Healthier and Sustainable Food Systems: Integrating Underutilised Crops in a ‘Theory of Change Approach’

Increasingly, consumers are paying attention to healthier food diets, “healthy” food attributes (such as “freshness”, “naturalness” and “nutritional value”), and the overall sustainability of production and processing methods. Other significant trends include a growing demand for regional and locally produced/supplied and less processed food. To meet these demands, food production and processing need to evolve to preserve the raw material and natural food properties while ensuring such sustenance is healthy, tasty, and sustainable. In parallel, it is necessary to understand the influence of consumers’ practices in maintaining the beneficial food attributes from purchasing to consumption. The whole supply chain must be resilient, fair, diverse, transparent, and economically balanced to make different food systems sustainable. This chapter focuses on the role of dynamic value chains using biodiverse, underutilised crops to improve food system resilience and deliver foods with good nutritional and health properties while ensuring low environmental impacts, and resilient ecosystem functions.This research was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme through the project “Realising Dynamic Value Chains for Underutilised Crops” (RADIANT), Grant Agreement number 101000622. The authors would also like to thank the scientific collaboration under the FCT project UIDB/50016/2020. in. The James Hutton Institute (CH and PPMI) are supported by the “Rural and Environmental Science and Analytical Services” (RESAS), a Division of the Scottish Government.Peer reviewe

Healthier and Sustainable Food Systems: Integrating Underutilised Crops in a ‘Theory of Change Approach’

Increasingly, consumers are paying attention to healthier food diets, “healthy” food attributes (such as “freshness”, “naturalness” and “nutritional value”), and the overall sustainability of production and processing methods. Other significant trends include a growing demand for regional and locally produced/supplied and less processed food. To meet these demands, food production and processing need to evolve to preserve the raw material and natural food properties while ensuring such sustenance is healthy, tasty, and sustainable. In parallel, it is necessary to understand the influence of consumers’ practices in maintaining the beneficial food attributes from purchasing to consumption. The whole supply chain must be resilient, fair, diverse, transparent, and economically balanced to make different food systems sustainable. This chapter focuses on the role of dynamic value chains using biodiverse, underutilised crops to improve food system resilience and deliver foods with good nutritional and health properties while ensuring low environmental impacts, and resilient ecosystem functions