Rationale and Context: Measuring the sustainability of diets across several geographical and cultural contexts as an inter- disciplinary topic of research interest seems on the surge worldwide. Given that the bulk of the world population resides in developing countries and that is only likely to grow in the coming decades, and that they need to be fed food that enables them to lead happy and healthy lives (against a backdrop of development, climate change, population growth, economy transition challenges), the focus of such research, if concentrated, in the developing countries could make much sense from demographic, livelihoods, health and nutrition and sustainability perspectives. However, such studies have been few and far between owing to the cultural, geographic, climate, religious and development trajectory diversity inherent in such countries.  Developing approaches for measuring the sustainability of diets in a specific context such as India, could pave way for similar such studies in other countries ultimately leading to their operationalization in programme and policy contexts in the region as also influencing consumer behavior towards sustainable diet choices.

Innovation Design: The theme is to design a novel approach to measuring the sustainability of diet through a combination of existing measurement/indicator frameworks that have been validated for their rigor and ease of application across the world.  Following this, the developed approach can be applied to a representative sample of Indian diets and the diets ranked according to their sustainability scores. The approach broadly involves building on the basic FAO definition of a sustainable diet covering four important dimensions – namely a) Nutritional Adequacy   b) Environment Sustainability c) Accessibility and d) Cultural Acceptability. Using this basic definition framework, indicators that measure each dimension could be combined to get an overall score of sustainability for representative Indian Diets.

Benefits of the Innovative Design Approach:

• Ease of combining the existing indicators, availability of data, building on current research results, and scope for applying broad cultural principles of diet and nutrition
• Exploit the promise of an integrated foot print approach to measuring the environmental sustainability of diets
• Use combined diet diversity score and MPCE into a composite mode to measure the affordability dimension of the diets
• Scope to mainstream distinct cultural aspects into measurement of sustainability of diets (Studies here have tended to build a matrix of cultural versus modern classification of diets).
• Scale up results to other developing country contexts, scope to influence sustainable consumer choices

Development relevance: Determining the overall nutritional quality of diets have important ramifications for re-visiting the RDA allowances and public health goals in terms of overall well being and disease susceptibility of population. Integrated foot print and composite affordability score has ramifications for assessing the agri food systems pertaining to the diets and optimizing the relevant value chain variables for better accessibility. Mainstreaming the cultural aspects of traditional diets has ramifications for influencing the consumer behavior towards adopting more sustainable choices to lead happy and healthy lives. In essence, the design has implications across food-nutrition-health axes , public policy on agri-food systems  and consumer behavior re-orientation.

Clearly another nexus problem with public health thrown in and which  needs priority attention from across the development-government-society stakeholder spectrum…