In her new book Eating Our Way through the Anthropocene, which was originally delivered as the Stegner Lecture at the 2020 annual symposium of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at University of Utah, Jessica Fanzo explores how, in the context of the broad global trends of population growth, climate crisis and inequitable food availability, food systems need to be re-oriented to ensure they can produce enough food to nourish the world. She says that this re-orientation includes moving toward on-farm sustainable food production practices, decreasing food loss and waste, addressing poverty by creating jobs and decent livelihoods and providing safe, affordable and healthy diets for everyone. At the same time, food systems must decrease the pressure on biodiversity loss, conserve land and water resources, minimize air and water pollution and lower greenhouse gas emissions. This is, she says, a lot to ask of an entrenched system.
Jessica Fanzo is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics and vice dean of Faculty Affairs at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. She is the editor-in-chief for Global Food Security and since 2017 has served on various advisory groups including the Food Systems Economic Commission, the Global Nutrition Report, the Global Panel of Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition Foresight 2.0 report, the UN High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition and the EAT-Lancet Commission. She is the author of Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2021.
