Sustainable nutrition

Sustainable nutrition is a principle based on a consumption of food with healthy nutritional characteristics, which requires a low ecological footprint in terms of land use, water resources used and factors necessary to produce it, with low carbon emissions and nitrogen. Sustainable food must therefore be attentive to the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystems, rich in local and traditional foods, fair and accessible to all. To continue this principle, however, it is necessary to review the vision that lies at the center between man and production; between man and nature; reporting the company towards a synchrony with the laws of the ecosystem. Today, modern agriculture, despite many technological advances, has created, in most cases, a production paradigm somewhat distant from the functional models of the ecosystem. We must therefore revise these principles by promoting a new agricultural model that guarantees man and the environment. The solution to this question lies in the agroecology that, together with the principle of Food Sovereignty, revises the models of production, distribution and access to food. We need to retrace a concept of global well-being that, by putting the ecosystem and society on the same level, can guarantee a new ethical and economic paradigm. Today, modern agriculture and globalization have diminished the focus on sustainability in favor of the intensification and industrialization of agricultural systems. The result of this phenomenon has been the vertiginous increase in globalized food production, but without bringing global improvements in the nutritional field. All this without solving the problem of hunger in the world, but even aggravating it. We are facing an agricultural system that has increased hunger in the world, increased diseases due to poor diet (obese, chronic disorders, etc.) and deteriorated, in just the arc of a little more than half a century those resources wisely preserved, protected and improved from our ancestors. It is urgently necessary to change direction and the reference term from which to start is precisely a new concept, integral, of sustainable nutrition.

Guido Bissanti