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Public interest in where food comes from and how it is produced, processed, and distributed has increased over the last few decades, with even greater focus emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mounting evidence and experience point to disturbing weaknesses in our food systems’ abilities to support human livelihoods and wellbeing, and alarming long-term trends regarding both the environmental footprint of food systems and mounting vulnerabilities to shocks and stressors. How can we tackle the “wicked problems” embedded in a food system? More specifically, how can convergent research programs be designed and resulting knowledge implemented to increase inclusion, sustainability, and resilience within these complex systems, support widespread contributions to and acceptance of solutions to these challenges, and provide concrete benchmarks to measure progress and understand tradeoffs among strategies along multiple dimensions? This article introduces and defines food systems informatics (FSI) as a tool to enhance equity, sustainability, and resilience of food systems through collaborative, user-driven interaction, negotiation, experimentation, and innovation within food systems. Specific benefits we foresee in further development of FSI platforms include the creation of capacity-enabling verifiable claims of sustainability, food safety, and human health benefits relevant to particular locations and products; the creation of better incentives for the adoption of more sustainable land use practices and for the creation of more diverse agro-ecosystems; the wide-spread use of improved and verifiable metrics of sustainability, resilience, and health benefits; and improved human health through better diets.
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This content will become publicly available on April 1, 2026
Interactions and tradeoffs for sustainability, equity, and resilience in wasted food models
Abstract Reducing wasted food has been identified as a key strategy to meet food security goals and attain human nutritional needs and food preferences in an equitable, sustainable, and resilient manner. Yet, mathematically modeling how reducing wasted food contributes to sustainability, equity, and resilience objectives, and the possible interactions and tradeoffs among these metrics, is limited by challenges to quantifying these characteristics. Using the process of convergent science, we develop a prototype wasted food model to evaluate how a set of common equity, sustainability, and resilience measures interact. We consider prevention (consumer education) and treatment (anaerobic digestion and composting) options for wasted food diversion from landfills. The model applies a convex nonlinear optimization to determine the allocation of wasted food to different management alternatives, optimizing for economic (net cost), sustainability (emissions reductions or energy savings), or equity (distribution of per-capita cost or emissions reduction impacts). The model developed in this research is available online as open-source code for others to replicate and build upon for future studies and analysis. Our findings illustrate that optimal wasted food management alternatives may vary when targeting different metrics and that strategies promoting cost-effectiveness may be in tension with sustainability or equity goals and vice versa. The implications of this study could be used by policy makers to evaluate how wasted food reduction measures will impact sustainability, equity, and resilience goals.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2115405
- PAR ID:
- 10637704
- Publisher / Repository:
- Environmental Research Communications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environmental Research Communications
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2515-7620
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 045013
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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