Our current globalized food system is often at the core of the pressure on sustainable development goals such as life on land, life below water, and water and sanitation, while failing to meet goals such as zero hunger and no poverty.
Understanding the causes of the current unsustainable situation and developing solutions to stimulate a transition towards sustainable food systems requires a thorough understanding of the food system at various scales. Current sustainability challenges of the food system are related to the production and consumption of food, changing economic markets, changing socio-cultural relations with food and the private and public policies that regulate change in each of these areas. These different components of the food system are interdependent across regions, sectors and scales. This complexity requires students and practitioners to develop a systemic perspective on the food system and identify how they can leverage change in the food system that achieves synergies across SDGs.
In this course, you will learn about the complexity of these globalized food systems and how these systems are related to sustainability issues from a broad interdisciplinary range of lecturers from UU and guest lecturers from outside academia. In interaction with the lecturers and fellow students, you will critically reflect on current food system themes and sustainability issues and analyse these issues in depth for a food system of your choice. For your food system you will furthermore design solutions to a sustainability challenge from a systems perspective and present those solutions in a scientific report and summary for policy makers.
