Sustainable food systems
The Chair aims to restore a holistic view of food, not as a meta-discipline integrating all perspectives and issues, but as a way of taking a step back from overly specialised approaches, in order to restore meaning to knowledge and reconcile science and society.
Food is studied through increasingly specialised scientific disciplines: nutrition, food science, process engineering, economics, social sciences, etc. With such increasingly narrow focuses, each of these disciplines risks losing sight of the full range of issues surrounding food.
Moreover, although these issues are grouped together under the umbrella of ‘sustainable food’, they are often addressed in a relatively compartmentalised manner, prioritising either an environmental, nutritional, social, economic or governance perspective.
The Chair seeks to restore a holistic view of food, not as a meta-discipline incorporating all perspectives and issues, but as a way of taking a step back from overly specialised approaches, in order to restore meaning to knowledge and reconcile science and society.
A wider selection of resources, including articles and books, is available in French on the French page of the website.
Projects
URBAL
Urbal is a multiple-step method designed to help you better understand the impact of your innovation on the sustainability of food systems.
Surfood
A project that aims to coordinate and facilitate work on the development of sustainable urban food systems.
Foodscapes
To help actors understand the options available to them in food-related matters, the project analyses the effects of urban food environments on people’s eating habits.
Resources
The limits of industrialized food systems
In what ways do industrialised food systems generate negative externalities in environmental, health, socio-economic and political terms? An analysis of this can be found in Chapter 7 of our anniversary publication.
Food in politics
A proliferation of initiatives that enables new civil society actors to be involved in food systems, thereby addressing new concerns. Read more in Chapter 22 of our book An Ecology of Food.
Sustainable Food System Assessment
The book provides both practical and theoretical insights into the growing interest in measuring the sustainability of food systems and the approaches taken to address this issue.
Training courses
Find information about MOOCs
Find out more about the following MOOCs: Co-developing a local food strategy, Food Security in Africa and Nutrition and Food Systems.
Seminar on sustainable food
As part of the ‘Sustainable Food Cluster’ at the Montpellier Agro Institute, the Chair co-organises, at the start of each academic year, a training seminar open to all on contemporary food issues: agroecological scenarios, new forms of food solidarity, the role of digital technology, etc.
