary exercise.

Smart food choices and environmental sustainability should go hand in hand: few steps are needed to make this possible.

For FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, a diet that guarantees maximum environmental sustainability must have a reduced impact on the environment and must be adequate from a nutritional point of view, while at the same time remaining economically sustainable, easily accessible and culturally acceptable.

Ambitious goals if we consider that by 2050 the global population of the planet will exceed nine billion, most of them in Asia and Africa. What can we do to achieve FAO’s goal in a world where resources are finite, climate change is heavily modifying environmental conditions and populations are growing rapidly, with similarly growing food needs?

Producing food costs, especially in environmental terms. Agriculture and breeding involve the production of large quantities of greenhouse gases and the use of a large part of the available water resources. To cultivate, you need to have land available and this means deforesting, with consequent loss of biodiversity. Agriculture and farming involve pollution, not only for production but also for the packaging, transport and sale of finished products.

We live in a world full of contradictions, seven billion human beings on a planet that offers limited resources. One billion people still suffer from hunger and risk dying from food shortages, while one billion and two hundred million are obese or overweight, besieged by diseases caused by excessive consumption. Changing our diet is not only right but necessary, if we want to live healthily, in a less polluted world, respecting the environment, guaranteeing everyone an adequate diet.

A sustainable diet is possible, without upsetting one’s habits and without having to embrace food cultures that are too distant from one’s own.
The three basic principles are simple:

– consume less;
– waste less;
– choose foods whose production has a reduced environmental impact.

Fruits and vegetables should be the pillars of a healthy diet and in most cases their production and marketing have a reduced environmental impact. There are obviously exceptions: these are easily perishable fruits and vegetables, which require constant refrigeration; of products linked to specific geographical areas and marketed on the other side of the world with a great waste of resources; of vegetables grown in greenhouses.

Often the best choice is to consume locally grown foods during the season they are available. However, that a product is zero km, as they say, does not mean that it is automatically more respectful of the environment. In some cases, local products require cultivation and conservation techniques that make them less advantageous than similar products obtained in other areas, despite the transport costs.

Ensuring an adequate dose of protein every day has always been difficult and represents one of the toughest challenges for the future. Generally speaking, the production of proteins of animal origin requires more resources than those necessary to obtain a similar quantity of proteins of vegetable origin.

In the Western world we are large consumers of meat and our habits are making their way even in emerging countries. To reduce the environmental impact of the diet, it would be appropriate to reduce the consumption of animal products and increase that of plant products.

This does not mean becoming vegetarian or even vegan but simply reducing the consumption of meat both in quantity and frequency, perhaps increasing the space dedicated to the consumption of legumes with an excellent nutritional profile such as lentils and chickpeas, alternating and varying the type as much as possible, of food consumed.

Ensuring nutritious food for everyone while fully respecting the environment is one of the biggest challenges for the future. It is obvious that large-scale policies that aim at optimizing the use of resources with reduction of waste will have the greatest impact.

Improving productivity is key to ensuring better yields with the least possible land and resource commitment. To do this, we must resort to those technologies that at all levels allow us to optimize processes, operating above all in developing countries and in those areas where climate change could lead to a collapse of existing production. New varieties, targeted use of the soil, fight against diseases with increasingly specific tools: priority objectives if we want to produce more while respecting the environment.