It involves 24 entities and organizations from 12 European countries (Italy, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom) for a duration of four years and under the coordination of the Food and Nutrition Research Center of CREA (Council for Research in Agriculture and Analysis of Agricultural Economics). It is the Horizon project “PLAN’EAT, Food Systems Transformation for Healthier and More Sustainable Food Behaviors,” and will conclude with the development of a vademecum of recommendations and ad hoc intervention strategies for food supply chain actors aimed at making production choices, consumption habits and dietary recommendations increasingly harmonized and sustainable.
The Food and Nutrition Research Center will collect data on the food consumption and eating habits of the population of the 12 participating European countries, dividing them into 9 vulnerable groups, i.e., population groups that have special nutritional needs such as children and the elderly or population groups that do not have access to a healthy diet, such as low-income or low-schooling individuals. Based on the results obtained, targeted diet proposals and recommendations will be formulated that can gradually replace body-damaging eating habits.
“Consumers,” says Laura Rossi, researcher at CREA Food and Nutrition and coordinator of PLAN’EAT, “will be the protagonists of the project because they are the first recipients of the recommendations. Nine Living Labs will be carried out, involving, in addition to the general population, specific population subgroups (children, adolescents, low-income people and the elderly) in different European areas, to map their dietary patterns and analyze them from an environmental, socioeconomic and health perspective.”
The cultural operation in favor of sustainable food is to encourage the alignment of food consumption with the recommendations of the Guidelines made by CREA, which suggest that plant products should be preferred above all over animal products, with a preference, in the latter case, for foods with a lower environmental impact, such as milk, eggs, small Mediterranean fish and chicken. Not to mention adopting a number of good consumption practices, such as buying from short supply chains of local products according to seasonality.
“Nutritional recommendations must be increasingly coupled with recommendations on environmental sustainability,” Rossi concludes. “Our goal is to promote healthy food choices that are compatible with environmental protection.”
