This study surveys Italian consumers to explore whether there is a relationship between health and environmental sustainability concerns in their food choices. Abstract The objective of the study is to analyze if there is a relationship between health and environmental sustainability concerns in food choices. We used data of 300 Italian consumers collected through a vis-à-vis survey. We performed cross-tabulations and chi-square tests for a selected set of variables measuring both types of concerns, segmenting the sample by age, gender and education.

In this blog-post for the The Institute of Food Safety, Integrity & Protection (TiFSiP) Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at the City University London and FCRN advisory board member, discusses sustainable diets. He argues that the pursuit of food integrity and authenticity is also the pursuit of sustainability.

This website, curated by Geoff Tansey, provides a series of open access online talks, for use by those teaching some aspect of food and farming – but open to anyone to watch. The aim is to provide an overview of the complex and multidisciplinary nature of food systems. Read more about the initiative on their website. 

Food Ethics: The Basics  provides an introduction to the ethical dimensions of the production and consumption of food. 

In this blog, Eating Better’s Sue Dibb writes of her disappointment that the long awaited Communication on Sustainable Food from the European Commission remains unpublished, amid reports of political and industry lobbying to bury it. Read the full blog post here. You can also read more about sustainable healthy diets and food policy on our website.

In recent years there has been increasing attention for facilitating healthier and more sustainable food choices. Research and policy making in the field, however, have largely ignored important cultural changes that are taking place in the Netherlands (and elsewhere in Europe) due to the inflow of new ethnic groups.

Novel use of UK national data finds a growing gap between the prices of more and less healthy foods between 2002 and 2012. Healthy foods in 2012 were three times more expensive per calorie than less healthy foods. Food prices in the UK have risen faster than the price of other goods in recent years, and this new study, which tracked the price of 94 key food and beverage items from 2002 to 2012, shows that the increase has been greater for more healthy foods, making them progressively more expensive over time.

Although there is no absolute consensus on the recommendation for total fat and dietary fat and saturated fat (SFA) intake between governing bodies and health organizations, there is a general sense of convergence. All guidelines currently suggest that total fat should not exceed 35% of daily calories. Although most guidelines propose a target for dietary SFA, there is no consensus on the value to aim for.

In this open letter a large number of civil society organisations present a critique of the use of ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’, a concept that is gaining increasing attention among governments, NGOs, academics, corporations and in international policy. They state that they have concerns around the aims of the 'Global Alliance on Climate Smart Agriculture' to establish policies to enable farming to deal with the impacts of climate change.