Rachel Mazac is a postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University’s Stockholm Resilience Centre, working on food systems transformation for sustainability in a globalised context for Sweden and at the broader Nordic and EU levels. She focuses her research on the nexus of global food systems sustainability, agroecology, and diversifying foods, and has investigated future diet shifts and the potential of novel food production systems.
Why is there a need for more sustainable food?
Rachel Mazac: We need to find options for sustainable food systems that allow us to continue to produce food with less of an impact and help us remain within our planetary boundaries. A large reason why we are exceeding many of these planetary boundaries is because of our agricultural production practices, in Europe and all over the world.
Discussion is often focused heavily on the production side, but it is the whole food system that needs changing, everything across the food value chains: policymakers and consumers, producers and processors, everything in between.
What role could novel foods, such as cultivated meat, play in the transition to more sustainable food systems?
Rachel Mazac: To enable transition we need more sustainable options. Right now, we are overspending our budget, if we’re speaking in terms of carbon, on food and we have to minimise that. These novel options can provide us with pathways forward to remain within our budget and still meet our other diverse and sustainability needs.
The point of a food system is to have healthy, available and safe food for everyone as a public right. Right now, our food system is set up in a way where we value food as a commodity. Novel, sustainable pathways could look at alternative forms of valuing food.
These novel foods, be they newer technologies or newer applications of existing technologies, can be used in ways to produce food that remain within our carbon budget, use less land and water, etc. This could be like carbon capture and using microbes to turn those captured carbon molecules into fats and carbohydrates.
In Europe, according to the WHO guidelines, just about every country on average is consuming 25% to 50% more protein per day than they need. So, it’s not just necessarily about proteins but I think that alternative foods can provide options for switching away from more resource intensive, high impact foods. But we also need to be careful that we’re not just creating new problems by adding new commodities and concentrations of wealth, which are some of the reasons the food system is not sustainable now.
The broad systemic approach is to look at what novel foods have the potential to do. In the paper Incorporation of novel foods in European diets we looked at novel in terms of not just technology but also culturally and contextually novel; things like insects, kelp, mycoprotein, that have been consumed in other areas in other ways but are new in Europe. So, it’s not just novel, it’s diversifying options – there’s not going to be one silver bullet solution.
Can novel foods be a healthier option, as well as being more sustainable? Would a shift to more plant based diets not be easier?
Rachel Mazac: A shift to plant-based diets is the low tech, non-novel pathway. I don’t think something can be sustainable without being healthy; that should be a primary sustainability goal for food systems. But I see the intent here that it should also provide us with options for healthy, nutritious diets. We could be focusing on things like fibre, micronutrients, calcium, vitamins, iron, etc. This is where diversity comes into play – every health organisation will tell you that a diverse diet is a more healthy diet.
These novel foods have the opportunity to provide diversity and there are ways they can be fortified. There are questions about bioavailability and digestibility of these, but for example oat milk is many times more popular today as a milk substitute. That could have sustainability implications but also health implications as we still need to get our calcium, which we could put in the oat milk. That’s where the systemic idea comes into play.
We already have a solution that we know works well: eat more plants. The first step in reducing environmental impacts and meeting health goals is reducing our protein intake from animal sources – for example, up to 12% of the protein we need can come from animal sources while optimising land use, but we are currently closer to 40%, 50% or higher.
There are other issues around access and literacy, knowledge of how to cook novel or plant-based foods, while pre-packaged and convenience foods are less healthy. From a policymaking perspective we have to make these sustainable and healthy options the easier and more available option.
If you had a novel technology that could reduce our environmental impacts and provide the same food functionally, this is perhaps one step in the right direction. For example, we could replace every McDonald’s hamburger with a lab-grown meat burger – we’re not really solving the problem, we’re treating a symptom, but it would reduce some of the impacts.
What about novel foods that require lots of energy to produce?
Rachel Mazac: Yes, several forms of novel food production require quite a bit of energy. Yet, novel food production technologies at lab scale are still not all feasible to do at high economies of scale, but once that is reached, costs and energy use per unit could be reduced. Agricultural production in general right now uses a lot of energy, so that is a big piece to address, decarbonising the energy grid and switching to renewables. But the easier first step is to eat more plants – we don’t need to adjust energy use there, it’s about as efficient as it can get.
How can cultural acceptance (or lack thereof) affect the uptake of novel foods?
Rachel Mazac: If people don’t want to consume novel foods, they’re not going to eat them. But our cultures have changed dramatically, and food cultures can adapt. The way we’re consuming resource intensive and high impact foods today is not at all like how we were 50-70 years ago. We’re demanding more meat, which is also more affordable and available, and that has become normalised.
We also have huge industry lobbies and huge agricultural subsidies in the EU for livestock production, so we are making these foods falsely cheap and falsely available, in a sense that we don’t actually have the resources to sustain the kinds of diets that we are consuming now.
In terms of what is culturally important, I think we should look at what we see as a sufficient amount – do I need to be consuming meat every single day, three times a day, or could it be for more important moments? The fulfilment, meaning, happiness that we get out of consuming food, we don’t want to lose that, but we need to readdress what our choices mean.
“Sustainability” isn’t only about reducing our impact but what we want to be able to consume in the future – do I want my children, my grandchildren to be able to have these food items as well? Well, we need to change things, because if we don’t have land, water, if we are unable to feed livestock in the same way, then we’re not going to have them.
How could these dietary shifts be encouraged?
Rachel Mazac: We use monetary currency as the value of the things we consume. What we need to do is find a way to internalise those external costs, carbon, land, water, energy use, etc. We also need to think about the value of the animal’s life that we have removed from our daily consumption practices. That’s where something like another technology could provide options, with positive implications for animal welfare as well as sustainability.
There then could be changes to institutional practices, like dietary guidelines, and availability, as in what’s available as people walk down the street, what’s in the grocery store.
We can then find ways to change our relationship with food, such as incentives to get people to waste less food. Shrink wrapped packages in boxes in the store, we don’t have any relationship with the animals behind these products. So perhaps more understanding and knowledge of people, more awareness and empowerment in their choices.
I think there is a tendency to place too much emphasis on the individual to make dietary changes, which is important but at the same time it is this larger system of changes that need to be made.
Do you believe that a transition to a sustainable food system in Europe is possible?
Rachel Mazac: I do think we can make these changes; we just need to find the political, individual, and collective will do this. We actually have a lot of pathways forward; novel foods provide an option, and we can use all the tools in the toolbox.
So, I have some optimism that it’s possible, but also a bit of realism that it is going to be extremely difficult. The thing about food is we can’t just not eat. And if we’re going to spend our budget on something, it might as well be on feeding people good food.
So, why don’t we focus on quality and sufficiency over efficiency and maximisation of productivity and profits? In Europe, we still have a lot of people going hungry, but we are meeting a lot of our needs. If we have our hunger and nutritional needs met, we can start making progress on better production systems and making the sustainable choice the better choice, the easy choice, the only choice.