SustainFood

There is a strong focus to change diets towards more plant based sustainable and healthy diets. To accomplish this, the Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries has announced a climate label to be implemented on food. However, the major problem is a lack of representative and reliable data on carbon footprint of food – especially for organic food. Furthermore, the sustainability challenge is much more than climate impact, where organic agriculture often can contribute more to societal goods compared to conventional agriculture with regard to e.g. biodiversity, animal welfare and ecotocixity and the lack of environmental footprint data for organic food is even more severe in this area. At the same time, organic food consumption has been associated with a generally healthy lifestyle and more favourable dietary habits.

The purpose of SustainFood

Thus, the overall aim of SustainFood is to create new knowledge about the climate, environmental and health impact of organic foods by estimating carbon footprint and environmental footprint of major organic food items and investigating associations between organic food consumption and cardio metabolic risk factors. The new knowledge generated will be disseminated through workshops and will contribute to a significant step towards a healthy and sustainable organic diet, as well as being able to document this.

The project step-by-step

SustainFood will:

• further develop the Life Cycle (LCA) method to include other important impacts beyond climate, such as biodiversity, pesticide use and animal welfare in the evaluation of organic foods and diets
• use this knowledge to estimate and prepare a detailed profile of climate and environmental impact of 10-15 typical organic foods. Due to the large number of organic foods on the market, it is necessary to establish food clusters and derive standard estimates for groups of foods. These default values can be used for foods with missing climate and environmental data
• identify clusters of foods with a similar nutritional and climate profile and produce standard estimates of the climate and environmental impacts of the food clusters
  estimate the climate and environmental impact of different organic diets and shopping patterns
• examine the connection between organic food consumption, lifestyle and compliance with dietary guidelines
• examine the connection between organic food consumption and cardiometabolic risk factors (e.g. blood pressure, cholesterol level, long-term measurement of glucose in the blood, and body composition)
• identify relevant indicators for sustainable procurement
• hold workshops with stakeholders and food professionals partly to involve them in the process and partly to communicate the results of the project and thereby share knowledge on how to work to document sustainable food procurement
   

Project period

2024-2027