Page 112 - 長庚科技大學 台灣營養學會 第51屆年會暨學術研討會

Sustainable Nourishment: a changing paradigm for health and food
systems

Mark L Wahlqvist

The cognate food, nutrition and health sciences articulate for better or
worse in the story of humanity and its dependency on an earthly home. Most
recently, the IUNS (International Union of Nutritional Sciences)
reconceptualised its science as that of biomedicine, the environment, society and
economics in 2005. Already in place were the FBDGs (Food Based Dietary
Guidelines) in the FAO/WHO Cyprus declaration of 1995 to foster a more
contextual approach to dietary guidelines. The limited operationalisation of these
regionally and locally as intended might have been overcome by a SUN (Scaling
Up Nutrition) initiative towards 2025 and the SDGs (Sustainability Development
Goals) towards 2030. It is by now clear that climate change is an existential crisis,
notwithstanding the abundance of evidence for decades that ecosystem loss and
dysfunction had increasingly become unsustainable since the industrial
revolution, an energy dependence on fossil fuels, and materialistic
acquisitiveness. Moreover, the notion that competition rather than co-operation
enabled a misguided sense of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. GDP (Gross
Domestic Product) measured in terms of currency rather than sustainable
livelihoods has become the international comparator of a nation’s status,
irrespective of livelihood, inequity or sustainability. The European Union,
northeast Asia, OECD and African States are working to deal with this failure.
It is agreed among nations that, by 2050, when upward population trends may
have plateaued, and fossil fuel consumption has been stopped, planetary
habitability might be sustainable. In the meantime, we need to be more
cosmological in the way we tackle our nourishment with and beyond food and
be sufficiently prudent in our livelihood requirements that they are sustainable.

Keywords: nourishment, sustainable livelihoods, quantum food and nutrition,
sociecology, econutrition

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